Friday, May 23, 2014

Thinking about saying goodbye to the blog

I was thinking about not doing this blog anymore, but instead, just maintaining my unschooling Facebook page.  However, if others really like my blog entries and would like to continue reading them on blogger, please let me know and I'll continue with the blog.  My Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/pages/Unschooling-Our-Way/542805365768918.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Unschooling a 2 year old

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!


Many people think that you do not really start the schooling process until your children are 3 or 4 for preschool or 5 or 6 for kindergarten, however, unschooling a 2 year old is a wonderful experience.  I have an intense, inquisitive little 2 year old man who absolutely loves to learn and once I started noticing that he was capable of doing many of the things that the older children do, he has been so much happier to be included in the learning process. I have three children, a 7 year old boy, 5 year old girl, and 2 year old boy, so today as I describe unschooling a 2 year old, I will mainly focus on my 2 year old, but also compare his learning to the older two when they were his age.  Since we had not started any formal schooling yet, since we initially started with a more structured approach with my oldest son, when he was 2 years old, he was also unschooled, it is just natural learning.


Reading/Language Arts:  My 2 year old loves books, he just loves them.  If he could sit and look through books or have me read to him all day long, he would.  Reading is also a great way for language development.  I probably read to my two year old at least 2 hours a day because he makes me do it.  He sits me down in a chair and grabs books and says, "read me this!"  He's really bossy. So I read him whatever books he wants to read.  Then after each book, he will read the book back to me. He has the ability to memorize a simple book after reading it one time, by simple, I mean three or four word sentences on each page.  So we read, read, read together.  When my daughter was 2, she was very similar and loved reading book after book after book.  My oldest son was different.  He did not like reading books very much and was difficult to understand at the age of two.  Instead, he was able to dress himself at a very young age, maybe a little over one.  So he would dress like super heroes mostly and run around the house acting like his favorite character, so I would read to him while he was doing back flips off the couch, rolling around on the floor, jumping on the bed, etc.  He just did not like sitting and reading like the other two.  He is more of a mover when he learns, otherwise, he zones out. 


Math:  Math is everywhere.  My daughter loves having her nails painted because she's a girly girl.  Well, my 2 year old is a girly boy, well, sorta, he is really a brute, but anyway, he also loves having his nails painted and he has to have his toe nails and finger nails painted.  When we do this, we count to 100.  He seems to be stuck counting 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2... and has been stuck at this for a very long time.  sometimes he will count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, if he is repeating after me, but then on his own, he goes back to 3, 2, 3, 2...  He may not be an overly quick math kid.  My oldest son could probably count to about 30 at the age of 2 and my daughter could probably count to 5 or 10.  We all have our strengths.  He loves helping me fetch the eggs from the chicken coop and we will count the eggs.  We count his cars a lot because he loves playing with cars and he also loves helping me bake cookies, muffin or cook dinner.  He is a great helper, so we do a lot of measuring with cooking.   Measuring is a great visual for learning math.  My two year old has always loved cars and trains and loves creating track sequences for the trains with his sister. So he is able to learn math visually through this.


Science:  My two year old boy loves science.  He loves going to the science museum and exploring hands on to see how everything works.  He loves one area where he can push a button and watch a ball float up into the air or push a button to watch the hot air balloon inflate and float to the ceiling.  He loved doing an activity at the Indianapolis Children's Museum where a vacuum would suck a ball into this machine and he would watch it go into the air.  He did this over and over and would probably still be doing it if we did not make him stop.  He is fascinated by movement and what makes things move.  He has always had a fascination with cars and trains.  He also loves animals.  He has always been a dog lover, but now he is starting to explore other animals.  He finds elephants fascinating.  He loves watching the Baby Einstein videos over and over and will often pick out books or videos with animals at the library.  He loves any animal, zoo animals, farm animals, it does not matter.  He loves imitating animal sounds also and act out their movements.  My daughter participates in science activities, but does not seem to have as much of a fascination with them as the boys do.  She does science activities now, at 5, but at two, she was more interesting in reading and being creative artistically.  My oldest son, who is 7 years old, is a science guy.  He loves every aspect of science, animals, and the human body.  At two, he was very interested in super heroes, their movements and behaviors and started having a fascination with monkeys and apes at that young age and this is still a passion of his.


