I wanted to write a bit more about my homeschooling tendencies, since I really do not consider myself fully an unschooler.  I have been pleasantly surprised though with what I have seen produced by a period of unschooling in my home and from what I have learned from reading up on unschooling a bit.

I would say my first love is Charlotte Mason by way of Karen Andreola’s A Charlotte Mason Companion.  It is so gentle, but there is structure.  That’s the way I like to be.  Life, however, is not always gentle and so it’s hard to always be gentle with everything, including school lessons.  

I don’t mean to say that I am “rough” with school lessons, but rather that there are seasons when we find ourselves needing to be very assertive with academics or even aggressive with problems that arise from life itself. At least that has been the case with me.

With children spread out in age like they are here, there are bound to be struggles. A “stubborn” teenager (to put it mildly) can rock the boat. Keeping order in the home (bedtime, chores done on time, lessons done, etc.), sometimes requires a match of wills.

Some teenagers would easily have you enter into a yelling match with them or watch you pull your hair out piece by piece while their younger siblings look on in astonishment. This does not make for a “gentle” atmosphere.  Lessons still get done – sure, but a parent’s stamina for creating the perfect Charlotte Mason day may run out sooner than they had intended.

Life is not fair. We all know that. I am not complaining, but making the statement here that we have to deal with it. It can interfere with school lessons, of course, but not with real-life lessons. Children learn a whole lot from seasons riddled with struggles for their parents. How we cope as parents helps them know how to cope.

I know how it feels to sit at the bedside of a dying parent, giving out school assignments to my children on the sidelines, all the while wishing we were on a picnic with one of the classics, but knowing it would have to wait. The children were fine and they ended up learning something bigger than a picnic could have taught them. I am not sure what to call this kind of homeschooling except real-life homeschooling.

In summary: My copy of A Charlotte Mason Companion will be falling apart by the time the kids are grown.  We will have done some nature journaling, but probably not as much as I’d have liked.  We have, for the most part, been a unit study school thus far. I am drawn to the continuity of a prepackaged curriculum, but life itself is not prepackaged, so that inherently does not make sense.  The classical approach interests me greatly, but I am not totally convinced that we could pull it off in this home. One thing I know for sure is that I want to raise good children who are able to love and embrace their own lives, be honest and kind and good citizens, and know that they are capable of learning anything they want to learn.