Wednesday 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!

My 7 year old son has been requesting that we set up a science center this week, so we put something together.  I found him a cheap microscope that is appropriate for a seven year old to play around with and my son really enjoys just mixing things together to see what will happen.  So we set up an old end table that has been just taking up space and it no longer in use as an end table and we put a little chair up to it and we have a science center.  Today my son decided to mix baking soda, lemon, lime, sugar and water to try to make soda pop and the result was something nasty tasting, but at least he tried.  Perhaps he will come up with something more useful next time.

One thing I love about unschooling is the spontaneity of it.  Life is generally best when there is some spontaneity and everything does not follow a rigid schedule.  Rigid schedules are for robots, spontaneity is for human beings.  Sunday I learned that there is a recorder class that meets weekly at a downtown church.  Monday, my seven year old son was a proud member of a recorder class.  This is something that required no planning and I actually did not know a recorder class existed until Sunday and I never thought a seven year old could be part of it until Monday.  So Monday consisted of a play day at the park, recorder class and soccer for my son.  He was so excited.  The recorder class actually gave him homework for the first time also and my son was so motivated, he completed his homework that night even though he does not have another class until next week.  I love seeing this type of enthusiasm coming from a child.  The reason I brought this up for the Wednesday blog is because after his somewhat unsuccessful science experiment, he practiced playing his recorder for about an hour.  He only knows 3 notes, but he practices them everyday.  I never would have been aware of this passion within him if I had not noticed that there was a recorder class that existed in our community through a Facebook comment and was spontaneous enough to include it in our already busy day.

After his recorder practice and lunch, another homeschool family decided to come over to pick up some eggs.  Our hens are currently producing six eggs a day, so one of the girls is popping out two of them.  I am quite impressed by these resourceful pets.  There are details about this project under the 'Project Chick' blog entry.  Since we are averaging about three dozen eggs a week at this point in our lives, I am happy to share the wealth with some of the nice people we know.  Along with sharing eggs, this also lead to a play date.  My son played with the six year old boy of the family, the eight year old girl played with the chickens and the 12 year old girl entertained my younger two children.  The 12 year old girl was inspired by the chickens and decided to draw some lovely chicken pictures to share with my younger two children and she let my four year old daughter keep one of them.  She felt so honored.  The play date went on for a couple hours and definitely seemed like a success.  Everyone seemed very happy about the experience.

My husband plays guitar at a Farmer's Market once a month and the older two children like to go help him set up for this.  I figure it's a good experience for them to witness how a professional musician can help provide for the family with his art and by helping with this, they are able to witness the magic of this.  They also like to visit the goats on the farm and eat homemade Amish sugar cookies.  Either way, it seems like a positive to me.  So my older two children went with their father to the farmer's market where he plays his guitar.

My two year old decided that it was art time after they left and decided to express himself through painting. He chose his colors and knows the names of the main colors already.  He seemed to have something in mind and created his masterpiece.  I then took him over to the Farmer's Market with the others, we stayed for a while, stopped and had some dinner afterward and when we arrived home, my four year old daughter said, "Look!  He painted a chicken!"  You know, after taking another look at it, I think she is right.  ;)  Apparently he also was inspired by the chickens today.

For some reason my seven year old son is very interested in wrestling now, so the night ended with a three way wrestling match between the children with a lot of laughter and excitement between them.  I love unschooling.  There is nothing negative about it.  It could very easily become the education of the future if enough families catch on and as a result, we will be blessed with a well educated, peaceful, polite, and healthy socialized society based on respect, helpfulness, bravery and open mindedness.  I am so glad my family discovered this lifestyle.