History:  My two year old boy loves old cars and seeing old buggies and how things moved from the beginning of time.  He also loves looking at family pictures with his brother and sister.  This is recent history, but far in the past for someone who was born less than three years ago.  I will read history books to the older children and he will listen also, but since his main interest is cars, he really gets passionate when we are talking about the history of cars while he does not seem to be as interested in other history unless his family is involved directly.


Art:  My two year old loves art.  This is my daughter's strong subject.  She loves to paint, so since she wants to paint a lot, so does my two year old son and he is very amazing at expressing himself through painting and art.  He will often take objects and incorporate them into his art, such as nature or magnetic letters.  It does not matter, he just loves creating.  He also likes to draw and loves trying to draw cars, mummies, and penguins.  He loves combining colors and started learning his colors when he was one years old.  We always talks about the colors of his cars and he will name colors of cars as we are driving around.  We are always aware of all of the colors of cars that surround us when my two year old is with us.  My daughter and older son also loved art at two, but may not have been as advanced with their knowledge of colors at this age as my youngest son.  He is just fascinated by colors, especially when a car is involved.


Music:  My 2 year old boy loves music.  He loves making up songs about his cars and will mimic show tunes or any music he hears.  He can really belt out his songs and sings very on-tune for a two year old.  He is a great song writer.  We are a musical family.  I do a lot of singing while my husband plays guitar and drums and we also have a piano.  My 2 year old son is very drawn to the drums and can keep a beat well at his young age.  My daughter has always loved singing, dancing and piano while my oldest son would try to play guitar when he was two to imitate his father and sing.  I think my younger two may have more of the music gene than my oldest son, but I guess we will find this out with time.


As you can see, a two year old can very enthusiastically participate in the unschooling process.  He is developing a love for learning at his young age and I try to encourage him by reading to him as much as he wants, letting him write in my journal, count with him and let him help whenever he wants to help with preparing food.  He makes learning seem like so much fun.  He is very inspirational with his enthusiasm.  I love two year olds.  So far, it is one of my favorite ages.  So if you have a little one, there is no limit on when you can start unschooling them.  Life is learning.





Sunday, May 18, 2014

Make it Simple

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!


I am basically going into my third year of unschooling and I have learned a lot through this process.  I still have some of the ideas that the kids need to socialize with children their own age and that there needs to be somewhat of a routine or schedule with our lives.  That does make sense to live in this manner, but now I am starting to want to have more spontaneity, such as, if the children say they want to go to a museum an hour or two away from home for the day, we can just up and go without always having schedule conflicts.  This year, we had recorder Monday once a week, science Tuesday once a month, ballet Wednesday once a week, art and hockey Thursday one a week and nature  Friday once a month.  So we did not necessarily always have something scheduled every day of the week, but occasionally the once a month activities would land on the same week and then we would.  I felt like we were committing to too many activities and did not have enough down time.


My plan is to only do one out of the house day weekly and this will be Thursday.  My daughter was feeling overwhelmed with her Wednesday ballet class.  It is a shame because the teacher is so nice and also homeschools.  I was very happy with the program, but it seemed to be a little too much for my daughter.  It was the peers that were the problem, not the class itself. So I am not completely ruling out ballet, but we are going to take a bit of a break from it.  My son also enjoyed his Monday recorder class for a while, but then was pretty overwhelmed by going every week. I think it has been a positive experience for him, but I would prefer not to continue with it simply because it is another thing on the schedule and it is on Monday rather than Thursday.  So I felt recorder class was very positive and a great introduction for reading music, but now we are ready to move on to something new.


My plan for this homeschool year is hockey on Thursday nights and art classes when they start up in the fall that will also be on Thursday and that's all for the weekly activities.  The children will then attend science class once a month and nature class once a month.  These will be the only scheduled activities unless there are other things for Thursday.  This will leave room for my son to audition for plays, go on field trips, do spontaneous road trips and just have a more relaxed schedule.  I think it will work much better.  If other activities or lessons pop up, I will just make sure everything is on Thursday.  We will have one regular out of the house day a week rather than three.


