What type of school do you do with your kids? Traditional brick and mortar school? Cyber school? Homeschool? We spent several years in traditional school and then Covid inspired us to try a version of homeschooling called unschooling. Unschooling is learning through experiences vs. sitting down for formal lessons. Recently we have switched to cyber school and I wanted to share some observations about cyber school vs. unschooling so far…
unschooling felt really good after being in the school system for several years. its all about freedom and learning through experiences. it showed me that kids learn regardless of what curriculum you use or how much time you spend sitting down with them and practicing reading or math skills. Zack learned his letters and even some words just from being around other kids who knew them. Ava honestly learned a lot of spelling through playing roblox. the challenges, especially for the parent, are juggling everyones interests and needs. Ava would love to go somewhere every single day and interact with people and the world. Izzy and Zack need some down time. They didn’t all like the activities we chose to do every day so we had to navigate that.
Side note- Izzy- who had really enjoyed unschooling and really really didn’t like anything that had to do with “real school” as she called because she had been in the school system up to 4th grade- decided all on her own that she wanted to go back to “real school” for 8th grade.
Which leads me into why we decided to try cyber school for the 2nd half of this year.
I thought she needed a stepping stone. And since she was doing it I decided to try it for all my kids. So far so good- I am so impressed with how all of them have adapted and how they somehow know so much without me formally teaching them the past few years.
I do think they overdo it a bit for cyber school- the amount of work that needs to be completed seems excessive- not for Zack with kindergarten but with Ava for 3rd. It’s a lot of computer work and I would rather have more of a balance of other ways of learning.
There have been some interesting behaviors coming up with Ava and Zack because of the new schedule and that they “have to” do some things instead of the amount of freedom they were used to. Zack has been throwing some tantrums and doing little mischievous things like sprinkling salt on my laptop and spitting randomly on the floor in the house. Ava openly complains and stomps around and absolutely hates being woken up in the morning.
Overall though it’s nice to have some structure and support and there are things the kids really like about it. They feel really good about themselves when they participate in the virtual classes and talk with their teachers.
I don’t know yet exactly what we will be doing next year but I could tell it was time for a new chapter…
ps pictured below is the massive amount of stuff they send you with cyber!!
Patricia June Photography 