traceyfleger

How did you make the transition?

Hi, my name is Tracey and I am a homeschooling mom of five - ages 13, 10, 6, 4, and 20 months. I've considered unschooling a few times, but always chickened out. :-)

We're using My Father's World curriculum right now, and although we do enjoy it, unschooling's freedom and how you let your children explore their interests more still attracts me.

Thanks!

- Tracey Fleger
Come visit my yahoo group at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UsborneFundraiser/
and get in on the summer reading and free books!

Melissa Lake

We're in the process of doing it right now. My kids are 12 (almost 13), 11
and 5. It is very scary for me still and I tell myself that if I need to
(for me) I can always go back to curriculum.

We just quit altogether. I let the kids decide what they want to do. My
oldest is very curious about science and is really pursuing that. My
youngest is really pushing to learn to read. But, my middle seemingly is
only interested in Legos. It must be what he needs to be learning about
right now!

It is a very scary step, but since we've been unschooling (about 2 months)
my oldest has learned SO much and my middle son has actually started to show
an interest in books...that is HUGE!

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 9:05 AM, traceyfleger <tracey@...>wrote:

>
>
> How did you make the transition?
>
> Hi, my name is Tracey and I am a homeschooling mom of five - ages 13, 10,
> 6, 4, and 20 months. I've considered unschooling a few times, but always
> chickened out. :-)
>
> We're using My Father's World curriculum right now, and although we do
> enjoy it, unschooling's freedom and how you let your children explore their
> interests more still attracts me.
>
> Thanks!
>
> - Tracey Fleger
> Come visit my yahoo group at
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UsborneFundraiser/
> and get in on the summer reading and free books!
>
>
>



--
"It's not that the world is a good classroom; it's that classrooms are poor
worlds." Grace Llewellyn


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

N CONFER

We're using My Father's World curriculum right now, and although we do enjoy it, unschooling' s freedom and how you let your children explore their interests more still attracts me.

Thanks!

- Tracey Fleger

*******************
Well, Tracey, I never had a pre-packaged curric but I did spend many, many days going through our state's standards, printing them out, reading each one to see which bit of nonsense applied to my son, which he had already done and hadn't done, highlighting and cutting and pasting until I had a lovely notebook full of a year's worth of stuff. Compiled from 3-4 grade levels.
Then there was hsing with my actual son. Darned if he didn't deviate from the plan! :) 
The notebook was quickly shelved and never used again. 
But I did go through a year where we had a traditional annual evaluation and I dutifully logged activities and collected papers and odds and ends. 
We switched to another option in our state that fits us better and doesn't make me think of our days in terms of being split up into subjects but for a while we were close enough to a standard curric to know it didn't work for us. And it took a while to let go of a lot of that thinking -- all together, a year or two.
Short answer: Yes. :)
Give yourselves lots of time to transition and enjoy! :)
Nance


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Meredith

My stepson, Ray, came to us at 13 from school and living at his bio mom's house, but before then he lived with us and homeschooled. Since he'd had so many years of "you have to do this bc its how you will learn" I found it important to talk with him a bit about unschooling and deschooling so he didn't feel like we were just abandoning him, educationally speaking. Something else I did was to appologise to him for my previous parenting - that was something that came up wrt our younger child, since she "gets" to do a lot of things he wouldn't have been allowed to do at the same age.

---Meredith (Mo 7, Ray 15)