Monday: 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 going to share what this Monday looked like in our unschooling family.  Not everyday is filled with constant stimulation and intense learning.  Some days are maybe setting the children up for new ideas in the future by introducing new concepts while other days, there are a lot of  'ahha' moments.  Well, today was one of those laid back type of days.  My three children spent their morning watching PBS and they watched Sid the Science Kid where they focused on where water comes from in relation to our sinks, Word World, Barney, Sesame Street, and Curious George.  Even though my three children are 2, 4 and 7 and at different intellectual levels based on age, they all enjoy watching these simple shows together. My 7 year old son is learning to read and reads at a 1st or 2nd grade level, my daughter is also learning to read and working on her letters and is reading at a pre-school or kindergarten level and baby boy is learning his letters and has his colors down pretty well, so they can all relate to Word World.  Barney and Sesame Street are a little bit more at baby boys level, but the others enjoy watching it with him and who doesn't love Curious George?   I really don't mind watching that one.  My son said that Sesame Street was about flooding and the flow of water and Curious George was about making instruments.  We very rarely watch TV, so today was a rare one, but everyone needs a laid back TV day from time to time.

The TV day was followed by lunch and a park day where the children played with friends and met some new ones.  I forgot it was Columbus Day, so the public schools were set free, so the park was a little busier and more chaotic than what we prefer, but the children need to be around the masses and not just in their little homeschooling, laid back, relaxed children crowd, so I don't mind having park days like this every once in a while.  I don't want my children to be overly sheltered.  Of course my daughter found a friend who happily taught her how to be bratty and disrespectful, so she got a lesson on proper social skills when she tried to use the new skills she learned with me, but she handled it well. 

After park day, we picked up some dinner and then headed over to my son's ballet class.  My son has been in ballet for 3 years, so this would be his 4th and I do not really feel like he is learning much about ballet, but maybe he is and he just doesn't know how to tell us about what he has learned yet.  He was in the Nutcracker twice as a Cannon Soldier and he said that he wants to be in it again this year, so we are exploring this possibility.  Today was his first ballet class for this season because his soccer sessions just ended last week and my son really wanted to do ballet again.  I thought we were going to take the year off from ballet, but I don't want to prevent him from doing something he enjoys, so I agreed to it.  Once I double check to make sure the performance for the Nutcracker and the performance for his recorder class are not the same day, I will allow him to do both.  So we may have a busy holiday season this year.  While he did his ballet class, the younger children, helped one of the other families make ghosts out of suckers and Kleenex. 

We then settled in for the night.  My daughter wanted to play Scooby Doo, my 7 year old son worked on making musical instruments out of buckets which was inspired by watching Curious George earlier and baby boy wanted to watch Elmo's Potty Time.  I think he's tired of wearing diapers, so he is working hard at learning to use the potty properly.  Then my 7 year old son had the opportunity to help his Dad unclog one of our drains in the bathroom and it was interesting how this was connected to Sid the Science Kid and Sesame Street that he watched earlier.  Some days just seem to make sense once it's said and done as my son shows me his latest musical instrument of shaking a Dr. Pepper bottle filled with water.  Then we all became involved in the unschooling band playing the instruments my son created.  After that, baby boy drank the water in the Dr. Pepper bottle.  I love to see everything tied together at the end of an unschooling day.  :)