Rethinking Homeschooling

Shhhh....don't tell anyone, but we have not done any "real" school work since September. This isn't such a big deal, since we started school in July. We are still on track.

But, in the meantime, my kids have proceeded to learn a lot more without me.

Seriously, I am amazed at what my children have learned these past 2 months with no intervention on my part.

First, we have Monkey1 [the original BabyGenius]. LOL! She reads constantly - she reads at least one book each day, she reads her history texts for fun and picks up any science related materials she can get her hands on and reads them completely through. She watches "Nova" with great enthusiasm. [OK, is it just me? That show puts me to sleep....] She's written and illustrated several books and poems in the last 2 months. It goes on and on - I'll stop now so I'm not annoying. But the result is that she has learned a *tremendous* amount of "stuff" while we have "not" been schooling. She routinely amazes people with what she knows [including me - I'm starting to feel kind of stupid in her presence LOL!].

Then, there is The Boy [Monkey2]. He's in first grade officially, but has been kind of slow to pick up reading. [So was his sister, she didn't read well till she was 7, so I'm not worried]. He's a math and engineering genius though, and I expect his reading skills to catch up within the next year. So, we were doing first grade work and I was going through "Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons" with him and he was trying hard, but just not really "getting it".

Well, since I stopped "educatin" him, he has taught himself to read simple words. He has done this so he can identify the Star Wars Characters in the books he reads and so he can operate the TiVo remote and pick whatever shows he or his little sisters want to watch [and no, they DON'T sit around watching TV all day LOL!]. Its weird - one day he couldn't read at all, the next day he could read and was totally self sufficient with it.

Yesterday he spent the whole day reading his new favorite Star Wars book and sketching characters and ships from the book into his sketch book and then labeling them with correctly spelled and beautifully written names.... he did this just because he wanted to.

We've been taking walks each day and having a nature scavenger hunt while we walk and finding neat stuff. The kids then take home what they find and sketch it in their sketch books and then write about it - not because I said to, but because they want to.

So, frankly, I'm kind of wondering why I've been working so hard to "teach" them, when they learn so fantastically on their own! I have always been very skeptical about the concept of "unschooling", but I'm starting to think they may have something there...

For the past 3 years, I've been using a curriculum from Seton Home Studies, and it is an excellent curriculum. I have no complaints at all about it.

But....I'm thinking now that maybe this isn't the way to go. Often, sitting down for our hours of book work is like "pulling teeth" with my kids, and I do sometimes think it may be strangling the love of learning right out of them...

I think my days of sitting at the table doing book work with a rigorous curriculum for hours on end are over. I don't think I will ever be comfortable "unschooling" completely - I think I will keep our math text, our English/grammar text, and maybe our religion text. But I think I'm giving up the rest of it. I've been reading a lot of Charlotte Mason books lately too, and I agree with a lot of what she says about children being natural learners if we surround them with great books and learning opportunities. And she really values family read aloud time, which is our *favorite* thing to do around here.

So, this is me discovering that I need to back off with the text books and the whip. LOL! And watch my little geniuses blossom....