Making the decision to unschool

One of the things that finally helped make the decision to unschool easier was at the beginning of November Josh was doing his maths workbook and I was sat helping them whenever they needed help and some of the pages he was working on were about shapes - edges and vertices, right angles, lines of symmetry and I just thought ‘hang on a minute, what am I doing making him sit there and do this when it really is so unimportant.’ I had to look up the answers as I had no clue whatsoever to the answers and I thought ‘does he really need to learn this?’ The answer, of course, is no. He doesn’t need to learn anything. He will learn what he wants to learn, when he wants to learn it, how he wants to learn it. I can’t remember hardly anything that I learnt in a school environment that I have used since leaving school. I didn’t learn anything useful about managing a home and have taught myself to do the laundry and chores and to use the internet.

Josh and Ellie have taught themselves how to use our home pc and the internet. Ellie has great mouse control and loves looking up Dora the Explorer on the internet. She knows how to click onto google and type in what she wants to look at and search and she is only 5 and a half. She knows more about the internet than Vic because she wanted to learn about it and Vic hasn’t really had a need to use the internet but he says he wants us to show him to use it to find pictures for our business. Josh uses the internet to look at pokemon and play games online.