So...A day in the life of unschooling

So I thought I'd share what a good day of unschooling in our house looks like. And seeing as my last post mentioned rusks and trains I thought I'd use that day!

After all stumbling out of bed & eating a bit of breakfast, we all went to get dressed and I asked the kids what they wanted to get up to.

Baking was the unanimous decision so I decided to make some health rusks I've been wanting to do. We needed a few supplies though so popped off to the shops.

Bear grabbed a kid sized trolley and got all the necessary ingredients, while Evie and I strolled along behind him.
A quick aside here - You know those shops where they have a queueing system with the boards that tell you what number teller to go to when it's your turn? Well Bear loves finding the right till by matching up the numbers, and I think it's a great way for him to learn number recognition without even realising it ;)

Back home to the baking and as you can see the kids had loads of fun measuring, pouring and stirring...note the vigorous stirring which results in ingredients everywhere lol!

Lots of interesting things to learn while baking, questions about various ingredients and why we're using them, measuring and mixing, textures and tasting...and of course the magic of watching a bit of flour, eggs, milk etc all turn into something completely different and wonderful on the opening and closing of an oven door!





While I was greasing pans and cleaning up the kids kept busy and called me over to see their train engine, which they'd built. And what a lovely train it was. We all went on a trip through the countryside and pointed out all the different things we could see.

We passed a farm and saw all sorts of animals there, chugged through a forest and saw fawns peering out from behind fir trees, and in a final bit of excitement we held up by "baddies" who blocked the doors so we couldn't escape. thanks to some quick thinking by Bear though the situation was soon resolved and we all got home safe and sound.

(That wasn't the only trip taken that day, I left the train in place and it grew and grew to include every chair and stool in the house. And when The Dad got home he took a trip too!)



Then it was lunch time and we all got to relax a little, the kids watched a bit of tv with their lunch and I got to catch up a little on the internet.

Then nap time for Evie, and Bear decided to join her (he doesn't usually nap any more, but as he's such an early riser & bad sleeper he often needs one or so a week to catch up) - yay, more time for The Mom to catch up on some work & e-mails.

Once everyone was awake again we decided it was tea and biscuit time, and because it was such a lovely afternoon we decided to have them outside. So we put out our blanket under the tree and enjoyed our snack.

Then it was time to run around and play, the kids spent some time on the jungle gym and chasing each other around. Evie stalked the cat and ended up in the sandpit while Bear crunched leaves, raced his motorbike and kicked a ball a bit with me.

Once a bit of energy was worn off, I decided to pull out a brand new book and we all lay on the blanket to check it out.
And I am pleased to say it was a roaring success.
I bought them The Usborne Big Book of Things to SpotWhat a lovely way to introduce all sorts of things, different environments & the animals who live in them, counting & number recognition, concentrating and looking for all the different things in each picture.

It kept us busy right until The Dad came home, and even then there was a bit of fuss when the book was finally put away.

At this point I was happy to pass over to the Dad and get on with my own things, so they all played together and went for trips on the train.
He took them with him to go get dinner, takeaways - a Friday night treat. and before we knew it dinner had been eaten, little bodies had been washed in the bath, clean pyjamas were on and bedtime stories were being read.

Just a normal day at home.
A good day, a fun day, a learning day and play day.
Nothing special :)

So...Homemade Activity Book!

Once upon a time Bear used to love puzzles, and he was very good at them! By the time he was 2 he was doing 36 piece puzzles with no issues and even some bigger.
And then he stopped!
Since then he claims he can't do them and if he asks to take them down it's just so he can watch you complete them yourself.
Sigh...

I mentioned this to a friend and she suggested that some children get bored of puzzles once they figure out how they work. For them it's not so much about the picture, but rather how the pieces go together, and once they've worked it out that's it, they're no longer interested in doing any more. I have no idea if this is true or not but it made sense, especially as once he's mastered something Bear usually has no interest in revisiting it.

She did however suggest we try some mazes with him, and so I printed some off and voila, he loved it!
I couldn't keep up with the printing demand though, so I came up with the idea of putting together a little activity book for him that he could reuse whenever he wanted.

I got onto google and even found post of someone who had done the very same thing who already had already had a nice list of links to various activity sheets and mazes. So if you want to print off your own head over to The Best Toys for Toddlers for some resources.



Once I had a variety of mazes, connect the dots & some exercise sheets for preparing to write, I printed them all off onto brightly coloured paper, and then borrowed my sister's laminator to laminate them.
How cool are laminators??? Oh how I'd love my own, definitely one for the wish list!
Then all I had to do was punch holes in them and put together the book using 2 keyrings. Add some whiteboard markers and a cloth and there you have your very own reusable activity book!









You can try find yourself through the maze as many times as you like...










....and if you went the wrong way or made a mistake you can just wipe and start again!





Bear really impressed me with how quickly he understood how to do everything. Here's one of the follow the dots completed all by himself.

Follow the dots is also great for them to learn numbers and sequences...or even help with learning the alphabet if the dots are marked with letters instead of numbers.




