I started this blog ten years ago when all of my son's friends were heading to preschool at the age of three. I knew he wasn't ready for that and I wasn't ready either, so we decided to do our own preschool routine at home and spent several months enjoying a warm and sweet rhythm.
Within that first year of Waldorf home preschool we discovered a Waldorf-inspired preschool in our area... and a couple of years later decided to move away from that area because there wasn't a true Waldorf school there.
We spent eight years happily at two different Waldorf schools and I believed that we would stay with this mode of education through high school. We even moved from CA to OR, in large part in order to let the kids attend a Waldorf school that goes through 12th grade.
I spent the last decade volunteering 20+ hours per week in committee work, serving on the Board of Trustees, Parent Council, and a myriad of other working committees to support the structure and work of two Waldorf schools and it was SO very fulfilling. I grew as an individual in wisdom and inner strength, and all of it supported growth in my paid/professional career as well. The kids seemed to do well in the beginning with Waldorf and of course I appreciated the beauty and intention in the curriculum, but as we got into the grades I started to notice signs of stress in each child.
Molly was the model student - her work and behavior were held as models for the class and for visiting teachers. She would come home EXHAUSTED and prone to huge emotions which I still believe were due to the immense amount of effort that she put into holding herself up at school. She is a perfectionist and it causes her stress when she isn't "doing it right" from the very first. And in school there is a LOT to get right; a lot of external expectation and thus she self-imposed all of that expectation and more on herself.
Dylan is a dreamy young person. He loved the stories and loved being with other kids with time to play. But his focus is his own and while he spent two hours at home one day building an airplane from a shoe box and hand-helicopter, he would spend most of his classroom time staring out the window. We finally hit our limit when he entered 6th grade and the school he attended implemented special Math classes four days per week. The Math classes included daily homework. We worked diligently and patiently at home with Dylan to support his successful completion of the homework. He spent many nights crying and lying on the floor in agony over the stress of focusing on numbers on paper. Each day he needed to re-remember the steps and processes. Each day it was brand new. And each day he struggled. We did get to a point where we were caught up with the homework but then received an email from the class teacher--she had evaluated each student's math skills and sent home a packet of work that represented the amount of practice and "catch up" that they needed on skills. Dylan's packet was an inch thick. It was then that I realized that we were going about this all wrong.
My whole goal for my children's lives is for them to become who they are--who they're meant to be. This means supporting them where they are and allowing them to explore while finding what they love and what "feeds" them as individuals. I finally realized that school no longer was supporting that goal. I started to think about homeschooling again. And in researching homeschool ideas that support natural and life learning I was reintroduced to Unschooling. I first heard of Unschooling from my Mom, who clearly thought the whole idea was nuts. My cousin was unschooling her three (maybe already four at that time) children and she spent time doing outdoorsy things and reading to them... just living life. Because it was presented to me as crazy, I honestly didn't even try to get it at that time...and we were already started on our Waldorf path so. Now we've come back to it and I started to read. And learn. And my mind opened. And I listened to The Unschooling Life Podcast that broke down all the principals, and I cried through many of them at the time lost and at my own experiences as a child. And I joined the Facebook group, Radical Unschooling Info and our local Portland Unschoolers... and breathed. I talked to the family about homeschooling after a WONderful holiday break in late 2015 and everyone was on board. And so it began.
*pre-dated to reflect the time I wrote this post.*
