Finding Your Fit: A Guide to Homeschooling Styles and Approaches
Updated: Aug 24
When you begin your homeschooling journey in New Zealand, one of the first questions you will face is how to define your philosophy or approach. The wonderful news is that New Zealand law doesn't require you to follow a rigid, prescribed curriculum. Instead, the legal requirement is simply to teach your children "at least as regularly and as well" as a registered school.
This flexibility allows you to tailor education specifically to your child. Depending on your goals and your child's learning style, you can choose from several well-established homeschooling approaches:
Traditional Homeschooling (School at Home Model): This approach is also sometimes called "school-at-home" because it tends to lean more towards traditional methods of teaching and learning that people are more familiar with, usually follows a prescribed curriculum, and relies on more traditional curricular resources to impart the taught content in a more scheduled and formal manner.
Worldschooling: Worldschooling is an educational movement that recognises that a student can receive no greater education than by experiencing and interacting with the world around them. For families able to make it work, this often involves travelling together and using the journeys to enhance their child(ren)'s education.
Unschooling: Unschooling is a style of home education that allows the student's interests and curiosities to drive the path of learning. Rather than using a defined curriculum, unschoolers trust children to gain knowledge organically. Contrary to how it sounds, unschooling is an active learning process and not the passive, unstructured method that its terminology would suggest. Unschoolers are homeschoolers who are focused more on the experimental process of learning and becoming educated than on "doing school". The focus of unschooling is on the choices made by the individual child, dictated by interests, learning style, and personality type, and typically derived from life rather than from anything prescribed or formalised teaching.
Classical Homeschooling: Classical education is an approach to teaching and learning based on a three-part process to training the mind, called the trivium. The classical approach has the worthy overall goal of teaching children to think for themselves. Using the "trivium" model, children move through three distinct stages of learning, these being: Concrete Learning (the grammar stage), Critical Learning (the logic stage), and Abstract Learning (the rhetoric stage). It is a language-focused, literature-focused approach to teaching and learning that provides a core knowledge of the subjects of language arts, mathematics, science, and history, usually places some emphasis on Latin learning, logic, and rhetoric, employs the trivium to explain the stages of child learning and development, often integrates the teaching of values or character education into the curriculum, intentionally trains the mind to analyse and then draw conclusions, and usually relies on a range of tailored classical curricular resources to do so.
Montessori Homeschooling: The Montessori approach to early childhood education is a child-centred approach that values each child as a unique individual. Creativity and curiosity are encouraged, which leads students to value knowledge and seek it out for themselves. "Self-regulation" is a key goal of the Montessori philosophy of education, meaning the ability of a child to regulate his or her conduct in a way that is appropriate to the situation. The Montessori method views a child's classroom as a preparatory environment for the biggest classroom of all: life. Montessori parents follow her view that creating a customised educational plan for each child is essential. With a Montessori homeschool, the child directs the learning. Parents facilitate their child's education by connecting materials and curricula with each child's interests. Because Montessori is more of a philosophy than a defined program, any parent can create their own Montessori homeschool curriculum. One of the ways families accomplish this is by keeping plenty of materials on hand that allow them to utilise the Montessori method at home. This typically means that they create a prepared environment that encourages students to explore and discover, deliberately setting up their home to facilitate their child's learning.
Homeschooling with Unit Studies: Unit studies are time-specific overviews of a defined topic or theme that incorporate multiple subject areas into the study plan. Sometimes called "thematic units," these studies often involve multisensory learning where each activity is organised according to the thematic idea. The objective of unit studies is to allow students to delve deeply into a given topic, which is typically selected through a cooperative choice. By exploring a subject from multiple angles, information is more likely to be retained. Many homeschool families adopt this approach not so much for the depth of learning but more because the variety of activities keeps them engaged. The unit study method of homeschool works especially well for families homeschooling children across multiple age groups, children on the autism spectrum who have intense interests in specific subjects, parents who want to create their own curriculum, families who need low-cost curriculum options, and homeschoolers who want to break up a traditional homeschooling approach with short-term unit studies for variety.
Charlotte Mason Homeschooling: Charlotte Mason was a British author, teacher, and lecturer of the late 1800s. Her educational philosophy put a heavy emphasis on using high-quality literature, designated as "living books," to teach children. Charlotte Mason's belief was that education should involve the whole person, not just the mind. According to Mason, education is "an atmosphere, a discipline, a life". Within home education, a typical Charlotte Mason education involves the abundant use of narrative literature, plenty of time spent outdoors exploring, the development of an appreciation for art, music, and nature journaling, oral and written narration, dictation, and copywork. These core components of a Charlotte Mason education are defined as:
Narration - an activity that consists of the child telling back a story or understanding something that she has heard or read. It is done orally when the child is young, and as she grows older, she begins to write out her narrations.
Copywork - transcribing a piece of literature as handwriting practice.
Nature Study - a study of living science, with a focus on observation of things seen on nature walks and interactions with the natural world.
Living Books - books written in an alive, engaging way by an author who has a passion for the subject.
Waldorf Homeschooling: The Waldorf education philosophy originated in the early 1900s with Rudolf Steiner, who believed in educating the whole child: mind, body, and spirit. He also believed that child development could be grouped into three distinct stages of roughly seven years each. He proposed that:
Early childhood education should focus on creative play and active, hands-on learning.
Elementary education is the time to introduce academic instruction, while teaching students to increase their imagination and manage their emotions.
Secondary education should focus on critical thinking, empathy, and community service. The focus of a Waldorf education is on learning through play, exploration, and the natural world. It de-emphasises academics, focuses on age-appropriate learning, emphasises art, music, gardening, and foreign language, does not incorporate the use of textbooks in the first several grades, and no formal grades are assigned during the elementary years; instead, children are assessed by progress made. There is an integration of the natural world into all aspects of education. Academic learning tends to be delayed until at least age 7, and once started, the Waldorf approach recommends teaching curriculum subjects/topics in "blocks" of 3-6 weeks of in-depth study each. This keeps children focused on one subject at a time, rather than switching gears multiple times a day. Main lessons are typically taught in a multisensory fashion that balances listening and seatwork with active learning.
Eclectic Homeschooling: Eclectic homeschooling is specifically tailored to the individual child. It may encompass aspects of all of the above dependent on the needs and interests of the child. Within an eclectic approach, parents mix and match a variety of homeschooling resources. Eclectic homeschoolers see value in a variety of different educational methods. The eclectic approach is more about finding the right mix of resources and methods, with less concern that the child is directing the educational agenda and more that the parent is making informed choices and decisions about what methods, approaches, and materials will suit their child best. Designing an eclectic homeschool curriculum depends heavily on a parent understanding how their child learns best. This may not be possible until you've had at least a year or two of home education under your belt and have had the chance to test different curricula, resources, and methods as typically it involves the parent combining the educational goals they have for their children with their observation of their specific interests, strengths, and weaknesses, to mix and match the programs and tools that will fulfil both. Resources that eclectic homeschoolers might use could include online learning, library books, locally offered courses and clubs, videos, and bits and pieces of subject-specific curricula.
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