Being new to homeschooling, of course, I’m spending most of my time seeing what other moms are doing, printing out as many worksheets as possible, setting up sensory trays and learning activities, and just damn near winging it, as best I can. But when I came across Homeschool On’s “Homeschool Style Quiz” I was excited to see how this online technology would chug away on my answers and what they would come up with.

Here are my results:

23% Charlotte Mason

21% Unschooling

20% Classical

Don’t ask me why the percentages don’t add up or why they are all almost equal but I took it and ran with it. Let’s go over each one at a time.

Charlotte Mason

I hadn’t properly heard of CM before taking this quiz and it definitely caught my eye, being my top result.

A quick Google search will tell you, "Charlotte Mason (1842–1923) was a British educator who invested her life in improving the quality of children's education.” And that, “she believed that children are able to deal with ideas and knowledge, that they are not blank slates or empty sacks to be filled with information.”

Since taking the homeschool quiz, I purchased Leah Boden’s book titled, Modern Miss Mason and I am in the middle of it, and loving it. Modern Miss Mason is not a full instruction of Charlotte Mason’s teachings but I find that it summarizes the original teachings very well with clear key points to review at the end of each chapter.

The Charlotte Mason method, I’ve gathered, is mainly about living experiences, getting your children out and observing nature, and reading them intriguing books that have been written by experts or great minds.

Looking into Charlotte Mason's homeschooling has given me a bit of a spark. I have found a vintage thrift book store in my town and sat with my son trying out her method of finding “living books.” This involves reading one page from any book you’re considering, to see if you get a feeling of wanting to keep reading, feeling interested, invested, or intrigued. By doing this, we found a wonderful little book to begin our living book collection! I plan to revamp our library of books with this method.

Unschooling

My second highly rated style of homeschooling is the infamous unschooling! The “do nothing way”! Haha! Kidding but really it’s about letting your child lead and you finding lessons in their everyday life.

This type of homeschooling makes me the most nervous, as I’m sure it might most parents who are recovering control freaks and want the best for their children.

But a small article on PBS Kids stated, “Learning is not the main objective [of unschooling], it just happens as a side effect of living your life with passion and exploring our interests.”

With that, I say, we are already naturally unschooling because I enjoy finding lessons from our everyday situations and talking about them happens naturally.

Here are some examples;

My son will ask how a plane flies and I get so excited to tell him or to find a good video to explain it.
My son might ask where babies come from and I am ready with diagrams and conversation.
My son might see worms wriggling in the dirt under a rolled-over log and I get to tell him all about why worms live there, what they eat, and more.

I can check out library books and even talk about these topics around the other people in our lives and my son learns that learning is a natural part of our daily life and he falls in love with the whole process, rather than, on the other hand, dreading a forced daily worksheet, for example.

Speaking of worksheets, unschooling can still involve them. As a preschooler, I ask my son if he wants to work on a learning worksheet and some days he does, some days he does not, and some days he asks to do more than one.

I’ve seen unschooling work for us in the way my son has seen me write in cursive handwriting and he has asked to learn it. I didn’t have any plan to teach him but it is his interest and I am following his lead so we’ve begun a little bit at a time and he feels so proud to do something he found interesting.

He is also learning American Sign Language because he has a baby sister to whom we are teaching some ASL words, for communication purposes. I love seeing him take an active role in learning without being pushed.

Classical

I found it comical to have such split results for classical and unschooling methods because they feel opposite in my mind. Although, I am just as much pulled toward workbooks and the classical education styles, as I am to free-styling it, and so I guess that makes perfect sense.

The Classical Homeschooling Method, I thought, most closely resembled a traditional public school teaching as most might be familiar with. But I was surprised to learn that really, the Classical Method of homeschooling “focuses on teaching children how to think, rather than what to think.” And I couldn’t love and agree with that style of teaching more!

Classical Method is thus broken down into three main sections: The Grammar Stage (ages 6-10), The Logic Stage (ages 10-12), and The Rhetoric Stage (ages 13-18).

Each stage is set to cultivate in your children the ability to learn well, process what they’ve learned, create their own opinions, and have the skill to translate what they have learned so as to communicate with others on the topic and even further build mastery over the topics of their choosing.

I am personally still at the beginning of my Classical Homeschooling Method journey as my oldest is currently 4 years old but I am most excited for this addition since it adds structure to our learning, which is something I crave.

To support my Classical Method Journey, I purchased the very highly reviewed book, The Well Trained Mind, and will use this as my first step into the Classical Method!

I’m Glad I Took The Quiz

I really do find that I enjoy each type of homeschooling method and can not say that I will put my time, energy, and effort into one more than the other.

So far, I am a very go-with-the-flow type of educator because I only have a preschooler, but I believe as he ages, I’ll put more emphasis on his structured learning.

We will see how it develops but so far I love having more information and thus feeling more prepared going into my homeschooling journey.

I am still gathering resources, and tools, and forming opinions at this stage of my homeschooling journey.