Throwing Marshmallows

My fellow Life Without School author and friend Tammy has written some very insightful posts on Just Enough, and Nothing More about “deschooling”  to which I often refer new homeschoolers. Each time I end up re-searching her website to find them, so I have decided to collect my favorites here to make them easier to find!

• New to Homeschooling? Where to Start
• Deschooling Gently
• Deschooling Tips (for Homeschoolers)
• Top 10 Tips for Deschooling
• More About Deschooling
• Words of Homeschooling Wisdom

And these are just the tip of the iceberg. Tammy has lots of other pearls of wisdom on every aspect of homeschooling. Definitely take some time to pull up a chair, grab a cup of coffee and read to your hearts content.

Enjoy!

I had forgotten that I had taken this test a little while ago and found it remarkably accurate for an online test. I also find it amusing that I am not borderline in any of my characteristics! No doubt where I fall.

My multiple intelligences results did not reveal any big surprises either. Interpersonal and verbal/linguistics are definitely my strong points.

Learning styles, personality types and multiple intelligences are fascinating to me. Guess that is one reason why I am so strong in interpersonal skills!

Go check it out!

My post, Learning What is Not Necessary, is up over at Life Without School. Actually it was up a week or so ago and I forgot to mention it! Things have been a bit busy here lately. I am just trying to keep my head above water at this point…

So how do we answer the question “what is important to learn?” Every homeschool parent consciously or unconsciously answers this question differently. The key thing to remember is that there is no one right answer. Everyone has their own ideas…each school system, each curriculum provider, each parent, each child. They all have their own ideas and no one is right and no one is wrong.

I think that this is the basis for most of the “debates” among homeschoolers…the unschoolers, the classical homeschoolers, the school-at-homers, the waldof, the montessori folks all have their own ideas of “what is important”. But ultimately, despite all the strong opinions on the subject, there really is no “right” or “wrong”.

I used to have pretty strong opinions on the subject, but the longer I keep at this, the more that I see that “my way” is not the only way or even the best way for everyone. Not to mention that “my way” keeps changing. I just kind of muddle through and my kids manage to learn despite my best efforts.

I see one of my jobs as a homeschool parent to be that of exposing my kids to a variety of things…to expand their viewpoints. It is something that I am extremely conscious of. It is also one of my jobs to decide how important something is to learn. Sounds scary, but it is true. I have found that I often make this judgment based on how it is affecting my relationship with my child as well as how it is affecting his relationship with learning. Is it worth fighting with my child to get them to learn something they are not interested in?

Interestingly enough, my kids are learning what they need to know, albeit on their own timetable. Are there things that I wish they knew better? Yup. But they have time. We all have time.

Anyways, go check it out. I hope that you enjoy it!

This article in Scientific American got my attention when I was  searching to see if Scientific American has a kids magazine (I can’t seem to find one…anyone know?)

Seems that they have done a study that shows that “young children can crudely add and subtract numbers before they have learned the rules of arithmetic”:

To find out, they gave several groups of children a laptop-based audiovisual test that asked whether one person had more or fewer candies or other objects than another person. The screen showed numbers to be added, such as 21 and 30, or subtracted, such as 64 and 13, followed by another number, such as 34, with which to compare the added or subtracted value.

The children answered correctly from 64 to 73 percent of the time, according to a report published online today by Nature.

Looks like kids without formal instruction in arithmetic can still have a basic understanding of it. My favorite quote from the article was from cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard University:

“We never dreamed that you could simply give children the symbols and they will succeed,” she says.

And my second favorite quote:

Teachers were skeptical of the experiment because arithmetic lessons easily frustrate children, but “the kids really loved these problems,” she says. “It looks to us like a big part of the logic of addition and subtraction is already available to them.”

Veeery interesting….I wonder if half the enjoyment was at being asked to try to figure it out for themselves rather then being told how to do it?

~Stephanie

We have been having a blast birdwatching down here this year. it is something that I have been meaning to get into more since my MIL gave us Peterson’s Guide to Eastern Birds and my Mom gave us a great set of binoculars (how many years ago was that?). But I never seemed to be able to find them when we needed them.

