Electic unschooling and other big words

I'm trying to figure out my school plan for next year. You know what I'm realizing? None of you people know what you're doing, either. We're all winging it. That brings me great comfort and also fills me with terror. How in the world did we get kid licenses?

So anyways. I have all these books about homeschooling, because I buy books about whatever I'm interested in, usually for about 1 cent plus shipping on Amazon, because that's amazing. I have Dummies' guides to sewing, adoption, writing a novel, proofreading, homeschooling, etc. I also have several extensive books about organizing and cleaning, but I can't find them in the mess.

This year was my first official year and I bought a total curriculum, which my Idiot's Essential Guide to Not Screwing Up Your Kids calls a "rookie move". You will probably spend too much your first year, they said. Homeschooling can be very inexpensive, they said. I have a genius I can't screw up, I said. Please, someone take my money, I said. And they did, but it was the wrong approach for us, I think.

Next year I'm thinking about doing it this way. First, I'm going to think about what I want them to learn by the end of the school year. I'm going to devise various ways to get that information into them, via the occasional textbook, and many library books, online programs and apps and videos, and then take those springboards and do experiments and field trips and further research to learn more. I thought this was called unschooling, but that made a lot of people regurgitate their lungs onto my facebook, so I found a different term that maybe they'll like better: eclectic schooling. Eclectic, that's me. Also eccentric, and maybe slightly egocentric.

I have a whole internal philosophy about teaching and learning and kids, and I think I'm on to something, but my kids are little. So I will wait until they are big and smart and rich, and then I will write a book about it. OR I will write a book about how I did it all wrong. But I think the first one.