And here's bear trying out some the exercises which are to help prepare them for handwriting skills when they're older.

This was the first attempt...and the second line was my demonstration, after this he did them all again and did fantastically well!








And finally I put in a blank page just for him to draw on. And here's his portrait of his Dad. Isn't it just perfect?










And what has our Evie been up to? Well she's a little under the weather with a cold at the moment, but we kept her busy during this with her favourite activity...eating!!!




And when we were finished look what we found lol
















"Huh...What do you mean I have something on my face?"

So...More about Weapons

We've been very quiet lately, the morning sickness means I've been having to take it easy and have even been almost bed ridden some days :(
There is an end in sight though, I'm headed into my second trimester and hopefully it will start to lift from now on forwards!

In the meantime we've been doing quieter activities like reading, puzzles, brainy blocks and other similar things.
I did have a good week last week so we saw some friends and I even managed to get around to the library again let the kids chose some new books.

Bear of course managed to find a book full of robbers & guns, but as it was from the children's section and I've already decided that they are allowed to choose their own reading material he was allowed to bring it home.

As it happens it turned out to be the most wonderful book and we've read it countless times since. Because of my earlier post asking about children playing with guns/weapons I decided to share in case anyone else would like to read this to their kids.

Beaten by a Balloon by Jonathan Allen

Sam Appleby would like a sword, or a water gun like his friend Hacky Mackie, but his father and mother like peaceful things like sunflowers and ballooning and roses.
When a thief happens to comes to town though,Sam and his father outwit him with the help of a variety of items including a sunflower to a chocolate cake.
It's an amusing story that will be enjoyed by every child that ever waved a stick as a weapon, and by every parent that tried to explain why this isn't always the best of ideas.

If your library doesn't have it you can buy it here

Talking about reading a friend mentioned BOB books to me and showed me one her son is reading.
I've had a look and am considering some for us and seeing how it goes with Bear, because I'm not so sure on Teach Your Child too Read in 100 Easy Lessons anymore.

Tell me what you used to help teach your children to read, and at what age you started?

So - Paintless Painting & Lazy Days

Sooooooo....some days we don't think too much about homeschooling at all...and that's one of the perks to it, if we all just need some time to be, we can do just that!

The other day we had a day like that...but Bear decided he wanted to paint.
He's quite fond of painting but Mom not so much!
I've discovered that it takes me an age to layer the whole house in newspaper, undress the kids as much as possible, organise the paints in spill proof containers etc etc etc.
Then Bear takes about 2 seconds to mix all the paint into brown sludge, pour it over the paper/newspaper/himself/his little sister, and while I'm trying to stem the brown mud slide that's fast approaching my carpet/tiles/shoes, he declares he's all done and races off to try climb on the couch...covered in still wet paint of course... while I desperately scream "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Come back and get clean first!"
And then he tantrums.
And then I clean up for an hour.

So hopefully now you'll have gained some understanding into my reluctance :)

You'll imagine my delight when I was wandering through the Crazy Store the other day and happened to spot one of these "paintless" paint books! You know the ones where you just use water and the "paint" magically appears? Well I'd forgotten all about them until I saw it and when I did I promptly snapped it up and put it aside for a rainy day (which we've had plenty of lately)

So it was with great delight that I presented it to Bear and showed him the "magic" painting he could do!

As you can see below he took it all quite seriously, and spent loads of time dousing the pages with water (a word of caution, it's best to limit the water available), but he was very proud of the results!

Ok, so I know it's not as artistic as normal painting, but seriously he not really at the "artistic" phase yet, unless you call brown sludge art. Plus take into consideration the ease and lack of mess, and you just have to admit it's a winner!

After that it was time to chill and browse through some books. We recently got a new book from Letterland which has proved to be a great hit!

And while some of us enjoyed the literature, others cooked up tasty rocks

So - Before Five in a Row

So we use a book called Before Five in a Row which is actually a lovely resource for people with small children. I think it's helpful even if you don't plan on homeschooling.
The idea is not that you're "teaching" them as such, but you're getting them ready for learning and nurturing a love for learning.
It uses children's books to introduce new concepts, activities and discussions for you do do with your child.I will admit that I find some of the books used in it are a bit outdated but so far Bear has loved most of the ones we've bought, even if I haven't, and Evie is starting to enjoy them too!
I think it's very easy to carry the concept across to other books if you prefer, it's just a nice resource for giving parents an idea of where to start.

There is also a treasury of ideas in the second half of the book, just on fun things to do with small children.

So - What did we do today?
In the last day or 2 Bear has pulled out Blueberries for Sal again, and today I decided to start one of the activities he wasn't quite ready for the first time we read it...classification cards!
Teaching kids to classify items into groups is a great logical thinking exercise.
So basically the idea is to make your own animal classification cards, using animals from the book you're reading at the time, to eventually build up a nice selection of cards for your child to play with.

