Hi Dar! I'm also happy to see you here. Your posts at hM and other places have been an inspiration to me in parenting & unschooling.
I don't think I'd fall along the radical unschooler lines, though. I thought I did...but I'm a little more structured than that. My son is turning out to have some developmental delays (how I hate that term, but it's succinct) and thriving on some structured play sessions I'm doing with him. Anyway, it's challenged my ideas on what I thought I would do.
I have though, been much more relaxed with my daughter Katie. She's 5 1/2 and totally into hours and hours of imaginative play, often talking to her imaginary friends, making fairy houses in the yard, and doing circle time and a story with me each morning. We get our circle time/story/craft ideas from the Enki K resource book (
www.enkieducation.org) and we follow a weekly rhythm with a different craft or activity each day. This was my idea, but Katie loves it and asks what we'll be doing each day.
She has recently expressed interest in doing more with math and phonics, so we got Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (though I don't know if she'll dig it) and Games for Math by Peggy Kaye. Mostly for math, she is having fun counting out change with Daddy and using it to explore ideas about place value and conservation of number (trade five pennies for a nickel...she makes piles and trades coins among them to keep them all the same amount, that kind of thing). She also likes to play math games in her head and will tell me in the car how many ways you can put two numbers together to make 8, or 12, or whatever. And things like, "Mom! 2 million plus 2 million is 4 million!" She's just getting that idea, too.
Anyway, all that just to show how unschooling might look in the early years. Somewhere between radical unschooling and relaxed homeschooling is I guess where we are? Some input is from me but I follow her lead as to where we go next.
Here in Florida regs are simple. We need an eval done by a certified teacher each year as one option for complying with the regs. My husband is a certified FL teacher so that is um -- pretty easy! But most hs'ers I know here just know of several unschooling-friendly evaluators who they use for a charge of about $30-50. Some use Clonlara but not any in our unschooling group...some of the Christian homeschoolers I know use Clonlara as an umbrella.