Oh no! Eggs everywhere! Another 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 going to describe a typical school day for us.  My 7 year old son got up bright and early today, went outside with his Spiderman Easter basket and collected one egg.  He then put it in the egg carton in the refrigerator and wrote it on his chart and told us all about what he did.  I was proud of him and how responsible he was and did not think to go check the chicken coop.  He likes to close the door to the nesting box when he gets the eggs to be sure the chickens won't escape.  After he got the egg, he was so excited, I guess he forgot to open the door again, so the chickens could not get to their nesting box.  Therefore, there were 3 eggs under the nesting box and this is something we were not prepared for.  We have no way to get to them unless we climb into the chicken coop.  My husband was able to get one with a broom and the other two by reaching in through the side of the chicken wire, but this isn't going to work, so we need to brainstorm about a more efficient system for this type of issue.  The chickens have created 2 beds under the nesting box, which is really against our rules, but chickens seem to make their own rules.  There always seems to be a learning experience involved with everything lately.  I'm not sure what the solution for this issue is quite yet, but August 23rd is when a chicken laid our first egg from Project Chick and we got 4 eggs today.  Yay!

About a week ago, I think my son felt a little left out because so many of his friends were going back to school and we were seeing a lot of first day of school pictures and he has never had this experience, so we had a talk.  I asked him what it was that he feels he may be missing out on by not going to school.  He said that he wants to be able to ride a bus without a seatbelt and he wants to write more.  I can't do anything about the bus right now, but I told my son he could write whenever and whatever he wants, but he still did not seem happy.  I discussed this with my husband and he said that he had some ideas, so I just encouraged him to go for it.  Since my son asked for writing assignments, my husband gave him a writing assignment today to write out his numbers 1-10 in English and in Indonesian.  My husband has been learning Indonesian with my son on a weekly basis through SEAsite on NIU's website.  My son expressed an interest in learning Indonesian when he learned that this is where Orangutans' natural habitat is and that they are endangered due to their habitat being destroyed.  We learned together that there is an Orangutan Rescue Center in Indonesia, so my son decided that he wanted to learn the language so it would help with communication when he went there to help rescue the Orangutans.  So this was his assignment for today.   Later on, I asked my son if he still wants to go to public school and he said no.  So I think we are all happy with the decision now.

Once he finished his assignment, the children did some free play for a while and then my 7 year old son and 4 year old daughter started playing a game of Clue, and then we went for a bike ride and went to our neighborhood park.  My son is so fast now.  We removed the training wheels a few weeks ago and ever since then, he has just taken off and I can barely keep up with him as I'm dragging a bike trailer behind me with the younger two bobbing along.  My son did have a slight wipe out towards the end of our outing at the park, so he laid low for a while once we got back from our bike ride.

Once we got home from the bike ride, my 4 year old daughter started getting into creative mode and she had some pieces of paper and wanted to make a paper airplane.  I never can remember how to do this, so I looked it up on Google and found a great description for making paper airplanes and we made The Stealth and The Dart.  That must not have satisfied her creative spirit, so she told me it was time to paint.  I took our art easel out on our back patio and dumped out their favorite colors on a plate, which was basically all of the colors, and my famous painters created their masterpieces.  My daughter has always seemed to have a natural talent for painting where she will do very colorful, elaborate paintings with interesting designs.  Well, today was her little 2 year old brother's first time to paint, so most of the colors were mixed to create this brownish purple color.  She didn't have quite as many colors to work with as usual because of this.  They both created the most amazing paintings and they will look lovely on our art wall in our art and music room where I have framed the kids paintings and hung them on our white wall.  It creates a very colorful wall for us.  The kids name their paintings and I write their names and ages with the title on a tag on the painting.  After paint time, bath time was necessary, so that was our day of unschooling coming to a nice clean ending. 

We boiled up 4 eggs today.  Eggs seem to be a big part of our diet now. They are so good when they are fresh. Although, I can see a future blog possibly being revamp chicken coop?