- It's incredibly stressful to be home 24/7
with your child, with rising anxieties, forced lockdown,
perhaps job loss, and health concerns.
But to add onto all of that, the academic pressures
of keeping up is just too much.
It's too much for us, and it's too much for our kids.
The truth is that children don't remember
much of the education that is done to them at school.
I mean, ask yourself, how much do you remember
of all the facts you were forced to memorize?
Instead of trying to bring school home,
and compete with the quantity of structured learning
that children are directed in in school,
perhaps this could be a time to take a leap
out of the lifestyle of unschooling parents.
This is the best homeschool tip I've ever heard.
Children educate themselves.
They are naturally curious.
When given half a chance, they come up with projects
to research, with new skills to try out,
with excellent questions to discover answers to.
Education is not something you can do to someone.
It's something that each of us seek for ourselves.
Instead, we can help children to find the tools
to learn what they really want to learn.
Tools like reading and writing and math,
the basics of how to learn,
and let the rest of their education flow naturally.
Rather than following a rigid, strict,
punishing, even homeschool schedule,
take a look at how unschooling parents do it.
These are parents who live their lives
without school always, and who guide their children
in their lifelong learning process.
Unschoolers find incredible success with following
their children's passions, learning from regular
life experiences, like baking, or planting a garden,
and answering their children's endless questions together.
In the age of information, what could be easier?
Their children are no less educated.
They get a rich, robust, and diverse education,
but without all the stress and pressure
of the adult-led curriculums in school.
There's no one-size-fits-all, there's no dogma,
there's no keeping up, and there's no readiness.
It's about learning, day-to-day,
moment by moment, naturally.
Instead of bringing school home,
what if we try not bringing school home?
Instead of burdening ourselves and our children
with long hours of textbooks, homework,
and virtual classrooms, which lead to a lot of stress
for many of us and for our children,
let's open our minds to an easier, but no less effective,
approach to education.
An approach that trusts our children to learn through play,
as the research confirms that they do.
Learn through conversations.
Learn through living life, on the go,
natural and highly-relevant learning
that really serves them and their curiosity,
and preserves it.
The basic tenet of unschooling is that we trust children,
to be curious, and to educate themselves,
seek answers to their questions,
and to build skills based on the projects
that they wanna complete in their life.
It does away with the hierarchy of education,
of one subject being more valuable than another,
and realizes that each of us has a wealth of potential,
of interest and motivation, if we just leave it be.
It is unlocked, it's already there,
but sometimes we don't access it,
because we've learnt in school that learning is forced
and led by someone else, rather than by our own minds.
So if you're endlessly researching
all the free homeschool resources,
and rewriting your homeschool schedules,
here's how to homeschool during the coronavirus quarantine.
Keep your structured academics and textbook work
to less than an hour a day.
You will be shocked at how much you can accomplish
in short, focused bursts.
You don't have to manage a classroom of 30 kids,
so you can keep it really simple, straightforward,
and customized to your child's optimized
learning environment and time of day.
Keep it short, tight, and easy,
and always end on a high five.
And then spend the rest of your time
enjoying and pursuing your child's interests,
working on fun projects together,
or simply allowing your child
to explore boredom, see what comes up for them,
and play freely and independently.
I promise they are learning,
more than you might ever have known,
and probably more than they would have
at a school desk.
If you'd like to know exactly how we structure
our homeschool, you can get my course, "Focus Time,"
which will show you how we hit Common Core standards
in less than an hour a day, and how we follow
an unschooling approach mixed in
with some Reggio Emilia and Montessori
throughout the rest of the day.
I'll link to that below.
(upbeat music)