I think your situation is complicated by another issue: your dd is at an age where a lot of unschoolers begin to look for a little bit more structure, direction and goal-orientation in their learning. Unschooling often looks quite different in kids who are 12+ vs. kids who are 10 and under. You may be looking to transition back into unschooling, but also into a different kind of unschooling more typical of teens.
An approach that I found very helpful with my kids at that age came from the unschooling-inspired umbrella school we homeschooled under. It was a way of brainstorming collaboratively and coming up with a plan for learning that was inspired by the child's needs and interests. It starts with Mind-Mapping and leads to a Learning Plan. For us this is how it worked:
I would make notes somewhere about all the things I noticed my child was interested in or seemed to have curiosity about or an affinity for, often over the course of a few days or a couple of weeks. Inevitably the list would seem really random. eg. "Lots of questions about statistics. Horses/farm animals. Drawing. Digital art. Swimming. Dance/yoga/gymnastics? Local politics. Stephen King novels. Food security. Baking (chocolate esp.). Electric scooters. Earrings." Absolutely anything would go. I would also include areas that I knew my child had expressed concern about learning. For example if she'd been stressed in the past about keeping up with math, I'd put "formal math?" on the list. If she'd been working hard on cursive handwriting, but had let that lapse over the past few months, I'd put down "handwriting? keyboarding?"
Then we would go out to a quiet café or restaurant and have a nice snack and a warm drink. I would bring the list. I would say "Here are some things that I've noticed you are interested in. Either that or it seemed from something you've done or said that you thought they were worthwhile ... Anything you want to cross off? ... Okay, now you tell me: what have I missed? What interests you, and what do you like? What would you love to do, love to learn, in your wildest dreams what would you want to learn about?" I'd also casually prompt with questions like "Are you still loving gymnastics? Are you still wanting that to be part of what you do?" and "What about formal math bookwork? I know that's fallen by the wayside recently. But is that something you're interested in continuing with in some way, shape or form?"
And we'd end up with a revised list that might include horror movies, paragliding, cake-decorating and human physiology, but have yoga and swimming and local politics crossed off. The key at this stage is that it should be wide-ranging and use an anything-goes approach. Anything your child is interested in, no matter how weird, how dangerous, how expensive, how impractical. As well as anything mundane, bookish, already routine.
That's the "mind map" or "inventory of interests." Sometimes we'd draw it as a list, or else sometimes as a visual map, linking and branching ideas. Do a Google image search for <mind map> and you'll see some ways of doing this visually. Sometimes it's kind of fun to let the mind-map gel and percolate for a couple of days and come back to it fresh at another meeting. You could go home and make a large-scale colourful version of it, or an on-line version, or a word collage. Or you could just carry on with the next stage, which is to discuss how those learning interests might be pursued and fleshed out into a Learning Plan.
For each interest, we'd talk about whether it was totally realistic, just pie-in-the-sky at this point, or maybe something that my child could begin exploring in a modified way. For instance, if paragliding was on the list the conversation might go a little like this: "I'm pretty sure paragliders costs thousands of dollars, and to use a rental you would have to be 18. We should check on that to confirm. But maybe we could see about going to that paragliding place near Coldstream and see what they offer, kind of get a tour, look at their equipment and so on. And you could probably learn a lot on the internet by looking at videos and learning about the equipment and the way thermals work and all that."
Some might get discarded at this stage. She might decide that paragliding isn't a strong enough interest at this point to warrant continuing to explore in any intentional way and just shuffle it off to the side. Some interests you might need to do some research to figure out what the possibilities are. Some interests you might have some ideas, but you'll need to take some time and show your dd what they are and get her reaction. Others you might already know more or less how it will make sense to pursue them.
You should also talk about the sort of structure that might be helpful around the various learning interests.
"Okay, so keyboarding is a for-sure, and we'll make sure we get a good computer program for you to use. How do you see yourself using it? Would it be best to work on it in big spurts when you feel like it, but otherwise just let it go? Or is it something you'll like to work at a little bit at a time and consistently from week to week? .... Okay, how many times a week, and how long each time? ... I'll write down 3-5 times a week, half an hour each time, then, just as a general goal or expectation for yourself? .... Okay, and are there any rules you want to set for yourself, or is there anything you want me to do to make sure you stick to that? ... Okay, so you're saying no computer on Monday, Thursday or Friday evenings until you've done 20 minutes of keyboarding practice. And you want me to help you stick to that. Got it."
"So formal math is going to be totally unstructured, is that what you're saying? You'd like to have some resources available, but do it in spurts, just when you feel like it? And we'll look into this new computer-based program and also that book we talked about. So, no real goals or schedule? ... Okay, I'll write down unstructured for that."
And so on, for each interest. And then, once you've pretty much sorted out what she wants to pursue, and how, you write it all down, nicely formatted, get her to proof-read and offer corrections, and file it somewhere.
That's the Learning Plan. Think of it as a lighthouse rather than a set of directions. You're not bound by it; you don't have to follow it. If she wanders totally off course, that's fine. But you both know that it was an authentic representation of her desires and ambitions at a point in time, and that can be really helpful as a guiding light. The magic comes a few weeks or a couple of months later where you pull out the Learning Plan and say "Oh look, this is what you said you wanted to do. You've haven't done it, and you've done this instead. Is that because you don't want to do that first thing any more? Or did you just kind of get off-track? Do you want to try to get back on track with it? Or do you want to take that off the plan and change things up. Anything we should add or delete here?"
Set dates regularly to revisit the Learning Plan. Every 6-12 weeks works pretty well for our family. What amazes me is how often, especially from age 10 or 11 up, my kids re-affirm their commitment to things that I thought they had lost interest in. They realize that they are still interested in formal math, or learning Japanese, or chemistry or whatever, and that they thought they would do it five times a week, but didn't follow through at all ... and they then decide upon a new and better way of committing to that goal. It blows my mind to have a 12- or 14-year-old tell me at one of these meetings "I really don't enjoy doing ___, but I know it's part of the basic stuff I need to learn in order to get to ___ which is going to be really fun, so I'm going to make myself do it, and here's how." It's the sort of mature goal-setting and self-structuring that it often takes school children another five or ten years to master, because they're not allowed to try and fail and learn from their failures: it's all done for them in an effort to prevent any failure. (But of course when the coercive "support" of all the school-structured learning falls away, or when the student rebels against it, failure often happens. And it's higher-stakes stuff at that point. But I digress....)
Anyway, this can all seem quite different from unschooling when they were 6 or 8 and were just frolicking outdoors or playing imaginatively and reading for entertainment, but I think it's exactly what a lot of unschooled kids want and need as they move through adolescence towards adulthood, towards a world which they know expects certain levels of competence, commitment and persistence.
Ack! Huge long post. I hope it provides you with some food for thought, and maybe a couple of useful ideas.
Miranda
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