Introduction

This August, Dexter Keats (5) and Liam Eliot (8) entered Kindergarten and 3rd grade respectively. We threw ourselves completely into unschooling this year and we loved almost everything about it. The lack of organization and record-keeping, however, did give me a bad case of mama-anxiety. 

I have been contemplating how to address these issues since the beginning of the school year, but after stumbling across a perfect storm of resources, including an unschooling podcast, a conversation with a friend, and two great homeschooling books (The Brave Learner and Guerilla Learning) I have come up with what I believe will be a good system of organizing and record-keeping without interfering too much with our self-directed approach.

Even though it is March and the 2018/2019 school year will be over relatively soon, I have decided to go ahead and implement my idea now, rather than waiting until next year. This will give me a shorter "practice run" of sorts, while also working on the 2019/2020 school year. 

The idea, which I have stolen and pieced together from the resources mentioned above, is to basically create a master list of resources for my kids based on the state educational standards. These are things I plan to introduce to the kids throughout the year. I will then make a weekly/monthly plan for how often I intend to introduce a particular topic. I am using the state standards as a jumping off point only because it is a concise list of topics and skills that simplifies the organizational process. I will then use this space as a portfolio to record both our intentions and our daily happenings. Of course, I only intend to introduce these resources to the kids. If they have no interest in them, we will not pursue them.  If something comes along that my children are interested in that is not something I planned for, then I will add those resources to our plan retroactively. This will allow for freedom within a framework and will give me a way of documenting our homeschooling journey in a way that makes sense to me.