I am still learning that I can say 'no' and my children do not have to be in every activity I can find.  I am glad I discovered this now.  Baby boy is happy playing hockey with his older brother and there are other little girls the age of my daughter that go to hockey night and my daughter is happy doing her ballet freely around the house and not going to a class at this time.  So I think we have a good plan and I hope I feel like we are headed in the right direction with this plan.  It is a learning process for everyone involved.  The children love 'stay at home' days and I think having four a week sometimes will really help all of us.  So I have learned to say 'no' and relax with this.  We do not need to take on the world.  We are just unschooling, not creating mania.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Unschooling Saturday

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!


Children learn daily, so yes, I do consider Saturday a school day.  I only am required to keep track of 180 days per year in our state, but in our unschooling home, our children go to school 365 days a year.  Each day is a learning experience.  They are either learning how to manage a home, how to do math, how things were long ago, how to read, how to spell, how to talk, how things work, how to measure, how to count money, how to add money, nutrition, the list is endless.  They learn daily.  Life is learning.


It is May, the weather is supposed to be better, so today was garage sale day.  I have my oldest son, who is 7, my daughter, who is 5 and baby boy who is, 2.  However, the only one who loves going to garage sales is my oldest son.  My daughter just is not a shopper.  Her idea of shopping is go to a store, get what she wants, leave.  Baby boy is just crazy sometimes and my oldest son and I had a shopping addiction prior to the other two coming along and I trained him well.  He loves the hunt and finding that special item.  He loves the magic of going to a garage sale, so he was my helper today.  We bundled up on this not so warm May day and hit some garage sales.  I usually collect mostly books at garage sales, but often we will find other useful items as well.  My son is interested in the sports, hockey and golf at the moment and he loves anything about science, spooky things and has some interests in history and is really working on spelling and learning to read right now.  My daughter loves ballet, being creative and really likes My Little Pony.  Baby boy loves cars, trains, trucks and is starting to have a lot of interest in animals.  He has always been a dog lover, but now is starting to expand his repertoire with his love for animals.   Our best finds for the day were, drum roll, a goalie mask, a golf club, a small handheld dictionary, history books, a book about machines, a My Little Pony book and coloring book, a ballet video and foot position mat, and a book about farm animals and zoo animals, among a few other items.  It was a good garage sale day. 


After our garage sale adventure, I took my son to a local natural food co-op to pick up some food items.  He enjoys helping me at the store and has a good understanding of the food groups, organic versus non-organic and overall health and nutrition.  I try to always be open and honest with my son and share any information I have about anything.  I have been learning a lot about organic and natural foods, cleaners and just basically living a healthier lifestyle within the last couple years and have been sharing this knowledge with my children.  I have learned that there are natural antibodies in raw honey that fight off bacteria and infection, so we always make sure that we have raw honey.  I've also been learning that by buying mostly raw items, we can get more nutrients from the items and avoid preservatives and unhealthy additives, so I get fresh fruits and vegetables and raw, organic nuts and honey.  I also get organic milk and juices and natural meats without any artificial additives.  As we shopped, we discussed what we were buying and why we were buying it. We do go out to eat and get candy from time to time and drink pop, but for the most part, we try to mainly ingest raw and organic items.


Once we got home, the children were all excited about the new garage sale items.  I got several simple books to read with my 2 year old son, so we started with those.  He is now getting to the point where he likes to read the books after I read them to him and he will memorize the simple books after I read them one time.  He is very enthusiastic about his reading too.  He loves books.  He learned the names of some new animals today through his new animal books and was very excited about this.  My oldest son's favorite find was a book about spooky tricks, so he started reading through his book and creating spooky tricks to share with the rest of us.  He then started looking through a book about haunted castles that we found.  He also started looking up words in his new dictionary and was excited about doing this and learning the meanings of certain words.  My daughter watched her ballet video and then danced around the house in a tutu for the rest of the evening.  Then we read the new My Little Pony book and after I read it, my daughter read her memorized version of the book to me. This was a very productive unschooling day.


