Vacations are comming: great time to start unschooling

June 11, 2009 by Monica
Filed under Fun & Learning

If you’ve been wondering about how your family life would be if you unschooled, this is the perfect time for a free trial.

In many countries children are heading for summer vacations, planing adventures, trips, summer workshops on their interests and free time at home. This is what unschooling looks like every day of the year, except for the fact that in most homeschooling families we don’t rely on the TV to get our kids entretained.

I remember when I was at school that the beginnig of summer vacations were excited but also a bit hard. Hard to find what to do, to figure out how to entertain myself. However, after a few weeks I was engaged in a new book, a summer job, a craft project, or frequent visits to public places in the city.

My advice if you want to consider this form of education for your family, is to leave things as they are, giving children plenty of free time and options for possible activities so they can decide. This is what many schooling parents do for vacations anyways, but the difference is that this time you should pay attention to how much they learn and how happy they are without being directed by someone else. A bit of effort on your part towards helping them explore and be part of the adult’s world would be appreciated, and that could include taking your kids to work or to places they’re not able to go by themselves.

If you realize unschooling is the way to go for your family, then you just keep going after the summer. Otherwise, kids would be back to school next fall.

Here 3 books I recommend if you want to learn more about homeschooling/unschooling:

1. Any of John Holt’s books. I’d start by “How Children Learn” – I’d recommend to go for the old original version by John Holt.

2. For a modern approach and ideas of activities you can do during the summer I recommend The Unschooling Handbook: How to Use the Whole World as Your Child’s Classroom, by Mary Griffith

3. Jan Hunt’s The Unschooling Unmanual. I don’t have this one but it seems like a good alternative for an easy to read book with practical unschooling ideas.

photo credit: jakesmome