Stella
2-23-12, 11:43am
I'd love to hear other people's unschooling experiences. I am now in my third trimester and we have so many things going on right now that adding formal schooling seems a bit overwhelming. The more I think about it, the more I think unschooling may be the way to go for the rest of the year.
My older kids are in first and second grade and totally proficient (or ahead) for their age range at reading, writing and math. My oldest, Cheyenne, is really into math and is always doing math stuff on her own, unsolicited. My second kid, Isabella, is a total bookworm. We've covered a wide range of topics this year for science, history and geography including travels to 15 states.
I have strict limits on TV and we have no videogame system or anything like that, so pretty much everything they do in a day has some kind of learning value.
They love to cook, build things, read books, write stories, write e-mails, draw, play outside, teach their little siblings things and indulge their many curiosities.
For example, they wanted to know about babies and how they grow in the womb and are born so they (supervised) looked up videos on YouTube and found some from babycenter.com that showed the growth of a baby from fertilization to birth in a totally child-friendly way.
Cheyenne wants to learn more about Japan so she has struck up a friendship with a retired couple in the neighborhood. The husband is from Japan and the wife is from France. The husband was a perfumer from Aveda, which has sparked an interest in that. She also made friends with a mom in the neighborhood with a biology degree who has been showing her stuff from her anatomy books and answering her questions.
Isabella wants to learn to cook, so she shadows me in the kitchen. Yesterday she helped me make laundry soap and we talked about how we shred the soap because the more surface area that is exposed to the heat, the faster it will melt. We shredded some soap with a cheese grater and some with a microplane grater.
Isabella is also the one who really likes to read books to the younger kids. She made them "sight word" cards too, and is trying to teach them. She decided to use words they use frequently, like diaper and fun. :) In the process she had to find out how to spell some words and she got writing practice by writing it all down on notecards for them.
The girls are planning some gardening for the summer too, making lists of things they want to grow, narrowing the list down by what we could reasonably grow and finding the best varieties for our space and climate. They were inspired when we visited the Dervaes' of Path to Freedom on our trip to California and want to grow food plants. They are also going to build some planter boxes with their Dad and they looked up books on garden crafts at the library. They want to make some mosaic garden art and a few other decorative crafts. I'm involving them in the budgeting of the project too.
Maybe I just need reassurance that letting go of formal "school" is OK for a while. It just seems silly, as variable as my energy is these days, to force myself to work on anything formal when there is so much going on in our regular life.
My older kids are in first and second grade and totally proficient (or ahead) for their age range at reading, writing and math. My oldest, Cheyenne, is really into math and is always doing math stuff on her own, unsolicited. My second kid, Isabella, is a total bookworm. We've covered a wide range of topics this year for science, history and geography including travels to 15 states.
I have strict limits on TV and we have no videogame system or anything like that, so pretty much everything they do in a day has some kind of learning value.
They love to cook, build things, read books, write stories, write e-mails, draw, play outside, teach their little siblings things and indulge their many curiosities.
For example, they wanted to know about babies and how they grow in the womb and are born so they (supervised) looked up videos on YouTube and found some from babycenter.com that showed the growth of a baby from fertilization to birth in a totally child-friendly way.
Cheyenne wants to learn more about Japan so she has struck up a friendship with a retired couple in the neighborhood. The husband is from Japan and the wife is from France. The husband was a perfumer from Aveda, which has sparked an interest in that. She also made friends with a mom in the neighborhood with a biology degree who has been showing her stuff from her anatomy books and answering her questions.
Isabella wants to learn to cook, so she shadows me in the kitchen. Yesterday she helped me make laundry soap and we talked about how we shred the soap because the more surface area that is exposed to the heat, the faster it will melt. We shredded some soap with a cheese grater and some with a microplane grater.
Isabella is also the one who really likes to read books to the younger kids. She made them "sight word" cards too, and is trying to teach them. She decided to use words they use frequently, like diaper and fun. :) In the process she had to find out how to spell some words and she got writing practice by writing it all down on notecards for them.
The girls are planning some gardening for the summer too, making lists of things they want to grow, narrowing the list down by what we could reasonably grow and finding the best varieties for our space and climate. They were inspired when we visited the Dervaes' of Path to Freedom on our trip to California and want to grow food plants. They are also going to build some planter boxes with their Dad and they looked up books on garden crafts at the library. They want to make some mosaic garden art and a few other decorative crafts. I'm involving them in the budgeting of the project too.
Maybe I just need reassurance that letting go of formal "school" is OK for a while. It just seems silly, as variable as my energy is these days, to force myself to work on anything formal when there is so much going on in our regular life.