How to Unschool Maths and Still Fulfil Homeschool Registration Requirements

Can Registered Homeschoolers Unschool Maths?

Perhaps you’d like to let your kids unschool maths, but you’re worried. Will you have enough maths notes in your records book if you let them drop the formal maths program they’re using? Can you satisfy the maths requirement for homeschool registration without traditional style workbook maths exercises? For us, the answer to these questions was yes. My youngest girls approached maths in an unschooling way, and we never had any trouble getting through our registration visits.

Deciding to Unschool Maths

I didn’t at first want to let go of maths because workbooks and textbooks (and attractive online interactive courses) are convenient. Everything is laid out in an ordered manner. Kids start at the beginning of a book (or course) and work towards the end, filling in the answers to the problems as they go. All I had to do was mark the maths problems. (And find a way to explain how to get the correct answers when my kids got them wrong!) At registration time, I had pages and pages of ticked examples that I displayed to prove my kids had learnt the maths they were expected to know. Or, more correctly, the workbooks (or printouts from online courses) showed my children had worked their way through the exercises. I couldn’t actually guarantee they’d remembered all they were supposed to know. They often forgot things as soon as the work had been completed. But that was a problem that I wanted to ignore.

One day, I was ready to admit that a lot of the formal work that we force our kids do is a waste of time. When my daughter Sophie started saying, “I hate maths. I’m no good at it. Why do I have to do it?” I knew I had to let my daughters learn maths in their own way and time. But I also knew that if they unschooled maths, I’d have to find a way to satisfy the education department at registration time. Legally, I had to prove my kids were ‘doing’ maths. So what did I do? How did I find lots of maths notes to include in my homeschool records book? Well, first I looked at the maths that my kids were encountering every day.

Maths is Everywhere

Our kids experience maths naturally in their lives. If we observe carefully, we will soon realise that maths is everywhere. We’re constantly coming into contact with it even though we often don’t realise this.

When unschool maths is mentioned, usually someone will say, “Cooking!” That seems to be the number one example of real life maths. And, yes, cooking does involve fractions, multiplication, volume, and mass. But there’s a lot more to cooking than that. Every time we bake or prepare a meal, we use loads of maths that we don’t even think about. (I wrote an article about this a while ago. Maybe I’ll publish it as a future post.)

Of course, we also use maths when we’re shopping, gardening, driving a car, looking at bus and train timetables, reading the weather forecast, talking about birthdays, finding clothes and shoes that fit us, locating books on library shelves, enjoying Kindle books, playing games, and reading maps.

When we discover our kids using maths, we can jot down a few notes in our homeschool records books. We can add some mathematical terms to describe what they’re doing. Maybe we can also snap a few photos as evidence that our children are experiencing maths.

Whenever my children encountered a new maths concept and we discussed it together, I’d find an online article on the relevant topic. I’d copy and paste it into my digital homeschool records book as evidence of our maths conversation. It was also a resource for my children in case they wanted to check some information.

Maths Associated With Our Kids’ Interests

Our kids might encounter maths while they’re involved with their interests. For example, a few years ago, my girls were enthusiastic runners. Each morning, we headed out to the bush together and pounded along the tracks as we tried to improve both our distances and speed. In my homeschool records book, I described what my children were doing as decimals, multiplication, addition, estimation, speed, distance in kilometres and metres, and time. I added screenshots of our running data and maps captured by our GPS devices. Occasionally, I took photos of my girls running in the bush or on the treadmill. A few times, I had results and photos from 5 and 10 K races to copy and paste into my notes.

But maybe your kids don’t run. They could have other interests and hobbies that involve maths such as photography, coding, sewing, carpentry or drawing. If we think carefully enough, we’ll probably discover maths in most topics that interest our kids. I regularly asked the question, “Is there any maths associated with that interest?” If I got stuck, a bit of googling helped me answer that question.

Strewing Maths to Fill in the Gaps

So, our kids encounter maths in their everyday lives and also when they’re involved with their interests. But is that enough maths? What about all those concepts listed in the school syllabus? What if our kids don’t stumble over them while they’re unschooling? Well, we could strew some maths to fill in the gaps. When my kids were younger, I was constantly on the lookout for maths resources that might appeal to them. I added links to videos, books, podcasts, movies, documentaries, puzzles, games and articles to a strewing notebook. And sometimes I strewed physical books and games in a place where my kids might stumble over them.

Of course, we might offer resources, but our children might not want to use them. What do we do about that? Nothing. I reasoned that I’d done my best to provide opportunities for my kids to learn what was in the school syllabus, but it was up to them whether they were interested or not. We can’t make kids learn. Learning isn’t a passive activity. I’d done all I could. I’d fulfilled my legal requirement.

Strewing for Interest

I often looked for resources to extend my kids’ knowledge, to further their interests, to show my children that maths is an interesting subject. It’s more than a set of exercises in a workbook.

My youngest daughter Gemma-Rose loved art. We explored art history, looked at paintings, enjoyed watching art competitions, and were fascinated by such things as forgeries and heists. I found infographics and other data and documentaries about the world’s most expensive paintings. I copied and pasted art history timelines into my homeschool records notes. I found articles about such things as art auctions and how they work. I labelled all these notes as ‘maths’ adding a few comments of my own, outlining the maths concepts that each resource covered.

