Relaxing the homeschool curriculum

Before I switched to a more relaxed atmosphere in my son's education (using unschooling as our primary homeschooling style), I created lists, plans, and my own curriculum, and tried my best to stick to the "plan."

When you have an extremely inquisitive child, and are yourself just as curious, it is so very hard to stick to the plan. When my son asked a question, we'd look it up and discuss it. I had heard somewhere that Einstein's mom allowed him to be curious and explore as well. You can probably tell by my lengthy blog entries that I can go on a bit so these tangents took some time.

In the back of my head, I knew that his curiosity was a good thing, but I didn't want to get too far behind on the schedule. So I would try to recoup by starting with a lesson we missed the night before. I would try my darnedest to not go off on tangents, but we would just get further and further behind. I would get so stressed thinking Nick was so far behind other kids his age, and not just because of his dyslexia.

So, it went for a long time. Nick was seeing his friends who went to public school get weeks or months off at a time and would ask if he could get more time off too. I went over the whole "so far behind" lecture and also explained that taking so much time off between lessons would cause us to spend more time we didn't have reviewing old information, and blah, blah, blah. That "blah, blah, blah" part was what Nick heard.

Revelation hits
One day the neighbors had friends with kids visiting and they sent their kids over here to see if Nick could play. They played here for a while and then went over to the neighbors' house and played there for a while. Nick was having so much fun. I finally went over there to see if he was ready for lunch and he hadn't even noticed how much time had passed. He asked for a little bit longer and the neighbors said they'd feed him a sandwich, and it was all settled.

So I chatted with the parents of the kids for a little bit and it didn't take long for the conversation to turn to school. Nick had mentioned he was dyslexic to the parents and the mom told me she didn't really know what that meant, but it was clear to her that Nick was intelligent. She was really impressed with his vocabulary and how much he knew about certain topics and how much thought he put into his responses.

After talking to her, I felt truly relieved. I guess I had never thought about it that much, but when we do go off on our tangents, he's still learning. Maybe the fact that we spend the extra time to research something is more important than I realize. It probably explains why he's so eager to do his own research now on the things he wants to learn more about. This usually is video games, but one day it'll be something more.

The three R's
I once talked to someone who said that kids really only need to know how to Read, Research and Reason and they will be fine. I believe that's pretty much true. Nick has a hard time reading sometimes, but he gets around that with video and audiobooks.

And the more I learned about unschooling, the more I adopted it as the plan. I still take the time to focus on his reading, writing and spelling skills but most of the rest is just letting his curiosity run wild. We've done pretty good so far.