Still unschooling

I don't give unschooling much thought. It's just what we do. But lately I've had several new homeschoolers asking me about it. I've had a couple of longer term homeschoolers who are to one extent or another relaxed ask me how we do a transcript. So it's been on my mind.

I keep feeling like we aren't really unschooling anymore, but it's really just that our unschooling has changed over the years. In the early years, it truly was all fun and games. Our life was very unstructured and we spent lots of time doing things like going to the forest preserve, playing games, and just messing around.

It isn't like that anymore. There's a lot more structure. The kids are taking classes. As each of them gets older and college looms, they have all started to think about their goals and what they want to do. This leads to deciding to zoom through chapters of math in a few days, tackling different subjects in science, and working on things like accounting and foreign languages.

But we're still unschooling. This is what they want to do. I'm helping them, but they are calling the shots. That's why there are still days--like today--when they serve at a funeral, watch some news, play a computer game, and read a bit. There are days like Tuesday when they played Bionicles, played a computer game, and read. But there are also days like Monday,when they went to Greek, did pages of math, and wrote reports on the Boxer Rebellion and Chinese Dynasties for history.

So it's different, but we're still doing it, and it still works.