Unschool Curriculum

As home schoolers, we often hear people ask what curriculum we use, or
concerned family members don't understand how my kids are learning
since we don't use textbooks and worksheets. I would like to take some
time to explain how unschoolers learn and how life is the curriculum,
and I plan to add over time to this with our real life experiences (on
the sidebar, click the tag/category called "unschool curriculum").
Let me first state that unschoolers don't have to understand how this
works for it to work. It is perfectly acceptable for an unschool
family to simply have faith and trust that their kids are learning and
live life without disecting their experiences and dividing it up into
academic subjects and justifying their choices to well-intentioned
loved ones. But in case you want to, or in case you don't have that
faith:
I first learned the details of life learning from Mary Hood, in her
books on relaxed homeschooling. She talked about how you can take life
experiences and find how they fit into school subjects, like going to
a history museum could be reading (reading the plaques or preparing
ahead of time by doing some research), history, social studies
(interacting with other people, the drive to the museum was learning
about your city, etc.), math (if you were figuring anything that had
to do with dates), and so much more. She advocated that if you felt
some subject was missing from your kids' lives, leaving a book on
something from the subject on the couch and someone was bound to pick
it up and want to share their new read with the family. There was a
lot more to it than just that, but I think you get the gist. She
talked about family-involved unit studies, where the whole family
could get very involved in learning something. She was very proactive
about learning things and organized (daily planners and journals to
keep track of stuff to "sort" later). Mind you, these books were
written several years ago, so maybe the Hood family are unschoolers
now? Relaxed unschooling is very similar to unschooling, but different
in that relaxed homeschooling still extracts learning from living and
may encourage certain things to get a more "well-rounded" academic
experience.
My next introduction to life learning was through my Child Development
class on preschool curriculum, called Creative Curriculum, which uses
a style called emergent curriculum. Emergent curriculum means that the
learning and the bases for it emerges from the learner, from the
child. If a child shows an interest in cars, for example, the teachers
role is to provide more opportunities for the child to explore with
cars, so maybe they will add some ramps and some different kinds of
vehicles and maybe some books about how cars work and a table to
explore building ones own cars (or whatever with wheels). There are
lots of ideas the teacher can impliment once they have taken their
cues from the child. Creative Curriculum is a series of books (for
different age groups) about how kids are learning through play. For
example, block play promotes social and emotional development,
physical development, cognitive development, and language development.
Kids learn literacy (vocabulary and language, understanding of books
and other texts, print and letters and words), mathematics (number
concepts, patterns and relationships, geometry and spacial sense,
measurement), science (physical science, life science, earth and the
environment), social studies (spaces and geography, people and how
they live), the arts (drama, visual arts), and technology (basic
operations and concepts, technology tools). These were taken from the
Creative Curriculum book, and if you want more or clarification on
anything, please feel free to ask. So, all of that learning that
happens with some blocks!!!! Kids can learn so much from every
experience that they have, especially when they are given time to get
into depth on a project, which is one of the luxuries homeschooling
affords. I was telling my oldest, yesterday, that one of my favorite
things about unschooling is that we can spend an entire day painting
(which we did, for the most part). It was amazing to see the learning
that I was witnessing from that activity -- social skills between my
kids, art through painting, geometry through different kinds/styles of
painting, physics from body movement and paint properties, fine and
gross motor skills and fine-tuning, not to mention cognitive skills
like concentration, focus, manifesting something from our thoughts
into reality, etc. Where one person may see some kids with
paintbrushes and paint, another can see so much more. That can be
applied to any and all activities. I asked the teachers at the school
there if they thought this kind of teaching and learning could be
applied to older kids, and everytime they said definately. Got me
thinking about starting a private school for older kids in this fashion.
So, the next chapter in my life learning experiences was the term
unschooling, as applied to how children learn academic-type things.
This went right along with how I learned kids learn from the Creative
Curriculum, and the role of the parent seemed so very similar to that
of a teacher in the emergent curriculum model. Except, it wasn't so
organized and documented -- it didn't need to be, because this was
your child so you didn't have to prove how your child was learning in
your program or document to continue receiving funding or your
paycheck or whatever. Kind of like a difference between teacher and
parent -- we don't have 20 strange new kids who will come to us at one
certain level and our job is to pass on at the next level. We know our
children from before birth, we know the family members they get
certain traits from, we read the books with them or they can't wait to
tell us about them so there is no need to quiz them on what they are
learning -- we can just be with them and love the learning we witness
and are blessed to be a part of. With unschooling, there is this trust
that kids are naturally curious about the world around them and will
naturally adjust their interests to suit the needs that the world is
bringing to their attention. There is a lot more trust of the child
and the learning process in unschooling than in relaxed homeschooling.
The goal is to live learning, not extract learning from life.
Radical unschooling applies the concept of learning from life to all
areas of life, not just academics. So, the curriculum of radical
unschooling also involves bedtimes and chores and eating and teeth
brushing and television and many more things. We trust that our kids
are learning from every experience they have ("good" or "bad") and are
capable of making the choices that feel right to them, and that this
should be good enough for us. We trust that nothing is black or white,
and look for the million shades of gray to find which one or so fits
our familes' needs the best (that is touching upon consensual living a
bit, but radical unschooling really is about letting down our rigid
blinders and seeing the many ways things are done and all the learning
that comes from them ). It's about trusting their development in all
areas and trusting the path that they chose for themselves, because we
know that so much learning is happening all over the place, if that is
what we are looking for...