Tuesday Unschooling

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!

Tuesdays are usually library days and in the morning, we have a lot of free time. I checked on my seven year old son while he was happily playing in his room with his super hero guys and perfectly content counting backwards from 100.   He also collects eggs in the morning from our Project chick and records them on his research chart.  He keeps a tally throughout the day.  We got five eggs today from our five hens. 

After we had a laid back lunch, My seven year old son really wanted to go for a bike ride, so we took off on our journey as he rides independently and I pull the younger two in a bike trailer behind me.  While we circled around on the hilly road in our neighborhood, a huge owl whispered by as it flew over our heads like something from a Harry Potter movie.  I was sort of wondering why an owl was flying by in the afternoon since they are nocturnal, but it was such a beautiful, magical, and peaceful site that we never would have experienced if my son was not so enthusiastic about bike riding, so I did not worry about why we saw this, but was just in awe by the actual experience.  After a nice bike ride, the children wanted to go to the park and walk on trails in the woods.  My seven year old son is always the trail guide because I am terrible with directions.  He will look for clues to be sure that we are headed the right direction.  Sometimes I wonder if I learn more from him than he learns from me.  As we walked through the woods, a duck flew by and into one of the trees.  I have learned recently that wood ducks live in trees, hence the name.  I guess I never really thought about this until we moved into the wilderness four years ago and I saw a bunch of ducks in our trees.  Being in nature is so wonderful and relaxing and empowering.  I am so glad my children can spend a large part of their time embracing something so beautiful rather than being trapped inside a building for most of the day.  It is a magical experience for all of us.  I watched my youngest two children smell every flower they could find and the two year old threw himself into the shrubs to completely immerse himself into this natural experience and by the end of our hike, he was completely covered in burs.  We picked at least 50 of them off of his shirt afterward and we were trying to get ready to spend some time at the library before my daughter's ballet class started, so it slowed us down a bit, but was worth it.  Somehow we lost track of time while in the woods and instead of being gone for an hour, it was closer to three hours as we enjoyed this beautiful fall weather on this lovely carefree day.

We collected library books and videos to return to the library so that they could be replaced by new ones.   On the way to the library, my son worked hard on reading his comic book on his own.  He chose a new level 2 book at the library that is for kindergarten through 2nd grade readers and he worked on this at the library and as we drove to his sister's ballet class.  Reading has never been his strong point.  He is more of a science/math kid, but I have been encouraging him to work on his reading because it is so important.

My daughter was just precious in her ballet class.  We were able to watch her through the window as she followed the instructions and performed her ballet moves as she watched herself in the large mirror wall.  Seeing her happily learning from someone else's instruction is such a neat experience.

The final project was project movie.  My son tried to create a movie with his sister using her doll house, but was having some difficulty with the filming because his vision was that the dolls would be acting without seeing his sister and he in the movie, but he could not get the camera set up properly to get this effect.  So he created a new  adventure movie with a scientist (my son) and acrobat (my daughter) battling an orangutan bad guy aka my son's favorite stuffed animal.  My husband and I were included with this one as he filmed and I operated the bad guy.  I thought this film was a great way to finish their school day.  I love unschooling.  My son has been showing so much interest in film lately, that he may find a video recorder and acting lessons in his near future.  Followed by an intense and loud spontaneous child lead game of red light/green light, our unschooling day came to a very happy, enthusiastic end as our little students found their way into their beds for the night.  Happy Tuesday!