Week of April 21st

This was another laid back week. Most days we didn't have anywhere to go. 

We read D'Aulaire's biographies of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and started on Benjamin Franklin. After reading about the founding of our country and a bit about the colonies from the Washington biography, Tommy decided he wanted to know more about United States geography. I got a few books from the library on US geography and we'll read those next week. 

We went to Costco on Monday. The boys are watching as a kitchen worker at Costco makes dozens of pizzas.

The boys putting finishing touches on a rally car race course made by Tommy during quiet time.

Doing a bit of handwriting work. 

We made meringue cookies 

Yay, Ben finished his math book! 

On Wednesday we watched some friends' children for the day. They all played outside most of the day. In the evening we went out for pizza to celebrate Ben finishing his math book. 

Tommy made this during quiet time. He said it's a stereo speaker. He was bummed that it didn't work the way he thought it would, but was very happy that it turned out looking like it did when he imagined it in his mind.

In the wee hours of Friday morning, Tommy and Lucy got hit with stomach flu. Tommy spent most of the day watching Mythbusters and napping. Poor guy!

Tommy asks lots of questions throughout the day. We are already far beyond the point of me being able to answer them off the top of my head. Something I've been doing for a while is keeping a running list of his questions. When I have time I find the answers and then we sit down together with the laptop and either read the answers or watch YouTube videos that answer the questions. Here are some of this week's questions, which thankfully each had a corresponding YouTube video:

How do you make a wine glass? (asked while emptying the dishwasher)

What is the most aerodynamic car? (asked while watching Mythbusters)

Why don't race motorcycles fall over? (asked during his read-aloud time, from a book about race cars)

How are chocolate bunnies made? (asked on Easter morning)

One mistake I made was queuing up the videos and having the boys watch them while I did housework. I wish I would have sat down with them. Next time I will!

Week of April 14th

I'm going to call this week my first official week of unschooling, since it's the first week that I made a conscious decision not to stick to my schedule. Going forward, I plan to write down anything that even resembles learning, or bonding, or fun of any kind.

The boys did a little bit of handwriting and some math, but for the most part we read lots of books, they played outside, and worked on their own projects.

Lately we've been letting the boys stay up past their bedtime, as long as they play outside and get along. On this particular night they decided to make our deck swing into a bed. They asked if they could sleep outside and we said, "Sure, why not?" (this is definitely new territory for us!) They asked Mark to fire up the heater for them and he obliged. They actually fell asleep out there! (We did put them back in their beds).

Something I read in one of my books about unschooling really stuck with me. The simple advice read, "Say yes as often as you possibly can." So often I say no to things simply because it's inconvenient to me; it will make a mess or make more work for me somehow. But over these past few weeks I've realized that saying yes is so much more fun!

On this night I found Tommy in the kitchen trying to make up a recipe for peanut butter cookies. I suggested that we look together to find a recipe and we found this one for no bake peanut butter protein balls. It was past his bedtime, so I said he could make them under the condition that he makes the recipe by himself and cleans up after, and he agreed. (Okay, so I helped a little bit). I was completely impressed at how he figured everything out mostly on his own and even cleaned up pretty well. 

Later in the week we went to The Tech Museum with some friends. This Rube Goldberg machine is one of their favorite things. They can stand their for what seems like forever watching all the balls and the gears turn (and the funny thing is, it's outside the museum, so it's free!)

I Am The Unlikely Unschooler: How We Got Here

Why I am an unlikely unschooler? Because I am the last person on earth that I ever thought would unschool my children. I love curriculum. I love to plan. I love sitting down with a big pile of books and plotting my children's educational course for the upcoming school year. Heck, I even like the sound of the words "upcoming school year". 

Way before my children were ready to crack open their first workbook, when they were still in diapers, I started reading up on homeschooling methods. Back then, the method that appealed most to me was classical education. If I had to choose a method irrespective of who my children are, this would be it. Luckily even then I realized that there was no way my wild and energetic boys would be able to learn like this, so I kept looking for other methods. 

I read For the Children's Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay and learned about the Charlotte Mason method of homeschooling. I loved this method (and still do!) very much because it stressed lots of reading from good books, time in nature, and learning through experiencing life together. 

When I started reading up on methods of homeschooling, I had heard of unschooling, but I  always thought moms who did it were the hippie free spirit types, the kind with infinite patience and nothing but sweet and kind words for their children. I thought it was for moms who loved having the freedom of a wide open day to just hang out with their kids, and who didn't need the structure of a schedule.

No, I'm nothing like that. My journey to unschooling comes from quite the opposite place.

Unschooling appeals to me because I am a type-A personality. I love plotting our course, making charts, making lists, and checking off the items. It gives me a special feeling of accomplishment to look back at several months' worth of schoolwork and see all of it (okay, most of it) checked off.

The problem is, I'm not a very good mom when we follow my plan. The kids aren't happy and I'm not happy. I'm ashamed to admit this, but I act more like a tyrant or a taskmaster than a loving mother when we follow my homeschooling plan for the day. I bark orders all day long and get frustrated at my precious little people when they don't snap to.

And then there was all the workbooks and lessons. I started the 2013-2014 with a full load of lessons: every day reading, writing, math, Spanish, piano, typing, and geography. Once a week- art, science, and history. My plan looked beautiful on paper. The kids were happy with our schedule for a few weeks. But then the fun wore off. I realized they had little time for play because they were doing lessons all morning. Sure, each "lesson" was only five to fifteen minutes long, but when you put all the lessons together, even that was too much for them. So I took everything away except the three basics: reading, writing, and math. But my oldest still struggles with handwriting and some of his math. I am definitely seeing that I need to back off for a little while and give him space in these areas.

