The Bazaar Idea of Timed Targets (Grades)

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How funny is it that a hundred years or so ago, a bunch of people, strangers to us, sat down and made up a bunch of learning targets to standardise education, declaring the hierarchy of specific subjects? These people never meeting our individual children or knowing how the world is today and what’s important to us as families… because let’s face it, we are ALL so different!

Can we stop trying to be like everyone else?

I find it bazaar! I don’t know how that makes you feel BUT I find those things quite arbitrary and redundant and occasionally offensive. As I previously shared, even though we are indeed Natural Learners (Unschoolers), who don’t base our life around creating a school at home or using a curriculum… we (curiously) invested in the whole curriculum (set of activity books).

As an Unschooling family, we follow the child’s interests and THAT is what we base our “Activity (Life) Based Learning Plan around. Out of all of the curriculum books, we looked at any “subject matter” as a potential source of further research… to stimulate any potential questions of our own. Below I go further into how that went;)

Our school aged daughter previously finished the whole years worth of (Literacy & Numeracy) activity books we had chosen BEFORE this, in down times (her little sister’s nap time or rainy days etc). We really enjoyed exploring these so, we thought it might be good to see what else we could utilise (for learning) beyond the foundation of literacy and numeracy based activities. But I found that the majority of it was as extremely lacking in, well… “life”.

Side note: Now for many unschoolers… you’ll probably be thinking that the use of these books is not very “unschooler” of us. BUT, the way in which we scanned and used this (additional) material was almost an anthropological exploration really! Just as many homeschoolers may later dabble in say high school for a term or a year (not something we see on the cards). We literally looked at it to see what “they” are doing on the inside (of the school system). And it was indeed very confirming for us (in our choice not to use it).

What I discovered was, living the life we live, naturally inquisitive and immersed in the world of nature and health (our top values), covered way more than school possibly could have! That’s in terms of all key learning areas from History to Health and Science… the lot.

Not only did the language of the curriculum books rub me up the wrong way, in some of what is being normalised, but I found much of the content we already understood in a far deeper way, purely by living life and asking our own questions from our own curiosity. This brought me to ask…what the heck do we need to be told what to learn for? And why do we need to learn it by a predetermined “grade” (time) as such?

And so… though we have certainly arrived at the very solid opinion that grades mean very little if anything, we have certainly covered first grade in a term… and that’s a win for homeschooling in my eyes! I wanted to share a little on it, because I’m obviously amongst the young homeschooler community and many of them are about to register.

Many of them wonder how, out of the many ways, homeschooling without a curriculum, can be done to both suit them and appease their concerned loved ones. When we came to the conclusion that our daughter finished the content of grade one, after we went over EVERYTHING in it, she was quite chuffed and shared this with someone straight away. This person replied in disbelief saying “No…But you haven’t done your exams”.

Boy was I surprised! That for one, maybe they did ask grade 1 children to do exams and secondly, that someone would say that. So… naturally being me, I investigated and found that NO… there are no tests until grade 3… and that’s if you’re in school. These are called NAPLAN tests and their focus is one literacy and numeracy, which I agree are pretty useful tools. I feel pretty lucky that our daughter actually enjoys problem solving and literally says “I like maths!”. I sure didn’t enjoy it.

In fact, homeschoolers often “choose” to do NAPLAN and have been found overall to do very well, in fact BETTER on them!

“Home-schooled students perform “significantly better” in almost all NAPLAN tests than students in mainstream schools and they do as well as their peers in HSC English, new research from the state’s exam board reveals.”

Sydney Morning Herald

That awesome thing I say about homeschooling is… you actually get to learn WITH your children! And if YOU don’t feel capable of homeschooling your own, then school OBVIOUSLY did a terrible job of both educating you and instilling confidence in you!

Think about that for a moment… If YOU went to school but feel unable to school your own children, even with ALL of that life experience… then there is something deeply wrong with the system and it’s indoctrination! Finally I wanted to share where we are at now, being term 2 of grade 1… arriving to the point where we have officially finished the “grade”. Well, we don’t think much of grades thats certain.

Secondly, we have discovered a couple of stunning, and most importantly “values based” learning resources that our 6 (7 this Winter) year old is LAPPING up! We have found some AWESOME new book sets that she is ASKING us to listen to her read (to us)! I just wanted to say, I am really LOVING homeschooling! Mostly we are studying (by choice) Nature, Herbs and Homeopathy.

This IS a game changer! And as someone said to be at homeschool group 2 days ago, YES… It’s confronting! Just yesterday my daughter asked me, “Mum, why do they jab (vaccinate) meat?” And just like that… I was confronted and couldn’t not think about it! Immediately I did some research in one of the biggest Unvaccinated forums I’m in… and found there are merely just A COUPLE of Demeter Butchers (Organic Butchers who don’t vaccinate or give their animals antibiotics) in the whole country!

This was stifling! But… It just goes to show how powerful homeschooling can be as a catalyst for life changes in a family! Being on this journey has seen us change our life for the better in SO many conscious ways… as we are ON this journey WITH her, both of our girls really! And I just want to say… I love it!

Disclaimer: I don’t want to promote the assumption that life is perfect for me. I have my own share of yin and yang like everyone! Homeschooling however is a passion of mine for many reasons… so it’s where much of my focus lies. I don’t feel pretending all is dandy is healthy, as people can get the wrong idea and beat themselves up in comparison. I am in now way wanting to perpetuate that culture.

So I will ad, I have my own sadnesses, stresses and pressures just like you. They come in various forms as they differ from person to person. Just keeping it real. If you have any questions about what we are doing or want to learn more about registering and creating your own learning plan – please comment or check out the “Learning Plan” page from the tabs above.