Luckily down here it is incredibly easy. Our beach house backs onto a canal so we have a wonderful backdrop for seeing all kinds of birds, doing all kinds of things. My favorite time is just after dinner - it seems to be feeding time for the birds as well. It is fascinating to watch as they pick their target and swoop down to grab the fish or even a crab now and then. I even got to see one industrious seagull grab a crab and fly over to a driveway and let the poor crab fall to its death before feasting.

We have a plethora of seagulls of different types which we have yet to identify. And plenty of ducks and geese. But we also have many other more unusual birds as well.

The other day a very large, interesting bird perched himself on one of the pylons on our dock. He was very different from any of the other birds that we had seen. We grabbed the binoculars and bird book, hoping that he would not fly away. We knew that he was not a seagull and I thought that he might be a tern. The boys poured over the book and found a couple that were kinda close, but not quite right.

We continued to turn the pages and low and behold there he was a Black-crowned Night-heron (Nycticorax nycticorax). I had thought that all herons had long graceful necks, and some do, but not this one! We also learned that herons and egrets are in the same family (need to do some more reading on that one to figure out exactly what is the difference!). Our bird seemed to sense that we were curious about him - he sat on the pylon patiently while we spent quite a little while trying to figure out what he was. Then, almost as if he knew that we had figured it out, he flew off.

Now the boys want to figure out what kind of egrets we see flying around - and whether any of them have “golden slippers” like some of the ones in the book.

~Steph

On one of my homeschool email lists we are having a discussion about encouraging musical talents in our kids. Talking about lessons and unschooling piano and encouraging kids to practice. Some moms shared their experiences with being glad to have been encouraged to continue piano lessons with others hating it and wishing that they had been allowed to spend that time on something that they were passionate about.

I think one thing to keep in mind when it comes to music is that not all people are musically oriented or talented, lessons or not…I am not sure if I am really explaining that quite right. I think what I am trying to say is that while I think that everyone can and does enjoy music, not everyone is going to enjoy it in the same way.

I played clarinet from 5th grade through 5 years in college (13 years)…did marching band and symphony bands, took private lessons throughout jr. high and high school. I loved my band experiences and had a blast. However, my clarinet playing was a learned skill, most definitely was not a natural talent…I was ok, but not outstanding and actually had no desire to work or try to become really good. I practiced my half hour a day and enjoyed it, but had no desire to do more then that. In my last year of symphony band in college I asked my director if I could just play the 3rd clarinet part and not have to audition (I hated auditioning!).

Music was not a passion of mine although it was a very important part of my life. To be honest with you, band became more of a social thing…I loved the friends that I had and was a band officer etc (and met my husband there). I do totally enjoy music (especially classical which I think playing in symphony band helped nuture), but I honestly have no true desire to make the music myself. I listen to a wide range of music and especially love instrumentals including symphonies, quartets and the like.

For my brother, music is a gift and something completely natural. He has perfect pitch, can hear and play the bass line of any song by ear (I can barely hear the baseline LOL!). He played violin starting in 3rd grade and also picked up string bass, bass, and tuba along the way. He currently makes his living teaching violin and bass lessons and playing bass in a band. He says that he hears music all the time in his head (which is similar to how I have a running commentary in my head all the time…he is musically oriented, I am word oriented). Music is a part of who he is.

My personal feeling is that if a child is musically oriented then they will be drawn towards things musical. They will seek out those experiences and we as parents need to expose them to a wide range of opportunities. There is no need to push them however or immediately sign them up for lessons. When the time is right, I think that it will be obvious. For some that might happen very young, for others it might happen later. But if it was meant to be, it will happen on its own time (just like everything else!)

Jason actually is very musical, although he has not shown much interest in playing an instrument. He is, however, very aware of music everywhere…he loves movie soundtracks (especially Star Wars) and we have had tons of discussions of how music sets the tone of the scene. He goes into the extras on his video games and plays the different themes over and over and analyzes which ones he likes and dislikes and how they make him feel. We were eating at an Irish Pub on the boardwalk this past week and he absolutely loved the celtic music they had playing…again making comments and analyzing what he liked and did not like.

We were at a friends house and her teenage daughter played a few things on their piano including some tunes that she had made up. My friend commented on how attentive and curious Jason was. As we were walking home, he told me that he thought that he would be able to play piano really well, but he went on right on to say that he did not want to learn yet. He did not really have a reason why but I am ok with waiting for him to be ready.