Ticking Off Outcomes

Although I usually regard ticking off boxes as a waste of time, perhaps it’s useful when it comes to recording our kids’ progress for registration purposes. Each of the subjects in our state’s syllabus, including maths, has a set of outcomes that our kids are supposed to fulfil. We could copy the outcomes into our records book, and then occasionally look at it, and tick off the ones that we think our kids have achieved while unschooling maths. I never used to worry about the unticked boxes: “My child is working on those outcomes “ I’d say.

Time and Effort Required

So, is it possible to unschool maths and still satisfy an educational representative at homeschool registration time? I guess it depends on the requirements you have to fulfil, and maybe the person you meet with, but we managed to do it in our state of NSW, Australia, without compromising our way of life.

It helps if we are convinced that unschooling maths is best for our kids and are prepared to put in lots of extra work searching for maths resources and making homeschool records notes. Yes, doing the behind-the-scenes work so our kids can unschool maths isn’t easy. It does require a lot of time and energy. But, for me, that time was well spent. Unlike the time my kids used to waste as they reluctantly worked their way through workbooks.

When Unschooling Maths Seems Impossible

If it really does seem impossible to satisfy our homeschool registration requirements while unschooling maths, can we work with our kids to find a compromise? Are they willing to do some formal maths? What are they prepared to do? Asking for their opinions and brainstorming solutions could be better than telling kids what we expect them to do.

What if You’re Just Not Sure About Unschooling Maths?

Even if the registration problem can be solved, maybe you’re just not sure about unschooling maths and would prefer your kids to learn this subject in a structured way. If this is the case, can you still be unschoolers? I wrote an article about this for my book Curious Unschoolers:

Being Honest About Unschool Maths

Unschooling except for maths? Is that really unschooling?

I want to discuss that question, but first: why is it so hard to let go of maths? I’ve never heard anyone say, “We unschool except for history or creative arts or science. Why do many of us cling to old and false ideas about learning when it comes to maths? Do we not believe our kids will pick up all the maths they need by living life?

Or maybe we don’t think that’s enough maths. Although we may never have used it, perhaps we think our kids should learn higher maths just in case. Just in case of what? If our kids ever need more maths than they know, they can always learn it. It’s never too late.

We might tell ourselves that even if our kids never use all this maths, it’s a good mental exercise. They might not retain everything, but it won’t be a waste of time and effort because their brains will have got a workout.

And maybe we think that because we survived higher maths, it won’t hurt our kids to do it too.

I’ve also been pondering another idea: perhaps some of us don’t want to let go of maths, both primary and high school, because it would make our homeschool record-keeping more difficult.

My daughter Charlotte completed part of a higher maths course. Her story illustrates how we can fool ourselves. I won’t say we are dishonest, but we know that if we look too closely at a situation, we may discover something we don’t want to deal with. So we don’t look.

I told everyone Charlotte loves maths. “I love maths. My kids love it too. We’re a maths family. We like playing around with numbers.” This explained (I hoped) why my kids did structured maths courses even though we called ourselves unschoolers. I told everyone that my children enjoyed these courses. But did Charlotte really like working her way through the many levels of higher maths? For a long time, I didn’t know because I didn’t ask her. She never complained about doing maths. Therefore I assumed that she enjoyed this subject because it was convenient for me to believe this.

Yes, sometimes we can look at things with half-closed eyes because it’s convenient. Charlotte’s online maths course records provided an easy way for me to prove she was doing the required maths for homeschool registration purposes. If she gave up her course, what was I going to do? I’d have to find other evidence that she was learning maths. Could I do that? Maybe but it would certainly be much more difficult than running some maths worksheets and progress reports under the homeschool registration visitor’s eyes. So I continued not to examine the situation too closely. And my kids continued learning maths in a formal way. We weren’t ‘unschooling, but I require my kids to do maths’. I didn’t require maths. Oh no, my kids wanted to do it. They loved this subject.

Except they didn’t. One day, my daughter Sophie said, “I hate maths.” And eventually, I got brave and asked Charlotte how she felt, and she confessed she wasn’t enjoying her course as I had hoped. I knew I had to do something: I let go of maths.

I want to go back to that question: Can we call ourselves unschoolers if we require our kids to do maths?

If we think of unschooling as a pathway that we progress along as we learn more about this philosophy, I think it’s quite okay for us to require maths and still call ourselves unschoolers. The particular point where we are standing at the moment is the one just right for our family. And maybe we’ll stay there. Or perhaps we won’t.

But we all have to keep our minds open. Keep thinking. Keep learning. And be honest. Ask the question: are we really at the correct point for our family? Do we need to be brave and examine what’s really going on rather than what we hope is happening? Perhaps we’re doing something a certain way because it’s convenient and not because it’s right. If we find out that our kids’ learning is being negatively affected, we have to face that. Do something about it. We can’t stand still and say, “This is what suits our family,” when really it might only suit us, the parents, and not our children at all.

So I decided to be honest about maths. I listened to my kids, and then we let go of it. I lost the convenience of having lots of formal maths records. But that was okay. We still manage to get through our homeschool registration visits. I’ve discovered something: if we think about things long enough, there’s usually another way.

Unschool Maths Podcast

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A Last Thought

At the moment, if you’re discussing the ever-changing covid situation, it should be very easy to find lots of maths notes for your homeschool records book. There’s lots of data available online: case numbers, comparisons, percentages, predictions, graphs, tables…