Bigfoot studies: A 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 just going to describe a typical day of our unschooling family and that day would be today.  My boys always wake up before my daughter, she needs her beauty rest.  I allow the children to wake up naturally, so we don't have any set schedule.  I like allowing the children to stay up late so that they can spend time with their Dad in the evening also.  However, my sons usually wake up pretty early around 8:30 or 9 so they can see their Dad before he goes to work and they were up fairly early today.  My oldest son, who is 7, played outside with a baseball for a while and my youngest son, who is 2, played with cars, but my oldest son was really anticipating my daughter waking up today to play with her.  I guess he had big plans for the day.


Once my 5 year old daughter got up and had her breakfast, she first had to draw pictures of My Little Ponies.  This was an extension from the day before when she created a My Little Pony quiz where she created questions for each family member to figure out which My Little Pony we were.  I got Rarity.  She created pictures of our ponies for everyone the night before, but I guess she needed to draw a large picture of Twilight Sparkle today to finish that project.  After she completed this task she had created for herself, she joined her brother as they set up a scene using the Scooby Doo characters, some prince and princesses, maybe a few super heroes and some scary fish.  They played for a while as baby boy watched Baby Einstein with the animals.  He really likes elephants.  At one point, I was cuddling him and thought he may go to sleep since he has a little cold, but he just looked at me and said, "I want to dress like a penguin".  That seemed reasonable, we put the penguin costume on him and he was a penguin for a good hour or so.  I collect costumes usually from garage sales or wherever I find them.  You never know when you may have the desire to be a penguin, super hero, monkey.  Those urges hit and you need to be prepared.


We had lunch and baby boy decided he wanted a bath since he now has the cold that started with his sister that we probably picked up at the zoo last week.  I had taken some 'me time' doing yoga and taking a shower and I guess the children were busy while I was doing this.  They had traced all of their footprints along with Pinky Pie's footprint and created a bigfoot footprint and measured them with a measuring tape and had them all labeled.  My oldest son is fascinated with bigfoot.  Even though skeptics do not feel bigfoot is real and there has been no solid evidence found indicating that he is, my son still believes in the yeti.  He is so excited about a mysterious ape man wandering around the world.  We got a book about bigfoot a couple weeks ago at the library and read about how people have made plaster cast of big foot footprints as proof and we learned that there is an actual bigfoot display at a museum in Idaho.  Crypto zoologists are the scientists who study bigfoot sightings among other sightings of strange creatures whose existence has yet to be proven.  So my son and daughter spent the afternoon creating a bigfoot museum in our front yard.  They even had professional attire for this important job and used Cub Scout patches for their official badges.  I guess none of the neighbors wanted to look at their museum though and then it seemed like it was going to start storming, so the museum closed.


I spent some time outside with baby boy looking at airplanes, helicopters and making wishes by blowing the seeds off of dandelions, then the children decided to come in and watch PBS kid shows for some inspiration.  This was followed by finishing the book about cryptids such as bigfoot and learning about The Lock Ness Monster and the Giant Squid.  My son took a Cryptozoologist quiz and it told him he should not have a career solving mysteries.  However, it did list careers he could have that could lead to searching for bigfoot, so you never know, maybe he will be the one to find this unknown species of ape in North America.  He has plans to go on a bigfoot hunt with his Dad this summer.  I think the younger children and I will pass on that one.


So as you can see, our day was quite diverse and most days are like this in our unschooling home.  The children seem to do math, science, art, reading, and history in their day to day life.  It's just in a more casual, child focussed manner than if they were to go to school or use a structured curriculum.  It is amazing how much I learn from this too.  I never knew a giant squid existed the size of that monster nor did I know the terms cryptids or cryptozoologist until we got the book about bigfoot.  I also did not know that the lock ness monster was spotted in Scotland and the first giant squid was found near Norway.  Nor was I aware that animals that are thought to have died off millions or billions of years ago may still exist today.  I love stay at home days.  They are the most productive days we have.  However, the out of the house days do help with socializing and being inspired by our community, but stay at home days are my favorite.  So do you believe in bigfoot?