I see no reason to push this as I feel that if he is really drawn to music, he will get there when he is ready. It will come naturally and will progress on its own schedule. There is no rush, especially since he is very clear that he does not want to “learn” now. (shhh…don’t tell him that he is still learning just by listening and figuring out what he likes and does not like).

So we continue to enjoy music and it is interesting to see what he is drawn to. He definitely likes things with a strong beat, fast paced. He really likes electronic dance music (eek!) that he found on our sirius radio (Channel 33 also known as Area 33). Definitely not my favorite. But luckily much of what he likes I enjoy as well.

And I continue to look for cool music. Currently on the search for Irish/Celtic and what Jason calls “desert music” (middle eastern). One of my favorite sources for neat ethnic music is Putumayo World Music. Really fun music. We have Carribean and Reggae Playground (perfect for the beach) and I have Music from the Coffee Lands. And I look for different ways to expose him to music (we went to a wonderful musical at the Kennedy Center a few months back which is where he discovered that he liked middle eastern music).

I personally think that it will be interesting to watch this interest of his unfold and see where he goes with it. Or doesn’t go with it. Maybe he will have a talent for perfoming music like my brother or maybe he will just enjoy it like me. The great thing is that either way is fine. Because we are each unique and our interests and passions are going to be unique. And homeschooling allows our kids to have the time to discover just what those passions are.

~Steph

Joanne over at A Day in Our Lives has pulled together the first Unschooling Voices…a collection of unschooling blog posts which will support and inspire you. The question of the month was “How did you and your family come to unschooling?” Looks like lots of great answers to that plus more on other unschooling topics.
So check it out!

~Steph

The boys and I were playing Cinq-o today which was a lot of fun and reassured me that Jason’s adding and multiplication facts are still progressing. Jason was leading at first with me really far behind. Then I got a great score and the tables were turned. Kyle wound up winning, we me coming in second and Jason third.

After the game, Jason was asking me why he always seemed to loose at dice and card games. We talked a bit about how he did not always loose, but how it could seem that way. And how with most card and dice games it was all about luck. There usually was very little skill involved.

Jason said that he much prefered board games like Risk and card games like Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh, which after thinking about it, makes perfect sense. He has more control over these games…there is some element of luck in the games (dice rolls and draws of a card) but there is also a lot of strategy in them.  Same with his video games. He can practice and work at it and get better/faster/smarter. He can improve his game and work towards winning. In a game like Cinq-o it is all about luck. Luck of the roll or luck of the draw.

Funny thing is that I prefer card games and dice games rather then complex strategy games. I like how the playing field is level…younger players have the same chance as older of winning. I also don’t have to work quite so hard…I don’t have to think 5 plays ahead. They are more straightforward and thus more fun for me.

I am sure that there is a right-brained/left-brained parallel in there…actually it does make sense from that point-of-view. Dice games and card games are more sequential. More straight forward. Strategy games (including video games) require you to see the whole picture…to take into consideration many variables and to see how a move you make now affects the play down the road.

I think that strategy games also play to a right-brained learners’ sense of fairness…after all, if you work harder you will become better and that is only fair. With games of luck, there is no rhyme or reason to who wins really…which is very frustrating to Jason! Mainly because he is just as likely to loose as he is to win. And of course at this point in time, winning is everything. (Although I will say he is much better at loosing now…no getting upset or mad. He just started loosing interest towards the end of the game when he thought he had no chance to win. But he did not ask to stop playing! Big improvement!)

~Steph

I have seen this story in many variations and wanted to capture it here. I think that it really captures the potential problems with treating all kids “equally” rather then individually.

This version is by R.H. Reeves, as quoted in the book The Art of Education by Linda Dobson (page 186).

Animal School 

Once upon a time, the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of a “New World,” so they organized a school.  They adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming, and flying.  To make it easier to administer, all animals took all subjects.

The duck was excellent in swimming, better in fact than his instructor, and made excellent grades in flying, but he was very poor in running.  Since he was low in running he had to stay after school and also drop swimming to practice running.  This was kept up until his webbed feet were badly worn, and he was only average in swimming.  But average was acceptable in school, so nobody worried about that except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of the class in running but had a nervous breakdown because of so much makeup in swimming.

The squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed frustrations in the flying class where his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of from the tree-top down.  He also developed charley horses from over-exertion, and he got a “C” in climbing and a “D” in running.

The eagle was a problem child and had to be disciplined severely.  In climbing class he beat all the others to the top of the tree but insisted on using his own way of getting there.

At the end of the year, an abnormal eel that could swim exceedingly well and could also run, climb and fly a little had the highest average and was valedictorian.

The prairie dogs stayed out of school and fought the tax levy, because the administration would not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum.  They apprenticed their children to the badger and later joined the groundhogs and gophers to start a successful private school.

~Steph

Steph over at A Room of My Own has added her thoughts to the conversation I raised in On Being Ready. I started to respond over there, but my reply got a bit long, so I figured that I would move it over here. Isn’t blogging fun? I love these kind of conversations that make you think and see different angles on the same thought.

I think that what Steph talks about is trying to find the balance in being child-led and letting kids develop on their own timetables (I love her examples of teachers and people using what we know about child development to try to “speed up” kids development or get all kids “where they should be” at the same time). She says:

It is a natural process. In my opinion, it is the handiwork of God, much like a baby’s development in the womb or the growth of a blossoming flower. We can create conditions that help a child develop, unhindered by stress or lack of enriching experiences, but we can not speed it up.

I think that this hits the nail on the head and is the point that I was trying to make in my earlier post. The hard part comes from the not knowing exactly when a child is ready and worrying about if we are “doing enough”. Questioning if we are providing enough of those “enriching experiences”. Worrying that by not finding the “right program” we are actually hindering this development…not just not helping it, but actually hindering it. Is the reason that they are not learning something because they are not ready or because I am not doing enough? And that is where the fear comes in, I mean how scary is that? I have heard it called “unschooling panic” and have yet to meet a homeschooling mom (no matter what approach she is taking) who does not have moments of questioning what she is doing. It is this fear (of actually hindering our kids learning in someway) that causes the main struggle of the homeschooling parent…can I really trust my kids to learn everything that they need to learn.

The problem is that there is no guide book that gives us the answers. Because there is no “one right answer” for all kids! ”Enough” for one kid might be too much for another or not enough for a third. All we can do is look to our kids. And that too is a hard thing to explain …it is not that you sit back and do nothing until they tell you they are ready…it is finding that balance and reading their signals…if they absolutely hate something and you can tell that it is not working, then you back off and either wait or look for a different approach. But even that can be tricky!

I have told this story before about when Jason learned to read. I had realized that he had all the pieces but was struggling to put it all together (mainly because of his perfectionism). I thought maybe a more structured approach might help and checked Phonics Pathways out of the library. It was awful for him. He hated it and I did not push him on it. I then tried 100 EZ Lessons and there was a big difference. He still did not really want to do the lessons (thus causing me lots of unschooling angst!) but during the lessons I could see the pieces fitting together for him (something that I never saw while trying Phonics Pathways). It was obvious that this was making sense for him. He never asked to do a lesson, but he did show interest while we were doing it. I also at one point told him that he did not have to do all 100 lessons, but he said that he wanted to and he did.

What I am slowly coming to realize (and am still in no way perfect about this) is that you need to look at the “why” behind what you are doing rather then just looking at the “what”. With Jason, I started looking into a more structured approach to reading because I could see that he was ready but was just not putting the pieces together. So I was looking for something that would help him put the pieces together. Not something that would get him to read because a kid his age should be reading. It was no different then when I introduced him to the world of video game cheats…I saw something that I thought would help him acheive a goal and I showed it to him. But because it involved something “schooly”, I questioned whether I should.

