A mom has revealed that she takes her kids out on adventures regularly to avoid traditional lessons and textbooks at school.
Shanel Bell, 34, is a mom who takes her kids out on adventures to ditch textbooks in favor of “unschooling” her two children. She’s an advocate for unschooling, similar to homeschooling, where children are in charge of what they learn about.
She says that math is taught through cooking, history lessons happen in the museum, and they focus on what interests her kids, Maui, 10, and Maya, 6. The kids learn from their home in Bury-St-Edmunds, Suffolk, and Shanel says insatiable curiosity means every day is different.
She said: “It all depends on what they’re interested in, so we try to focus on things they want to learn about. It’s about the real-world application of the things you learn, so cooking turns into a maths lesson because you’re measuring and counting ingredients.”
She continued: “They can see how what they’re learning is important, and we try and get out to learn as much as possible.point 239 |
We’d only get a textbook out if there was an animal they wanted to learn about, we’d find it in a textbook.point 98 | We’d also have a trip to the zoo to see it in person, we went owl handling in York where they could learn more about owls and added everything that began with one camping trip”.point 251 | 1
“We’ve always homeschooled them, the only year they were in a public school in the US was the 2019/2020 year. Obviously, that ended part-way through due to the pandemic, so we figured that was a sign to keep doing what we were doing. ”
“We went on a camping trip in 2016, and we absolutely fell in love with it. It was after we bought an RV and traveled the US for a few years before moving to the UK. Now, we go out camping and travel all around the UK whenever we can, and we go for hikes every weekend,” she added.
The family used to live in Colorado, US, then traveled and relocated to the UK due to Shanel’s husband, Nicolas, 34, who is a medic and needed to move. Since moving, they’ve made trips to the Peak District, Snowdonia, and up to the Isles of Skye, Scotland.
Shanel said: “We’ve always wanted to live here, and we were so lucky that we were able to move here during the pandemic. It’s so frustrating though because we’d love to travel around Europe, but we can’t at the moment. It feels so close but so far away”.
She also shared that she gets mixed reactions from people about unschooling. She said: “Some people are fearful of learning that doesn’t take place behind a desk, but they don’t understand that the world is their classroom.”
She continued: “People share their concerns, and we know they mean well, and I understand it is unconventional but it works for us. Overall, it’s helping them understand the world and become better global citizens.”
While home-schooling your children is legal, the legality of unschooling is unclear, with the Department for Education (DoE) saying that children of compulsory school age must receive a suitable full-time education, whether in school or otherwise.
The unconventional phenomenon of unschooling began in America but its popularity is now rising in the UK. The mother-of-two also shared that the plan for the day can depend on what the children want to learn about.