Unschooling Our Way: Project November

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!

One interesting thing about unschooling is that by working towards providing a healthy learning environment for my children, I also become unschooled and find myself more open minded to learning and trying new things. At the beginning of November, we decided to incorporate my mother-n-law more in the unschooling process. She is very skilled with crocheting, knitting and hand crafts like this. She loves making blankets for the kids and has made us stockings and various other items. so one afternoon a month, we have plans to have time with Grandma. Well, in November, she had weaving kits for the kids to make hot pads and taught them to do this and for me, she taught me to crochet. I figured by learning, I could then pass the skill onto the children over time.

I figured that I would not crochet much at home and would just work on it more during our December lesson. However, I've always liked the look for homemade hats and thought that I would look up some videos on how to make hats to see if I could figure it out. Well, I definitely figured it out. I made myself a big slouchy hat and made some hats for the kids and one for my husband and then I went to a training for my career as a counselor and was wearing my hat. Another lady at the training asked about my hat and wanted me to make one for her and she said she would pay for it and then I showed a picture of my daughter's hat to another lady and she said she wanted me to make one for her daughter and agreed to pay for it. This was a 3 day training and I brought the hat I made for the little girl on the 3rd day and another lady wanted me to make the same hat for her granddaughter and paid me in advance, so somehow I started somewhat of a hat business without trying.

This turned into a lesson for the children on how to take a ball of yarn and turn it into something quite useful and I have my oldest son as my office manager where he keeps track of the profits and expenses in a notebook. So he can learn math skills while I satisfy my hat making obsession. The kids are not quite big enough to learn to crochet a hat, but my son did make a great crochet chain and is now taking a little break, but agreed to make some Christmas ornaments for his music teacher who is in charge of his recorder class.

This has sent my son into a math kick and he counted all of his money and trying to come up with ideas of things he can do or sell so he can start his own business. I love unschooling. :)