Garage sale days are very fun and inspiring homeschool day for the children.  Simple things, like old used books can be so inspirational by bringing something new into their lives and maybe lighting a spark that was starting to dull a bit.  Now they are all very motivated to learn new things.  I am predicting a very productive summer of learning this year. Saturdays can be the best unschooling day of the week.  Everyone should do Saturday school.  :)

Monday, May 12, 2014

Bigfoot studies: A Day in the Life of an Unschooler

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!


Today I am just going to describe a typical day of our unschooling family and that day would be today.  My boys always wake up before my daughter, she needs her beauty rest.  I allow the children to wake up naturally, so we don't have any set schedule.  I like allowing the children to stay up late so that they can spend time with their Dad in the evening also.  However, my sons usually wake up pretty early around 8:30 or 9 so they can see their Dad before he goes to work and they were up fairly early today.  My oldest son, who is 7, played outside with a baseball for a while and my youngest son, who is 2, played with cars, but my oldest son was really anticipating my daughter waking up today to play with her.  I guess he had big plans for the day.


Once my 5 year old daughter got up and had her breakfast, she first had to draw pictures of My Little Ponies.  This was an extension from the day before when she created a My Little Pony quiz where she created questions for each family member to figure out which My Little Pony we were.  I got Rarity.  She created pictures of our ponies for everyone the night before, but I guess she needed to draw a large picture of Twilight Sparkle today to finish that project.  After she completed this task she had created for herself, she joined her brother as they set up a scene using the Scooby Doo characters, some prince and princesses, maybe a few super heroes and some scary fish.  They played for a while as baby boy watched Baby Einstein with the animals.  He really likes elephants.  At one point, I was cuddling him and thought he may go to sleep since he has a little cold, but he just looked at me and said, "I want to dress like a penguin".  That seemed reasonable, we put the penguin costume on him and he was a penguin for a good hour or so.  I collect costumes usually from garage sales or wherever I find them.  You never know when you may have the desire to be a penguin, super hero, monkey.  Those urges hit and you need to be prepared.


We had lunch and baby boy decided he wanted a bath since he now has the cold that started with his sister that we probably picked up at the zoo last week.  I had taken some 'me time' doing yoga and taking a shower and I guess the children were busy while I was doing this.  They had traced all of their footprints along with Pinky Pie's footprint and created a bigfoot footprint and measured them with a measuring tape and had them all labeled.  My oldest son is fascinated with bigfoot.  Even though skeptics do not feel bigfoot is real and there has been no solid evidence found indicating that he is, my son still believes in the yeti.  He is so excited about a mysterious ape man wandering around the world.  We got a book about bigfoot a couple weeks ago at the library and read about how people have made plaster cast of big foot footprints as proof and we learned that there is an actual bigfoot display at a museum in Idaho.  Crypto zoologists are the scientists who study bigfoot sightings among other sightings of strange creatures whose existence has yet to be proven.  So my son and daughter spent the afternoon creating a bigfoot museum in our front yard.  They even had professional attire for this important job and used Cub Scout patches for their official badges.  I guess none of the neighbors wanted to look at their museum though and then it seemed like it was going to start storming, so the museum closed.


I spent some time outside with baby boy looking at airplanes, helicopters and making wishes by blowing the seeds off of dandelions, then the children decided to come in and watch PBS kid shows for some inspiration.  This was followed by finishing the book about cryptids such as bigfoot and learning about The Lock Ness Monster and the Giant Squid.  My son took a Cryptozoologist quiz and it told him he should not have a career solving mysteries.  However, it did list careers he could have that could lead to searching for bigfoot, so you never know, maybe he will be the one to find this unknown species of ape in North America.  He has plans to go on a bigfoot hunt with his Dad this summer.  I think the younger children and I will pass on that one.


So as you can see, our day was quite diverse and most days are like this in our unschooling home.  The children seem to do math, science, art, reading, and history in their day to day life.  It's just in a more casual, child focussed manner than if they were to go to school or use a structured curriculum.  It is amazing how much I learn from this too.  I never knew a giant squid existed the size of that monster nor did I know the terms cryptids or cryptozoologist until we got the book about bigfoot.  I also did not know that the lock ness monster was spotted in Scotland and the first giant squid was found near Norway.  Nor was I aware that animals that are thought to have died off millions or billions of years ago may still exist today.  I love stay at home days.  They are the most productive days we have.  However, the out of the house days do help with socializing and being inspired by our community, but stay at home days are my favorite.  So do you believe in bigfoot?



