September alert!!

It's rolled around again like a nasty rash or a dose of the flu, but this year I'm ready for it and I have vowed it's not going to get the better of me ever again. In the past when September rolled around and everyone else's kids were trudging off to school again something strange would come over me. I'd get a case of the teachery wobbles ( I was a secondary school teacher in a past existence) and would start  to panic about 'getting the kids to do something educational'. This would always end in tears, usually mine, as I tried to squash some learning into my kids and they would dig their heels in and seemed to want to sabotage my best efforts at 'structuring' them. I appreciate now that they will not be squashed or structured, no matter how hard I try. So this year (somehow the year always starts in september for me- old habits die hard) I am going to be true to myself and more importantly to my kids and follow our unschooling instincts and be a lot more calm about the whole thing. All through the summer the kids have been following their own learning patterns and filling their growing brains with plenty of new experiences and ideas and building on what they have already amassed in there. Why reinvent the wheel? If it ain't broke don't fix it. I don't really understand where these academic panics come from, but I'm just going to acknowledge that they are there and then ignore them. So we'll go on outings of various kinds and they'll do their own educational thing and I will try not to turn every experience into a learning opportunity. I'll just sit back and marvel at the organic way that children have of making sense of their world, and I'll be there at every turn to help, find resources, suggest ways to enrich their discoveries and generally and genuinely appreciate the efforts they are making for themselves.