Unschooling 101: The Step-by-Step Strategy You Need
If you’re thinking about unschooling, I want you to have a practical strategy that can actually help.
Yes, unschooling focuses on connection, relationships, play, exploring interests.
I can feel everyone nodding along with that.
But then what?
...How?
That’s what I’ve been helping families figure out since the 1990s!
Our Steps Toward Unschooling
Let me give you a little history and then show you what YOUR next steps can be.
I didn’t come to unschooling for philosophical reasons. We just stepped away from school because, frankly, I thought I could do a better job than they were doing.
I could help my kids LOVE learning again.
I could show them things in the world that they otherwise would have just had to read about.
I’d give them space to be curious and creative, and not told they had to set all that aside and learn the things that “everyone their age” has to learn. That just didn’t feel logical to me. I didn’t step into this though, with any big plan. I thought I’d continue to weigh it out. And when we came to a point that it would be better to have the kids in school than learn through life at home, we’d pivot and put them back in school.
But that never happened. We liked our lives.
The kids continued to grow and learn - and be MORE Curious and MORE creative.
So we just kept going.
Along the way, the internet grew and we bumped into more and more people. I saw what was working and what wasn’t working for other people. We were in the military so we moved a few times - so this gave me opportunities to tap into different communities and see how families were homeschooling and unschooling there.
I started helping people get started on this path. School wasn’t working for them either.
People asked questions and I answered with what I knew.
I think I may have been in the first wave of suburban moms choosing to walk away from the neighborhood schools.
So if this is you, I know what you’re going through!
And over time, I’ve created an Unschooling 101 kind of strategy to get you onto steady ground as quickly as possible.
And here's why I want you to move quickly on this:
You're probably surrounded by people who want you to get back in line. Either put the kids back in school or at LEAST get some decent curriculum so you can be confident they're learning something.
So that's this constant push. This steady drip (or maybe it's like a wave pool!) - but it's working on you.
So the sooner you have this information, the less impactful that will be.
That drip will roll off if you've already thought this through. it won't if it blindsides you or catches you on a bad day.
I've seen it happen. I don't want that to happen to you - I want you to be successful at this!
My Training Wheels Analogy
We’re all unsure in the beginning.
It’s like learning to ride a bike though. And stepping away from a school approach to learning is like taking off the training wheels. You’re wobbly at first. But those training wheels slow you down. And after a while, you don’t need them at all. AND.. without them, you can ride faster, more smoothly. You can feel the wind blowing in your face - it’s what Freedom feels like.
So I’ve created an
Unschooling 101 approach.. I want you to get past the wobbles as quickly as possible. You don’t need to run back to those training wheels.
This mini-course I created, started as a 10-day challenge in my
membership group.
(and it's still in there, if you want to join us)
It has short videos - even shorter than these 10 minute peptalks.
It’s enough to give you something to go on AND not overwhelm you.
A couple minutes of chatting and then some action steps.
First Things First... Unschooling = Individualization
It starts with an unschooling explanation and how it’s really all about individualization.This is why the general one-size-fits all curriculum approach never fits anyone. I've created a Supply list for you - so you can get your home ready for this unschooling lifestyle.
Fear and Overwhelm
But if you’re still feeling a little overwhelmed, I have something specifically for you. All those fears are coming at you. They crowd out the successes, the things that ARE going right.
As soon as you notice something good, does some voice in your head immediately rush in to remind you of any (or all?) of the shortcomings? These fears and negative talk squeeze out the good stuff keeping us in this permanent state of stress. We need to get that voice under control. I have some suggestions to stop the swirling doubts - I’ve used them with lots of parents - I know it will help you too.
Setting Up Your Home
Maybe it would help to give you practical tips for setting up your home for unschooling. We’re going to focus on the feelings and functions that you want your home to have - because that’s all part of this individualization process. It has to fit your family’s interests and preferences. I have an entire workbook just for setting up your home. We all want homes where the kids can gather what they need to go off on the next adventure - or that soft landing place to recharge their batteries. It’s not like a home where the kids are gone all day to school. It’s a different way to live, and I have practical suggestions to help you shift your perspective.
The Heavy Lifting: Your Internal Work
You can’t tackle unschooling without doing what I call “the internal work.” I used to say that kind of casually and parents would come back asking,
“What do you mean?”
I think they thought unschooling was just about the kids and their education. And while that IS the initial focus for most families, you’re going to have obstacles to overcome that you don’t even realize are there. You’ll know soon enough though! You’ll be puttering along and suddenly, one of these obstacles will jump out from behind the corner. How you react is going to depend on whether you were prepared for it. And while we all have a variety of fears and worries, there are some that are common with most of us. Things I’ve seen over and over again. We’ll start with those. Sometimes our fears come from other people - comments or judgements they make. And sometimes we’ve internalized some of their concerns ourselves. We just have to pull these out into the light and look at them.
We have a lot of People Pleasing traits in us, don’t we?
So that’s why it’s important for us to tackle our own “Why?” “Why ARE we choosing to do this?”
What are YOUR reasons that we walked away from the traditional conventional approach to learning?
I have workbooks in there to walk you through this - as well as a workbook to help you tackle those fears - or at least identify which ones are screaming the loudest right now. It’s not enough to just listen to a podcast and let my words wash over you. It helps, but it’s only going to scratch the surface. You’re going to need to dive a little deeper into these internal conversations you’re having if you want to tackle them once and for all. Luckily, I’ve made it really easy for you to start to examine it all.
We’ll also need to look at our own school experiences...what we liked, what we didn’t.
You’d be surprised how much that will creep into your expectations for your kids. And we’ll talk some more about deschooling. A lot of parents think that deschooling is something the kids need to do. Some kind of a Reset time, where they can transition from the school environment and the home environment for learning.
And they do.
But not NEARLY as much as WE need to deschool. Ours doesn’t have to do with anything that recently happened with the kids. It has to do with the conditioning that we went through from years of being told there’s only one right way to learn, and everyone else is wrong… or an entire collection of ideas that we were told year after year. It will be your hardest thing to unpack, probably. Most of us went to at least 12 years of traditional school, add on a few more years for college and that’s a lot to dismantle. Sure, some of it was good - and some we may even want to do with our kids - but looking at the underlying motivations AND the consequences you may not have even considered?… that’s all part of deschooling.
I’m going to walk you through how unschoolers learn what they need to know. How you’re going to find those subjects weaving through the kids’ activities. It’s all in there, but you may need a little help SEEING it. It gets easier over time - kind of like cleaning off a lens. Still, different ages bring in new concerns - that’s why it helps to keep learning about how unschooling really does work from families like mine who’ve done it. In this last section of my course, I’m going to help you build your own Unschooling Curriculum. There are components to include - and what you do will depend on your kids, your situation, all the things that make you unique.
So that’s my strategy for helping you get onto solid ground as far as unschooling goes.
This course is included in the membership group, but if you’d like hop into it now, it would be a great way to save you a lot of second-guessing down the road.
