About The Unschooling Sandbox in Sarjapur road, Bangalore

We're a unschooling family, living in Bangalore. We have an organic garden with a decent sized sand box, water tubs and a rambunctious toddler. A is 18 months old this July, 2017. We've been unschooling right from the beginning.

Meghana:
We see unschooling as a way of life.
In our case it translates to lots of free play, making space for independence, exploring; Few "structured" toys like blocks or stacking toys, almost zero electronics, lots of narrative books, more access to "loose parts" (which are basically everyday odds and ends, like tools, screwdrivers, chunky metal bits, screws, nails(you read that right!) bottle caps, dabbas, construction tools. With supervision for unsafe situations but we don't guide or dictate his play. Lots of pottering around in the garden, uninhibited access to the water hose, splashing in the mud puddles. Including him in the kitchen work.
We have very few "limits" instead we try to make all parts of the house safe for him. There is a greater emphasis on narratives, explaining what we are doing, what's around us.

Shamanth:
The thing is for generations and decades people have seen school as an inevitable phase of life for a child. Like the inevitable progression from rolling over to crawling to walking to talking to school. You can see that happening if you look for it. Ex: people will so often say something to this effect to the parents of Toddlers : "once he starts going to school, then he won't have time to play or that he WILL have to " adjust" or learn to share or respect. " that's because they think that there is no escaping the school phase. And trust me I didn't think any different. The day Meghana said we should homeschool our kid I scoffed at her and totally rejected the idea. But I slowly started exploring the topic and reading more about it, and the more I read, the more I fell in love with the concept and now it is extremely difficult for me to think of school as a necessity for anyone. Creativity, imagination, thinking of possibilities that the system has "ruled out" :these are the things uninspired mainstream school system ends up curbing.
We have been trained to conform to arbitrary rules set by people who are in an apparent position of power due to either age or authority : parents, relatives, teachers, officials, etc. So for us life doesn't exist outside of those boundaries (at least not always and not so naturally)
But when you break out of those boundaries and basically let your heart lead what you are doing is simply living intentionally.

I feel the term "Unschooling" was coined so people can see how you can disassociate yourself with the way of "school system". But if you really think about it. what did people do before public schools were "imposed" on mankind (less than 200 yrs ago)?! They probably just lived their life, learned by observing, exploring trying, failing pushing, things like that.

There is no age prerequisite for Unschooling. It is as natural as life itself.

Humans are born curious and learners. Our curiosity pushes us to explore and that's how we learn.