Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything is written by Laura Grace Weldon, a home educator who lives on a farm in the USA (and writes an interesting blog about it). This is a homeschooling book that sits towards the ‘unschooling’ end of the spectrum. It is a bit of a mix between a ‘how-to’ and a ‘why-to’ book, with a mix of discussing the advantages of home educating and things you can do. Studded throughout the book are short interviews with home educating parents and students.
The first part of the book discusses ideas such as learning happening everywhere, following children’s interests, how children will learn best when they are ready and interested rather than trying to stick to a proscribed time line, and the effect of homeschooling on the whole family and the wider community. There is a lot of good information and inspiration in this section, but it is also rife with statements put out there as truths without any backing (though there is a bibliography at the end of the book). There is also a lot of feel-good padding: perhaps helpful if you are still trying to decide if you want to make the change to home educating, but rather waffly otherwise.
The second part of the book is a bit more of a ‘how-to’, though here again this is no real strict program of how to do things. Rather, it is a collection of different topics of subjects or ideas to cover in your education and resources for going about it. As well as ‘traditional’ topics like language arts, maths and science there are also sections on volunteering, ethics and spirituality, field trips and ‘adventure homeschooling’ which is about learning while travelling. Each chapter has an introductory section about each ‘learning area’ followed by detailed dot points of suggested activities then detailed lists of resources, both online and books. The book is obviously aimed at a North American audience, so many of the recommended resources may not be relevant to readers in other countries.
This book is an inspiring mix of philosophy/theory and practical ideas. It covers a broad range of topics that would be relevant to home educating families with children aged six up to grown-up. However there are a few things that let it down. Firstly, the kindle edition is NOT well formatted, to the point the some sections are unreadable. Secondly, there is a lot of ‘padding’ (at least it seems so to this reader), including the fact every section has to begin with a quote, which starts to feel like the author has discovered a good quote search website.
If you are considering home education, or are currently home educating and thinking of moving to a more unschooling/unstructured approach, this book is definitely worth a read.
