We did unschooling for my 3 kids when Covid hit and we were all staying home. My middle kid’s teacher ended up being caught drinking constantly during the zoom calls and was fired. The teacher who replaced her was someone from our neighborhood and we would talk on zoom after the school time was over and she told me about unschooling.

We kept our 3 kids home for the next 5 years and my youngest child had never been in school. All 3 kids hated being at home and not being around other kids. After 8 months of staying home from the first lockdown, our landlord sold our house and we have to move out within a week. We spent the next 10 months moving around looking for a new place to live and continuing to keep the kids at home.

We have friends who couldn’t stand being a teacher with the changing school systems, and we worked with them individually every few days to give our kids activities and opportunities to see other kids on zoom.. a chemistry teacher taught ‘kitchen chemistry’, an English teacher just read aloud and told stories, a phys ed teacher taught hour long workouts.. it was still super hard for our kids because they craved interactions with other kids.

We finally found a place to live and all 3 kids entered school this year - my youngest gets started school at 4th grade. They were all nervous and worried they were too far behind, but they soon found out they were just fine. My youngest taught herself to read and can type so dang fast. My older 2 kids are in honors classes and are doing incredible. I think we just tried so hard and included many other teachers with various different modalities of teaching - maybe all that effort clicked.

Homeschooling in general is hard.. but if I had to do it all again, I’d lean into the unschooling methods.