Our Unschooling Lesson Plans

Alberto G. via Compfight

Say what?

Isn’t “unschooling lesson plan” pretty much an oxymoron?  Well, maybe.  I’d imagine most unschooling families don’t make any sort of lesson plans.  It’s the beauty of unschooling — there’s nothing telling you what you need to do or when.  There’s total freedom, no curriculum, no lesson plans.  Right?

Well, yeah.  But.

Unschooling is not about a strict adherence to anything.  That means that you don’t have to adhere to making no plans!  You can do what works best for you, whatever that looks like.  The only real tenet (in my opinion, anyway) is not following someone else’s plans or guidelines (i.e. a prepared curriculum).  You gather a bit of this and a bit of that to make schooling work for you.

But Why Lesson Plans?

These are not the sort of detailed plans you might find in some houses.  Some families literally schedule out their days — “At 10 we do math.  At 10:30 we do reading.  At 11, we do science.”  And each day they have assigned each child a particular lesson in their curriculum books, and mom spends time each day correcting the papers and then addressing any problems with each child and assigning new work based on the child’s areas of weakness as well as what comes next in the book.

This is not what I am talking about.  Not for us, anyway.

For me, “lesson plans” are a general list of what I’d like to accomplish each week, and they are based on what *we* (my kids and I) have decided together that we would like to do or focus on.

This accomplishes a few goals for me:

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