Saturday, May 10, 2014

Freedom

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!


We are fairly new in the homeschooling journey.  We started thinking about doing it when my oldest son was 4 years old and started unschooling when he was 5 1/2 years old.  He will soon be 8, so this is about our 4th year for starting a mindset for homeschooling and 2 1/2 for practicing unschooling.  As my husband and I adapt to this lifestyle, we start thinking outside of the box for our own well-being too.  My husband currently works a full time job that includes a moderate income to pay for the basics and health insurance  while I mainly stay home with the kids and work at my counseling private practice very part-time in the evening up to 6 hours a week.  This is a very traditional way to live and does not really fit well with the unschooling philosophy of family time and freedom in my opinion.  I wonder if other unschooling families also run into this dilemma if their lives are more traditional with societal norms so to speak.  It brings about a level of frustration as we are teaching the children about having freedom to make their own decisions and learn what inspires them, but we are in situations where we really are not living out our full potential and somewhat lacking inspiration.


I went to school for a bunch of years when I was younger to obtain my counseling degree and licensure and always wanted to have my own counseling private practice.  My husband went to school for a lot of years too to obtain a master's degree to be a college professor and researcher of anthropology, but has no desire to use the degree, but rather apply it towards being a professional musician.  So the trick is figuring out how to model a life of freedom where we are living out our dreams so that we can set good examples for the children to do the same.  We also would like to incorporate travel as part of the homeschooling journey for education related to geography, history, anthropology, math, among other subjects, so that the subjects can be more hands on and less traditional bookwork.


This is a process and I am going to share our plan and this may help inspire other unschooling families to live a life that models what they want to teach their children in our society of schedules, 40 hour a week jobs, and bills.  The following is our plan and hopefully it can inspire you to apply it to your own life at some level as well if you feel the same way.


1.  First, pay off all of our major bills including our cars and house.  This can be done by careful planning and living cheap.  We do not pay for TV, so our only bills aside from some debt related to credit cards and student loans are our house and one car and utilities, taxes, insurance, things that we have to have along with Internet and phone which are business expenses.  I am going through items at our house regularly and donating or selling, so it helps with not wanting to spend as much money if we are constantly getting rid of things.  I really like the minimalist rationale, but have not quite achieved it yet.  The minimalist philosophy parallels with a life of freedom.  This is approximately a five year plan for us, although, I would like to start traveling in 2 years, so perhaps a miracle will happen and we can do this more quickly.  Freedom and teaching the children to live a free life is important to us.  We have also made attempts to reduce spending on food by obtaining chickens and my husband has started a fruit and vegetable garden in our front yard.  I have learned to crochet and have made a lot of hats and scarves.  I also buy many of the children's clothes second hand or have friends who will often give us 2nd hand clothes, so this reduces clothing spending for our growing children.  I have a consignment account at a local consigner shop where I take clothes, shoes and toys and then have a credit to make purchases there.  Financial freedom is a great place to start and the best way to do this is to come up with a good plan to pay off bills by starting with the smallest and working your way up and reduce spending on unnecessary items in your life.




2.  The second step to our plan is for me to work more as a counselor.  I have arranged to only work three days a week and since counseling is somewhat seasonal where I am busiest in the spring and fall, that will leave flexibility with travel time in the summer and winter.  Since my availability is so limited, I have not advertised up to this point and simply get referrals through word of mouth and insurance companies and can see up to 6 people per week.  However, once the children can spend some time at home alone or if my husband's schedule could be altered slightly, I would be able to have a full time income with part-time hours and have low overhead for my business since my expenses are small.  I simply have to maintain my state licensure requirements, have a phone, Internet, insurance and an office space, which I already have in place.  If you do not have an advance degree, it is still possible to figure out a part-time career for yourself to help with a free lifestyle.  I have known mother's who started up photography, craft or cleaning businesses with no advanced schooling.  Everyone has strengths and finding strengths that will help bring in a fairly regular income into your home would help with finding your freedom in an unschooling home.


