The Obligatory Homeschool Post

I mention it in my profile, and many who read this already know me from that universe, but, yes, we homeschool. For the past 10 years, we have, for the most part, refused to partake of what passes for ordinary education in these United States. We keep our kids home and teach them at their pace and on their time schedule. We have an eclectic style. I really like the concept of unschooling. Free learning is mostly what I did as a kid, meaning that I went to school and did the assignments, but, when I think of what I learned, it was what I found in the dictionary on the way to finding the vocabulary word. Or what I learned while on a camping trip with my mom, that sort of thing. But I also like the concept of classical education, mostly because I admit to being a history freak and I like the idea of learning the way thousands of successful people have learned down through thousands of years of history. I've seen it work with my own history freak kids, when they were learning history and literature. I've seen the style of grammar stage repetition (hey, you know what that means if you followed the link. If you don't, then why do I waste my time?) work as we made our way through math facts, grammar rules and the like.
So, as we wander down this path, we do a little of both. We have piles of textbooks for the learning of specific facts and ideas. But we also have piles of books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias for "I don't wanna learn today, so I'm just gonna read." (Yeah, sometimes we fool 'em into larnin.') Sometimes we watch -gasp- videos or television programs, and sometimes I have the "teacher joy" of seeing them pick up a book to learn more about a character or an event. We take them on trips to Acadia and Colorado and Ft. Hood. We go to the museums in Chicago and Rockford and to see Shakespeare in Milwaukee. Somehow it works, and we know we like it much better then shipping them off in the big yellow bus. That big yellow bus IS a learning environment; but you don't wanna learn THOSE kind of lessons!