As we're reading Blueberries for Sal I took pictures of a bear, a partridge, a crow...and I decided to add a blueberry bush too, just for fun!

So - What did we use?
Pictures
Cardboard
Scissors
Glue stick
clear contact paper (optional)

I had a look through our magazines but didn't find pictures of the animals I needed, so I ended up grabbing some images from google & printing them out.
I also cut some different coloured A4 card into 4, so we have a bunch of cards the same size.
Then Bear and I cut out the pictures I printed.
Bear applied liberal amounts of glue to the pictures and stuck them on the cards.
Voila - There you have a classification card!
Then the rest is all optional, but as we are trying to work on the concept of the alphabet a little I drew the letter each picture starts with e.g. "Bb" for Bear.
Also because I want them to last a little while I decided to cover them in clear contact paper just to make them a little more durable.

Sadly no photos today, I'll try take some next time Bear has them out, but just in case you have no clue what I'm talking about, they're basically homemade versions of these:

So - What now?
Now we were ready to play. We laid out the cards and then I would ask him to choose all the ones with fur, or beaks, or leg.
He seemed to enjoy it and even came up with his own suggestions, grouping together the cards of the same colour, or animals with the same colour etc.
I think it will only get more fun as we add more and more cards to the bunch.

Then we read the book again and when we came across each animal in the book, Bear found the right card to match and showed it to Evie to so she could see.

So - What did we learn?
Some of the things we learnt during this activity:

• Shapes - as we were cutting them out we talked about square & rectangle shapes. How they are similar and how they are different. We looked around to find other things that were squares and rectangles, like the oven, dining room table, wash basket etc.
• Fine motor control - Bear was using his scissors again and he did all his own gluing and sticking
• Alphabet - we drew some letters, said them phonetically and then said the animal's name.
• Identifying various birds/animals - crow, partridge etc
  
• Classification - as mentioned above, we played a game and grouped our cards according to different things
• Colours - well Bear already know all his basic colours very well, but he spent some time commenting on the different browns of the animals and spent some time grouping cards according to colours.

So - what about our Evie, well we all read the book together again and let her have a good look at all the animals, and after we all went for a walk to the shop to stretch our legs!

Now if only everyone would nap so the parentals can keep their sanity :)

So - Reading, Writing & Arithmetic

Along with the majority of the world, I agree that reading, writing & arithmetic are the building blocks of learning. Once a person has mastered these skills they can essentially learn anything they set their minds too!

But when is the right time to start learning these skills and how long should it take?

Well I was shocked when I came across the following passage in the book Dumbing us Down by John Taylor Gatto (which I highly recommend by the way)

"Were the colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions of people teach themselves these things - it really isn't very hard. Pick up a fifth-grade nath or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for 'basic skills' practise is a smoke screen behind which schools preempt the time of children for 12 years and teach the the seven lessons* I've just described to you."

Did I just read that right?
100 hours?
And not 100 on each subject but for all 3?
Surely it can't be right?
But indeed it can - the thing is once you're ready to learn something it actually doesn't take all that long, but if you're not ready it's like banging your head against a wall repeatedly!

So why exactly are we taking our children and insisting they all learn the alphabet by a certain age, or their times tables by another age?

Surely our time, and their time, would be much better spent waiting until the specific child showed a readiness to learn and then forge ahead?

If faced with the choice of spending 12 years learning something as opposed to doing it in a 100 hours, I sure know which I would choose!

So now what?

Unfortunately all this brings me to a bit of a dilemma.
While I love the freedom and idea of unschooling, and just waiting for my children to one day decide to learn these skills, regardless of the age they are at the time, I also still really really feel strongly about them being able to master these skills as soon as possible. So do I forge ahead and go on and on and on about the alphabet now already, or do I bide my time and wait?

Well I'm still working on it but I guess some kind of middle ground is where we'll settle.
For the moment I'm following Bear's lead, as in I introduce something and if he wants to then we continue with it.
He's not a cooperative kind of person at the best time so forcing him to learn the ABC song, for instance, is like trying to stick a camel through the eye of a needle.
Incidentally he actually DESPISES the ABC song and won't even let me get the first few letters about before all hell breaks loose, never mind even attempting to repeat it.

On the other hand he LOVES reading his story books, so I spend a lot of time doing that.
He also enjoys some online websites like www.starfall.com which are suppose to help with teaching the different letters and phonics etc,
So in a way I guess that's good enough for the moment, he is only 3 after all, but it's taking everything in me not to go out and buy "How to teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons" right now!




And while I may be holding out on the instructional book right now, it didn't stop me grabbing 2 jars full of magnetic letters for a fridge today, thanks to Woolies & ELC ;)







If there any other homeschoolers reading this post I'd love to hear your approach to the three R's, did you let your child lead the way or did you start working on them as soon as possible?

* This paragraph is taken from the speech he made in 1991 when receiving his New York State Teacher of the Year Award, called "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" - so the seven lessons referred to in this paragraph are the ones listed in there. I will be discussing them at a later date, so if you're interested please come visit again!