No one teaches a baby to learn to crawl. It's a self driven journey by the child who often learns how to move without ever seeing another human travel in that manner (a crawl, although my older two do take great joy in trying to "teach" their little brother by demonstrating a crawl for him).
It's hard work ...
...but the joy on their little faces when they finally get up on all fours, or move forward and grasp the item they were reaching for is evidence enough that it's a journey full of a great sense of self achievement and victory!
This voyage of self discovery happens to be one of my favourite things about unschooling so far.
The learning that happens through self discovery, the joy my children take out of that sense of achievement, and the fact that when they learn this way it sticks!
A week ago I set up a water play invitation with water beads that was inspired by the creative moms over at Play at Home Mom LLC
They were so interested in these funny squishy balls that grow in the water
I left them to it and they had so much fun using the funnels to fill up bottles
And the sieve to fish them out the water
They were busy for hours on and off, and had so much fun!
We had the brief cold snap where it snowed but the moment it warmed up again they were begging to play. This time I had got a bit more equipment for them, including some syringes...so I decided to put out some coloured water, and the ice trays, along with the water beads etc.
I gave them the 3 basic colours, red, blue & yellow, showed them how to use the syringes to squirt the colours into the ice tray and left them to it while I went to take care of hanging the washing.
The next thing my favourite thing happened...a cry of excitement and jubilation!
"Mom, mom, come look...it's so cool"
Off I went to look and there were all different colours in the ice tray...and it was demonstrated to me that blue and yellow make green, and red and blue make purple etc etc etc.
Of course we've gone over this before, but it never made as much impact at this :)
And a week later that information is still firmly embedded in his mind, he discussed it with my mom today...and I bet he will now know this for the rest of his life.
Just a little discovery, but so much excitement and joy over it...I couldn't help but feel excited about colours myself again :D
Joining in with Owlet's Unschool Mondays
I do love seeing the excitement and joy of kids' discoveries and how good it can be to learn this way rather than being 'taught' color combinations.
ReplyDeleteLove it when they are so excited about self discoveries :)
ReplyDeleteMy eldest is starting to read and the joy when she can read a sign or something because she wanted to try and see if she could is so much more fulfilling than having to memorize sight words.