Michelle Conaway

I’m often asked what a typical Unschooling day looks like. “If you aren’t doing school, what ARE you doing?”

The answer can be as vast and expansive and as deep as the ocean. There is no right answer to this question. There are no two unschooling families that do it the same.  The Unschooling life is a shift in awareness. It’s more of a letting go than a doing. It’s a stream that moves and flows rather than a concrete solid truth. To me unschooling is about living in the moment and being grateful for all that IS right here and right now. It’s about having faith that we have the tools and the strength and the ingenuity to face whatever the future may hold for us.

We wake up each day with a sense of wonder and possibility. What connections might be made today? What obstacles might we have to climb over to find a gift? Where will our passions lead us and what new adventures will be brought to us through those passions?

I can tell you what we don’t do. We do not do worksheets, work with textbooks, force “educational” materials or coerce our children to do or be anything other than  who they are today. We don’t force bedtimes, certain foods, limit t.v. or computer time or force a lot of arbitrary rules upon our kids. We don’t subtely try to sneak in “educational” information to make sure our kids are “learning” something.

We live our lives through following what we like to do in any given moment. We learn through real life experience. Life is our learning pallet and we trust that each and every day learning is happening either on the computer, in the kitchen cooking together, working in the garden, watching documentaries, reading Harry Potter, camping in the backyard, cleaning the house together, taking walks, volunteering at an animal shelter, having conversations in the middle of the night, visiting museums, playing with friends, etc. We see what WANTS to happen in a day and we follow that with gusto.

Kids are always FINE with this. Even the most diligent student, if asked openly by a parent that has a willingness to really listen, will tell you that they would love to learn this way. We as parents are the ones that have to make that leap of faith. We have been indoctrinated to separate learning into compartmentalized subjects and have completely disassociated learning with life. Life teaches us reading. It teaches us math, history, science and much more as well. We simply have to engage with life.

As parents, we must stretch our eyes open – wake up to the world as it really is. The world is a miraculous place with so much to offer. Yes, bad things happen sometimes. But when our focus is directed to the wonder and preciousness of life, we see all that it has to teach us. Allowing our kids to learn this way helps them to retain that sense of wonder about the world and their innate ability to be curious.

So, our day might start at 12 p.m. because we stayed up late to look at the globe and find out where their new friend from skype lives.

It may start at 1 a.m., like the time we got up to watch the meteor shower in the backyard. We took snacks and blankets and a heater and laid down on the deck and watched the “show”.

Or it might start at 5 a.m. because we’ve decided to go on a trip.

The day may unfold into a game of monopoly or gardening or visiting the planetarium. We might spend a whole day playing Minecraft on the computer. I might be writing while the kids are orbiting around me with their conversations and silliness and laughter. However it unfolds, we are enjoying life and trusting that if something comes that we need to know, we will LEARN it and KNOW it like nobody’s business.

The learning happens in the living. The living starts NOW.