3. The third step is for my husband to build up his music career.  He is a song writer, guitarist and drummer.  This is a hobby at this time that he fits into his schedule while working a 40 hour/week job and being a family man, so he has many challenges with obtaining his goal.  He is starting small.  Last summer he played at a local farmer's market at least once a month and is scheduled to play this summer also.  He has entered to compete in a finger style guitar competition in July.  He has a MacBook Pro and is teaching himself how to record his work and has experimented with his guitar and electronic drums to do this.  I have been helping him by contacting places where I think he could be hired to play his guitar.  I know not everyone has talent, but there are many options.  I know some people who have seasonal landscaping companies, tree business or roofing companies.  Or if you or your husband are one with a career related advance degree, being a consultant or doing a job independently will often lead to more possibilities, it is best to just start small and be positive.


These are just steps we have in mind for a free lifestyle where I work as a counselor for about 5 to 8 hours three days a week during the spring and fall and my husband works as a freelance musician where he is able to schedule gigs as we travel to help with funding.  This is our five years plan to prepare for a life of freedom to help inspire and be healthy role models for our unschooled children.  Life is about following your dreams, sticking with your plan to do this, and feeling peaceful and free about life.  I figure the best way to set positive examples for our children is to live the life we are trying to help them create for themselves.  The goal of unschooling in our home is learning to live a life of happiness, contentment and freedom while being inspired and living to our fullest potential.  I am just hoping we can find others doing the same once we reach our lifestyle goal with our new unschooling and traveling mindset.  If you have made positive changes with financial freedom and lifestyle changes, feel free to share ideas.  I would love to learn about them.



Thursday, May 8, 2014

A spring week in the life of an unschooler

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!


We had a very long, cold winter this year and spring is normally a time when people start coming out of hibernation, but this year because of the extreme winter, it almost feels like we were all traumatized in some way after being cooped up so long inside our homes while at times being snowed in and have outdoor temperatures that were subzero and unsafe.  I still feel like I am in some type of post winter daze, but I still do spring type activities by getting outside and staying active with the children.


Normally, I try to have two stay at home days per week where we just relax and enjoy our home environment, but this week was a busy out of the house week and we had something scheduled daily.  Monday starts out our week with recorder class.  My oldest son started playing the recorder in the fall with a recorder orchestra.  He plays soprano recorder and they also have alto and bass recorders in their little orchestra of 6 to 12 year olds.  The contra bass is not played by any of the younger kids, but it is this giant wood contraption that stands about six feet tall.  I never knew this many types of recorders existed until my son joined the class in October.  My son was feeling very discouraged and uninspired with recorder class.  There is a concert this week and I told him that since he did not feel it was for him, he was welcome to quit after that concert.  Then after I told him that, the teacher gave him his own professional soprano recorder.  My son was so excited that he has practiced it several hours a day since he received it.  Apparently he just needed a new incentive to keep his interest and now he no longer feels like he wants to quit recorder class and has a lot of enthusiasm about sticking with it for a while longer.  This started a very musical week for him as he practiced his new recorder daily.


The children attend science classes at a local science museum once a month and Tuesday of this week was science day.  My 7 year old son and 5 year old daughter attend these classes together.  The classes are divided by age group  5-8 year olds are grouped together, 9-12 year olds and 13-16 year olds.  The classes include a half hour demonstration and a hands on lab that usually takes about a hour and then they have some free time to explore the museum and spend time with their friends.  The program goes from 1:30 to 4 p.m.  This week they learned about germs, how they spread and the dangers of cigarette smoke on the body and the environment.  So the topic this time around was focused on health, but the topics vary each month and cover biology, chemistry, robotics, math, earth science, among others.  The classes usually include about 50 children, so on these days, the children learn about science and also have the opportunity to socialize with their friends.  After participating in these science classes, my daughter well go to the class and will share things she learned or just talk about spending time with her friend and then that will satisfy her science needs for the month.  My oldest son, loves science.  He will fully participate in the class, answer most of the questions and talk about what is discussed and often be inspired to create his own experiments throughout the month based on what was introduced during the class.  He loves science days. 


