Yes yes I have written about how I subscribe to the Unschool philosophy, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t also enjoy a good month long planning session. Strange, I know. I guess it boils down to being Type A and needing to feel prepared. I can’t get all the way into the radical unschool mindset that just trusts that children will learn what they need to know without our meddling. I’m a bit more moderate about it – unschool on everything that works and fill the blanks with required learning.
It was actually very challenging to create this curriculum. I knew that I wanted to create my own rather than purchase one for several reasons
1) I wanted to be flexible to her particularities and a purchased curriculum could never do this
2) poor poor poor.
3) control freak. control freak. control freak.
4) I’m quite arrogant about mine and BK’s intelligence and thus pretty sure that we would find purchased curriculums lacking. (I realize how arrogant this sounds, but I’m sure I’m not the only one out there who is homeschooling their child because they think they can do a better job of it)
5) I differ from the bulk of homeschooling parents in a very important way. A lot of curriculums have a Christian theme, including some of the best reviewed Math ones. There’s a certain strangeness in an athiest teaching her children jesus-math.
So, a self-designed curriculum is the only way for me.
There’s a fine balance to unschooling. I want my child to learn and I have very specific goals for her – she needs to learn to read, to write, to perform basic math functions, and also how to learn. These are her goals for the next couple of years. Yet I don’t want to over structure her and strangle her natural love of learning with an institutional approach.
It took a while to find solutions, especially since each learning goal seemed to require its own strategy. Here is what I have come up with:
Reading
Composition
Math
Science
Art
Literature
History/Geography
Kings Where it Counts 