I realized how vastly different my attitude toward my kids was whenever we took a long break from school, like for the summer or for our long winter break during the month of December. I'm much more pleasant to be around. I go with the flow. They don't learn any less (in fact, they learn more) when I am easy going and when I follow their lead of what they want to learn about.

I was first introduced to unschooling when I read the book Free to Learn by Peter Gray. He writes a lot about an unconventional school in the Boston area where children are free all day long to work on projects that they enjoy. Students are free to play and learn at their own pace. It made a lot of sense to me, and moreover, sounded exactly like the type of environment my children would thrive in. I read several more books on the topic of unschooling and became convinced this is something I need to try.

For too long, I have been trying to stuff my children into a mold that doesn't fit them. Instead of looking at who they truly are and working with that, I have been frustratingly trying to make them who I want them to be. I had this mistaken idea of what children are supposed to be like, and was frustrated that my children weren't looking like that idea. This is not the way to have a good relationship with my children!

 I realized that I have been putting book work and "skills learning" ahead of real live fun. There were too many days that I would say "No, you can't do that experiment you found in a book, you need to finish your schoolwork. " or "No, we can't go to the beach today, you need to finish your math." That is not how I envisioned my homeschooling experience! I know that some homeschoolers are able to be very flexible; they can keep the bookwork and still do fun projects when the kids show interest. But I can't. I have learned about myself that I am either all or nothing. I'm either married to my schedule or I ditch it completely, there's no middle ground.

I have hope that things can be different. I have been relaxed about school for the past few weeks and I can already see a positive change in our relationship. I am enjoying my kids so much more. And they aren't learning any less. In fact, now that I am relaxed enough to help them do the things that interest them, they are learning so much more. 

I have no idea how this unschooling experiment will work out. I may try it for a few months and decide to tweak things a bit based on how my kids respond. I hope this new journey will be about me learning about myself and about my children. In this coming year I want to observe my children carefully and learn to trust their instincts for learning. 

This should tell me something about how my 6 year old feels about his math workbook!

What Is Unschooling?

My next post will tell you how we arrived at unschooling. But first I want to tell you want unschooling is.

What unschooling is not: 

it is not is letting the kids go wild all day long.

It is not letting them do what they want all day long.

It is not laziness disguised as a clever teaching method.

At the very basic level, unschooling is about the parent trusting their child's God-given drive to learn, their inner curiosity, to learn at their own pace. 

It is about observing and learning who their child is and what they are interested in. 

It is about fostering their innate love of learning.

Here are some of my definitions of unschooling.

This one comes from a blog I've been reading a lot of lately, The Path Less Taken:

"Unschooling is a philosophy that allows that given a rich, interesting environment, and attentive, supportive parents, that learning will happen naturally.  To believe in unschooling is to believe that true learning happens best when it arises from the experiences and interests of the learner, not from an imposed curriculum or a teacher or a parent.  As unschooling parents, we don’t act as teachers, but as facilitators and partners.  We do not separate the day into subjects, or into school time, or play time, or learning time.  We live as if school does not exist.  We live our lives and we learn from it.

While some people will call unschooling a method of homeschooling, I believe that this implies that it is something that is done to children, and I prefer to think of it as the manner in which we live and interact with our children."    - Jennifer McGrail

And another definition by Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn:

Defined most simply, unschooling is not schooling. Unschoolers do not send their children to school and they do not do at home the kinds of things that are done at school. More specifically, they do not establish a curriculum for their children, they do not require their children to do particular assignments for the purpose of education, and they do not test their children to measure progress. Instead, they allow their children freedom to pursue their own interests and to learn, in their own ways, what they need to know to follow those interests. They also, in various ways, provide an environmental context and environmental support for the child's learning. Life and learning do not occur in a vacuum; they occur in the context of a cultural environment, and unschooling parents help define and bring the child into contact with that environment.

From Pam Laricchia, author of several books about unschooling:

With unschooling, learning is not focused on the skills as it is in school (learning to read, to write, to calculate, and to memorize) but on pursuing personal goals and interests and the needed information and skills are picked up along the way. Learning has real meaning and connection to their lives in that moment so it is understood in a way that a random piece of information presented by someone else is not. And because that learning is strongly connected to a real and immediate use for that information or skill, it's much more likely to be remembered. Unschooling is a great way to learn.

Now that you know what unschooling is, next I'll tell you how we arrived at this unlikely way of homeschooling our children.

Who We Are

I'm Autumn, wife to Mark and mom to three amazing kiddos. We live in beautiful Northern  California. Mark and I have been married for 10 years this year. We started homeschooling our children two years ago, when our oldest was five.  

Tommy is 7. He loves to build things. He enjoys playing piano. He is intensely curious about the world around him and is constantly asking questions. His current favorite show is Mythbusters.

Ben is 6. He is sweet and fun loving. He loves playing tag, hide-and-seek, and having Nerf gun shoot-outs. His current favorite show is Phineas and Ferb.

Lucy is 1. She is full of laughter. She loves being chased around the house by her brothers.

Together we are navigating life and are enjoying learning together. 

Why This Blog?

This is the beginning of our journey into unschooling. I almost hesitate to call the way we learn 'unschooling' because that word can have a negative association within the Christian homeschooling community. I'm going to use it anyway because it best describes how my children learn. But more about that later.

I'm starting this blog as a way to journal our unschooling experience. I have no idea how long we will be unschooling. It could be just a few months, all of next year, or it could be forever. We'll have to see!

Later I will outline our reasons for choosing this method of homeschooling. 

Stay tuned. :)