Wednesday was ballet day.  I treat the children to lunch on ballet day and today they chose a pizza franchise.  Eating lunch at a restaurant with three young children is not as challenging as some may think.  They are able to learn social etiquette and how to behave in a public restaurant and my oldest son, who is 7 years old, has enough confidence to give our order to the server. So this has been part of ballet day since we started the spring, midday session. My daughter, who is now five years old, started ballet last summer with Cinderella camp when she was four years old and has attended the four year old ballet classes during the fall, winter and spring sessions.  She seems to learn a lot during her ballet classes, loves the teacher and enjoys making new friends in her class.  This has been a wonderful introduction to ballet for her.  While she does the class, I give the boys the option of waiting in the car and bringing reading material or games to play or just waiting in the building where they can watch their sister through the window and socialize with the other families.  Lately, they have been choosing to stay in the building and seem to be content with this choice.  Since it is spring and the weather is finally nice, we scheduled a park day after ballet and will continue to do this during spring, summer and fall as long as the weather cooperates.  Today we met three other families at the park and the children had a couple hours of free play with their friends.  My daughter works on her ballet skills and all of the children have the opportunity to work on social skills and build friendships on Wednesdays.


Thursdays are hockey days.  My son had been requesting to play floor hockey for months, but I was having a challenge with finding a place for him to do this since he did not want to play ice hockey, which is more readily available in our community.  Then I came across a local non-for-profit business where they play floor hockey on a weekly basis and it is not competitive, but rather fun and always ends with a positive message and a bible verse since this is considered a ministry.  We were doing art class on Thursdays too at one of the local libraries, but it is over until September, so we had the day free until hockey time.  My oldest son thought it would be a wonderful day to go to the zoo.  They watched the old King Kong movie from the 1930s with their Dad in the morning, so my oldest son was in the mood to see some great apes and our local zoo has three orangutans.  My five year old daughter wanted to go to the zoo to swim.  They have a small pool in one section of the zoo where young children can play.  Baby boy likes looking at the animals and loves the train.  So we enthusiastically went to the zoo to spend some time before the weekly hockey class.  My oldest son, my science guy, loves animals, especially great apes.  So our first stop is always the Indonesian area where he enjoys walking through the rain forest exhibit and having the opportunity to see the Orangutans.  Since my daughter mainly wants to swim, we went to stop number two at the Australian area where the little pool is so she could splash around in the water.  These adventures are also learning experiences for me and what I learned today is that we will arrange for pool days for my daughter and no longer swim at the zoo.  My daughter seemed to enjoy it for the most part, but cried a couple times when she was splashed in the face and then the boys decided to participate, but were not completely prepared with the right clothing attire, but I figured it was hot and they would probably dry off, so I thought I would go with the flow, which worked out fine with my oldest son, but not so much with baby boy.  Of course he was determined to leave his shirt on and I got his shorts off of him, but they got back on him at some point and ended up wet and of course they were jean shorts.  That was fun while it lasted, but when it came to an end, it was complete misery for baby boy and anyone in his path.  Since we had hockey afterward and mad boy refused to wear his wet shirt, my only option was to get a dry shirt from the gift shop where fairness kicked in and because a dry shirt was in order, so was a mermaid doll and a chimpanzee mask.  This led to some recovery from the zoo chaos, we grabbed some food and headed to hockey where baby boy's smile returned and the boys had a great time playing hockey while my daughter was able to admire her new mermaid and I started planning in my head how we would fit pool days into our schedule for her new swimming interests that sounds like great fun for me even if it is just her and I while the boys visit a friend.  However, swim time at the zoo will no longer be an option with this unschooling family.  :)


Tomorrow, Friday, will include nature class that meets once a month where my son and daughter will attend and then the spring recorder concert for my oldest son in the evening.  This is a typical unschooling week for us.  We often have activities that are scheduled weekly and monthly that seem to define our routine or schedule and the rest is free for self-directed learning.  I actually enjoy the weeks when we are home more because that is when more spontaneity occurs in relation to learning, but weeks like this are nice too because they can bring the children inspiration for the slower days.  Life is all about having a variety of experiences and exploring interests and finding who we are as individuals and in relation to others and unschooling is a great start for this life journey as it has the freedom for self-exploration and learning from our environment, community and families.  I hope you enjoyed reading about our week.