Natural Learning and Unschooling - Home Education Network

February 15, 2021

A Home Education Vocabulary

“What’s the difference between homeschooling and unschooling?” and “What is deschooling?’ are among the most commonly asked questions in Facebook groups. Homeschooling is generally used to mean home education. HEN (and many individuals) prefer this latter term as it is a more accurate description of what families do: educate their children at home. However, the VRQA uses the term homeschooling, as do most […]

July 14, 2020

Natural Learning – a Brief History

John Barratt-Peacock The other day I was proofreading an article on home education when I came across a statement that equated Natural Learning  with Unschooling and Unstructured Learning. This is quite a false association. By their nature unschooling and unstructured learning are merely a valid reaction to schooling but natural learning is different. It is scientifically based on the anatomy and physiology  of the […]

July 14, 2020

LOTE in a Natural Learning Home

Gnat Atherden In our family there hasn’t really been an attempt  to learn ‘a’ language. One language would be a bit limiting. Having said that, I’ve always been keenest to learn German and it’s the language other than English (LOTE) I knew most of before I became a parent so, on reflection, it’s been a big part of our LOTE education. In this article […]

July 6, 2020

Unconventional Learning

Kathleen Humble We’re a geeky kind of family. With me being a mathematician and my husband an engineer, it would be hard to not be geeky. We’re also not going to score high on the ‘doing things conventionally’ test, if one of those existed. But sometimes, just sometimes, the paths my kids take to learn are so unconventional that they leave me with […]

June 15, 2020

Why am I Home Educating?

Amy Conley It comes to my mind often these days. The demands of the little ones, the unpainted bedrooms, the list of to do’s longer than both my arms; and so the thoughts of whether to continue to home educate, or send my children to school, come to mind. They come with all the many questions. Am I spending enough time with my […]

May 26, 2020

Leap of Faith

By Heather Haines Recently, when my son Samuel fulfilled a long term ambition by sky diving, it felt to me the culmination of our home education journey. All those years ago, I took a leap of faith in pulling him out of school, and here he is a capable young man confidently pursuing his interests. Sky diving seemed uncannily appropriate. Samuel started school […]

November 21, 2019

Unschooling Works, Says the Emerging Evidence

By Arthur Grant We often notice how little prompting kids require to learn outside the classroom. Simply setting them free in nature does wonders for their curious spirits, as each overturned rock and never-before-seen leaf piques new interest and inquiries. Their instinct is to explore and learn, and structure isn’t always needed for learning to be meaningful and beneficial. The term “unschooling” puts a […]

November 10, 2019

Teaching Your Children Naturally

By Wendy Morriss I spent 30 years home educating my three children who are now 32, 29 and 19 years of age. It was an amazing experience; one that I will always remember and would recommend to anyone. I liked going to school myself because I was raised in a violent household, so school was an escape. My husband, however, constantly talked about his […]

July 8, 2019

Confessions of an Unschooling Cheerleader

By Marshall C When my wife Brooke and I first met she was raising her four children as a solo Mum and had been homeschooling for the better part of a decade. My first impression of Brooke’s children was of confident, well spoken kids (on their best behaviour to be sure after Mum made it clear that this one was a “keeper”). As I […]

July 2, 2019

“What Did You Do Today?” “Nothing, Really.”

By Brooke C. When I started home education (fifteen years ago) I used to dread being asked the *S Question*. You know, “How will your kids learn to socialise if they don’t get to go to school?” I dreaded it because I found that if I had time (and the inclination) I used to launch into a positively soap-box worthy rant explaining that the […]

June 4, 2019

Dinner Conversation

By Sue Wight If there’s one aspect of informal learning in home education that stands out above all others, in common with infant and adult informal learning, it’s conversation. On the face of it much of this is social, everyday talk of the kind that normally goes unnoticed. But it’s surprising how much of this kind of talk contains opportunities for learning, especially as […]

October 5, 2018

A Tale of Five Brothers

Carleen Sing home educated her five sons. Their story has been told over many years through Otherways and the family also appeared in a 60 Minutes segment on Unschooling in 2014 and an article in The Daily Telegraph in 2015. Here we look back at their journey… My husband and I both trained as primary school teachers, and it was whilst teaching that I began to question […]