A Week in the Life of an Unschooler: Do we have a theatre star?

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 talk about what an unschooling week looks like.  Each week seems to be a little different and there is always some level of spontaneity involved.  My desire for my children is that they know how to handle a lot of different types of situations and people so that functioning as adults can be an easy transition for them and help them gain wisdom as children so that the lack of wisdom does not need to cripple them as  young adults like it does for many.  It is important to be able to go with the flow of life because it can be quite unpredictable.


This week began with my husband being home from work due to MLK day.  As the children get older, I will educate them on this, but at their young ages of 2, 4 and 7, we did not focus on the importance of this day at this time.  I have to think a lot about how to address issues of racism and various prejudices because I really do not want any of that to be part of my children's lives.  It's just negative and wrong and unnecessary, but making a difference can be quite empowering, so perhaps I will approach it in that manner when we do teach them about it.  Anyway, my husband was home today, so he got to take my son to his recorder class.  Whenever I go to this, I have the younger two children, so I do not have a lot of time to participate in it and just take the younger two children to the nursery where they can play, but my husband went alone with my son, so he was part of the class too.  My son got to teach his Dad how to play the recorder.  I thought their story about recorder class was so sweet.  Then my husband took my son shopping at the natural food Co-op. So they had a great father/son day together. 


That evening, I discovered that auditions for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory at our local youth theatre are on Tuesday.  I actually thought we missed the audition and my son did not show a lot of interest in doing it.  Well, I asked him again today and he said that he wanted to be in it.  He was dead set against being an Oompa Loompa because he has a problem with people laughing at him.  I explained that the only reason anyone would laugh at an Oompa Loompa is because they are funny, then he changed his mind and decided that being an Oompa Loompa would not be horrible if he had the opportunity to be part of a big production and was assigned this part.  I looked at the audition requirements and it looked like singing a song was part of the process.  I was not sure if my son could sing, so I asked him if he knew any songs.  He said that he knows Jingle Bells, The Scooby Doo theme song and Spiderman, so these were our choices.  I told him to sing and to my surprise, he had quite a nice voice and was singing in tune.  So I figured he could audition, it was worth a shot.  Initially we chose the Scooby Doo theme song, but once we started working on it, we realized that it was a little tricky so maybe choosing a simpler song would be a better choice.  My son suggested the Oompa Loompa song since that would probably be his part if he were chosen, so we searched for it on You Tube and practiced the one about the chubby boy who falls into the chocolate river.  It was simple and sort of funny, so my son started working on it around 10 p.m. He was able to learn the words and then really needed to go to bed, so I figured we would practice it throughout the day on Tuesday.


On Tuesday as we casually lived our day of cleaning the house, playing games, cuddling, the usual, from time to time I would look at my son and say, "hit it" and he would sing "Oompa Loompa Doompadeedoo, I've got the perfect puzzle for you..."  He would fumble over the middle part a little, so we would work on it and I probably had him randomly sing it about 10 times throughout the day.  I did have a schedule conflict with my daughter's ballet, but I was able to rearrange things so that we could do her ballet on Wednesday and the audition would not be as rushed.  We arrived at the audition around 5 p.m. and the lady looked at me and said, "are you going to audition" and I just smiled and said, "no, he is".  She seemed surprised since he looked so nervous and shy.  There was a huge room full of parents and their children, much more than I was anticipating.  I guess 82 children auditioned this evening and they were going to have more auditions the following evening too.  He kept telling me that he felt really nervous.  I just told him to take a deep breath to help him relax and to just pretend he is an Oompa Loompa when he sings the song.  So he walked into his audition in a line of twelve children with him being 3rd from the front since he was one of the smaller ones at the age of 7 and I was so afraid he would start crying or just not talk to anyone since he does have a shy side to him.  After the audition, he had a big smile on his face and looked completely happy and relaxed.  He said that when he sang his song, the judges had huge smiles on their faces and seemed to like him the best and then when he went back to his seat, the girl next to him told him he did a great job.  After hearing that, I was thinking, oh my, he may get a part. 


