Unschooling Saturday

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!


Children learn daily, so yes, I do consider Saturday a school day.  I only am required to keep track of 180 days per year in our state, but in our unschooling home, our children go to school 365 days a year.  Each day is a learning experience.  They are either learning how to manage a home, how to do math, how things were long ago, how to read, how to spell, how to talk, how things work, how to measure, how to count money, how to add money, nutrition, the list is endless.  They learn daily.  Life is learning.


It is May, the weather is supposed to be better, so today was garage sale day.  I have my oldest son, who is 7, my daughter, who is 5 and baby boy who is, 2.  However, the only one who loves going to garage sales is my oldest son.  My daughter just is not a shopper.  Her idea of shopping is go to a store, get what she wants, leave.  Baby boy is just crazy sometimes and my oldest son and I had a shopping addiction prior to the other two coming along and I trained him well.  He loves the hunt and finding that special item.  He loves the magic of going to a garage sale, so he was my helper today.  We bundled up on this not so warm May day and hit some garage sales.  I usually collect mostly books at garage sales, but often we will find other useful items as well.  My son is interested in the sports, hockey and golf at the moment and he loves anything about science, spooky things and has some interests in history and is really working on spelling and learning to read right now.  My daughter loves ballet, being creative and really likes My Little Pony.  Baby boy loves cars, trains, trucks and is starting to have a lot of interest in animals.  He has always been a dog lover, but now is starting to expand his repertoire with his love for animals.   Our best finds for the day were, drum roll, a goalie mask, a golf club, a small handheld dictionary, history books, a book about machines, a My Little Pony book and coloring book, a ballet video and foot position mat, and a book about farm animals and zoo animals, among a few other items.  It was a good garage sale day. 


After our garage sale adventure, I took my son to a local natural food co-op to pick up some food items.  He enjoys helping me at the store and has a good understanding of the food groups, organic versus non-organic and overall health and nutrition.  I try to always be open and honest with my son and share any information I have about anything.  I have been learning a lot about organic and natural foods, cleaners and just basically living a healthier lifestyle within the last couple years and have been sharing this knowledge with my children.  I have learned that there are natural antibodies in raw honey that fight off bacteria and infection, so we always make sure that we have raw honey.  I've also been learning that by buying mostly raw items, we can get more nutrients from the items and avoid preservatives and unhealthy additives, so I get fresh fruits and vegetables and raw, organic nuts and honey.  I also get organic milk and juices and natural meats without any artificial additives.  As we shopped, we discussed what we were buying and why we were buying it. We do go out to eat and get candy from time to time and drink pop, but for the most part, we try to mainly ingest raw and organic items.


Once we got home, the children were all excited about the new garage sale items.  I got several simple books to read with my 2 year old son, so we started with those.  He is now getting to the point where he likes to read the books after I read them to him and he will memorize the simple books after I read them one time.  He is very enthusiastic about his reading too.  He loves books.  He learned the names of some new animals today through his new animal books and was very excited about this.  My oldest son's favorite find was a book about spooky tricks, so he started reading through his book and creating spooky tricks to share with the rest of us.  He then started looking through a book about haunted castles that we found.  He also started looking up words in his new dictionary and was excited about doing this and learning the meanings of certain words.  My daughter watched her ballet video and then danced around the house in a tutu for the rest of the evening.  Then we read the new My Little Pony book and after I read it, my daughter read her memorized version of the book to me. This was a very productive unschooling day.


Garage sale days are very fun and inspiring homeschool day for the children.  Simple things, like old used books can be so inspirational by bringing something new into their lives and maybe lighting a spark that was starting to dull a bit.  Now they are all very motivated to learn new things.  I am predicting a very productive summer of learning this year. Saturdays can be the best unschooling day of the week.  Everyone should do Saturday school.  :)