Unschooling and the Gleesons

We are unschoolers – that is, we have no formal curriculum or planned guidelines to what the children learn and when they learn it. I have some friends who have expressed interest in ‘how we do it,’ and while I don’t really have time today to write it all out, I can at least give you some sites to explore. Mostly we just live our lives and when we get interested in something we find out more about it.

Unschooling in general:

• Joyfully Rejoycing unschooling pages
• Sandra Dodd’s unschooling pages

Learner-led academics highly kid-approved:

• Starfall.com – Free. Complete learn to read lessons, from letter recognition to fluent reading.
• BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr – Subscription. Short cartoons on almost any subject. We only subscribe to Jr now, but we’ll get the full version in a few years.
• Cyberchase – Free. Companion to the PBS show and a great math ‘numeracy’ site.

Books we use frequently:

• World Book Childcraft – we have a complete set of these that Sean and the girls read from daily. Ours are an older edition (1980, I think) and came from a thrift store (thanks Uncle Troy!) I recommend eBay if you don’t feel like dropping $350 on a new set.
• John Holt books – these are for the grown-ups.

And finally, online and local support groups. To find one local to you, try searching on Yahoo! Groups for “unschooling YourStateName” (if that doesn’t get you any initial hits, try “homeschooling YourStateName”) and ask on those lists for other unschooling groups the members like.

• FYI-OKC – our local Oklahoma City unschoolers group. Love.
• Always Unschooled – national unschooling list. I don’t read this one anymore, but it’s a great place to start.

I’ve kept the computer long enough. I’ll try to flesh out this skeletal list later.