Thursday, April 3, 2014

Spring Break

I will be taking a break from the blog during the month of April.  I'll be back in May!  :)

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Unschooling Apes

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!


This is a short blog entry, but I just wanted to share a little information about how we explore a particular interests with a hands on approach, research, reading, math, and using film and art to explore the interest fully.


My 7 year old son loves apes.  He finds them so interesting, so much of our homeschooling is focused on the study of apes.  He loves seeing the apes at the zoo and it almost seems like the apes can tell how much he loves them.  When we went to the Toledo zoo last summer, the orangutan came over by my son like he wanted to share his food with him.  The gorilla looked him right in the face and seemed to have love in his eyes. This was a great hands on activity where he could see the apes up close and personal.  I know not everyone is supportive of zoos, but I feel like it is a great learning experience for children.  As long as the animals are treated well, I think it is wonderful that these places exist, otherwise the chances of children actually seeing these animals they read about would more than likely not happen and there could be confusion between facts and fiction because of this.  My son's ape fascination has been going on for a couple years now, so this could be an interest that leads to a passion or career in the future.


This past week, we grabbed a book about monkeys and apes at the library.  We are doing a lot of research on monkeys and apes right now.  I am learning way more about monkeys and apes than I ever thought anyone would want to know.  I allow my son to pick out a book of interest from the library on a weekly basis.  I encourage him to read, but I do not force it.  He is not a strong reader yet, but I want him to enjoy reading.  I made a mistake and pushed it too much in the beginning prior to learning about the unschooling approach and I got a lot of resistance because of that.  I have learned to let him learn as he is ready and this approach works so much better for us.


Then he wanted to get the movie King Kong.  We were able to get a 1933 version of King Kong and my son bought it with his own money.  So by getting this film, we are covering some history, learning about film making because it includes special features and of course, there's an ape in it.  What ape loving boy wouldn't love that?  He also used some math during this process with money by paying for the movie himself.  He got a $5 bill from his piggy bank.  The movie was $4.41 on Amazon, so I had him figure out what change I owed him.  He then was able to apply math and feel proud that he bought something on his own.  So he has been watching this old movie over and over.  My guess is the ape obsession may be here to stay.


We were able to cover the subjects of reading/literature, science and research, art and film, history and math simply by following his interest of apes.  This is the art of unschooling.