Wednesday ended up being a ballet day since we rescheduled it from the day before, so the morning was laid back and then around 11, we started preparing for the 12:30 ballet class.  My daughter loves her ballet class and while we wait, I usually hang out in the car and my 7 year old son practices reading while the little 2 year old guy likes to pretend he's driving the car and really enjoys messing with the windshield wipers and just tries to push whatever button he can get his hands on to work on his knowledge of cause and effect. My daughter works very hard in ballet, so she always needs a little down time after her class, so the three children decided to relax and watch some movies together for a while when we got home.  I have been in the process of reorganizing the house, so this will give our lives a breath of fresh air.  It almost feels like you get a new house if you do this from time to time.  After that, I thought the kids would help me bake cookies and we would have an impromptu math/science lesson, but they seemed more interested in just eating the cookies after I made them, which is fine too, so they had some free time. 


Thursday is here and the results for Willy Wonka are  (drum roll)  he didn't get a part.  I told him and he said, "Ok, I want to play hockey now" and that was that.  The next audition will be Snow White and the 7 Dwarves in April and he said that he wants to try out for that.  So I'm going to get some information so that we can be better prepared for the tryout next time since he is interested in doing this.  Today our project is cleaning the house well and maybe figure out some ideas for ant control.  We have these tiny little ants that are taking over our home.  AHHHHHH!  My son discovered some ant trap ideas when he was trying to have an ant farm, so we may expand on this.  We are starting to feel less compassionate about the ants and more war like now.  He seemed to be better at eliminating them than starting an ant farm, so we are going to expand on this skill level he has and see how well the results are.  If that does not work, we will have to resort to calling the poison people, but I really prefer not to do that. This will be a great science project.   My son then decided to write a note to his friend to send in the mail and then watch Baby Einstein with his little brother.  I then told my son he was going to play hockey tonight, so he got all excited and got ready and is taking his bike helmet so he can have more of a hockey player look.  I guess some hockey players may wear a spiderman bike helmet.  He smiled really big and said, "I look a lot like a hockey player.  I even have missing teeth."  You've gotta love a boy with a sense of humor.  :)  I have discovered the best way to be on time when you have 3 kids is to start getting ready an hour before we need to be there.  It took me a while to figure out how to do this.


This Friday was supposed to be the day when my son goes to Urban Forestry Class where they explore an outdoor wooded classroom with a licensed teacher and learn about nature.    However, with subzero temperatures and the schools being closed, we decided not to go and they are considering just canceling the class today anyway.  Each session involves 3 classrooms once a month.  The winter session had a blizzard for the first class scheduled in January and now there are subzero temperatures for the makeup time, so perhaps this class is not meant to be this January.  We are having an extremely cold, snowy winter this year.  So of course my daughter is wearing her new swimsuit today while the boys have been happily playing and baby boy is really enjoying Baby Einstein videos now.  I try to take time to myself each morning and do yoga.  The children were playing during this time and when I saw them, my oldest son had on an Indiana Jones hat, a Hawaiian shirt, some shorts, white socks pulled up to his knees, a light saber walking stick with a Spiderman backpack and they were all marching along in a line.  My daughter had on a yellow dress, a purse and a pink hat and baby boy just had on his clothes for the day, he is not really a costume kid.  I asked my oldest son what they were doing and he said that they were going to Africa, so they all got in their speed boat AKA the couch and floated to Africa and then set up camp in the living room.  I guess at one point, my son had to use a tranquilizer gun on a lion who was trying to attack my daughter.  They will be having some exciting African adventures on this cold January day.


I may start doing more blogs about our week.  For me, it is interesting to see how diverse and spontaneous unschooling truly is.  It is easier to see this by writing down what we do during a week's time.  Let me know what you think.  We love unschooling.  :)