Now I also had a friend of mine, who, after I told her this story, commented that maybe if I had tried 100 EZ Lessons when he was younger, he might not have taken so long to learn how to read. Which totally missed the point of my story! The point was not that 100 EZ Lessons is a great curriculum and got Jason reading. The point was that a kid needs to be ready and needs to get the information in a way that makes sense to him. If you do not have that combination, you will just be hitting your head (and his!) against a wall. If I had tried to use 100 EZ Lessons with Jason when he was 5, I am convinced that it would not have worked at all because I strongly believe that was not ready then. And when he was ready at 8, Phonics Pathways did not work because it was totally the wrong approach. And by wrong approach I don’t just mean the wrong curriculum. For some kids, any curriculum is the wrong approach. They need something hands on or need to experiment or just read or whatever works for them. No kid is one-size-fits-all.

Steph makes many more really good points in her post. Her best being that she believes that there is “no one ‘right’ way to school, or unschool, or a combination of both. Each family finds its own path, based on the unique and ever changing needs of the child”.

Definitely! The key is being open to realizing when something is not working. And being willing to change and look for something that does work. To be able to realize that if something is not working, the problem is not with the child. The problem is with the approach or that the child just is not ready yet. And that is ok.

I hope that I don’t sound like I have all the answers or never question if we are doing “enough”. Because I definitely do. All the time. It comes with the territory because, I, like all other homeschooling parents, want the best for my children and want to do right by them. After all that is why I made the decision to homeschool in the first place.

~Steph

P.S. We made it to the beach this afternoon and met up with our friends. The water is still cold, but the boys did not let that stop them! I really love it down here…

This is a recreation of the post I lost the other night…I had the boys re-tell their stories, which they thoroughly enjoyed. The idea was to record some of the small snippets of learning that happened throughout the day. These kind of exchanges happen all the time and help reassure me that the boys are learning constantly.

Kyle and Math

As we were getting ready to go to the Nova Unschoolers park day (why do they always do this when we are trying to get somewhere?) I had this conversation with Kyle:

Kyle: 5 is not an equal number, is it?
Me: (guessing because I am not sure exactly what he is talking about) Do you mean, even?
Kyle: Yeah
Me: You’re right. 5 is not an even number.
Kyle: What is an even number?
Me: It is a number that can be evenly divided by 2 (or in half) with nothing left over.
Kyle: You mean like 20? 
Me: Yes, just like 20.

And then I grabbed some pennies and showed him how if you lined the pennies up in 2 columns, the even numbers lined up evenly and the odd numbers had an “odd” penny left over. Since then he has occasionally come up and verified if various numbers are even or odd.

Jason and Government

We are currently listening to the Children of the Lamp series and really enjoying it. One of the story lines led to a great discussion of the difference between a president and a judge and how our government is set up (three branches, checks and balances etc). Don’t ask how we actually got there, but we did! And Jason was really interested.

Storytelling

I have to remember to do this more often as both boys really enjoy it and it is good practice at organizing one’s thought. Jason seems to really go for subtleness…he put a bit of thought into his stories and really choose the words carefully believe it or not. He also wanted to play around with the capitalization of the letters. We have been talking about what gets capitalized and what does not lately. He remembered in one of his books seeing the capital letters all over the place and wanted to see what that would look like. He decided that it made it harder to read, but he still liked it.

Once you get Kyle’s mind going, you can’t stop him. He actually had about 6 different variations of this story that he wanted to tell. I had to stop him after 3 as we had to get going.

One of the hardest things is to stop Jason from editing Kyle’s stories. He is always giving plot suggestions and correcting Kyle’s verb tenses. I have to remind him that this is Kyle’s story and it is up to him to decide how it goes.

A Short and Dumb Story
by Jason 

OnCe UPoN a TiMe ThErE wAs a GuY. He gOt SquIsHeD By a bOuLdeR.
THe EnD

A Little Bit of a Longer Short and Dumb Story
by Jason

Once upon a time there was a guy. He looked up and saw a boulder. It squished him.
The End.

Rock
by Kyle 

Once upon a time, there was a rock.
The End

Run Away from Big Boulder with Eyes
by Kyle

Once upon a time, there was a guy. He saw a big boulder with eyes. The man saw the boulder going after him. The man turned. The rock turned. And then the man was so tired that he hide behind a bush. Since the boulder was so big, he could see the man. And then the boulder squished the man.
The End.

Run Away from Rock with Eyes
by Kyle

Once upon time, there was a rock. A man saw the rock that had eyes. The man runned and the rock ran after the man. And then the man turned and then the rock turned. And then the man was tired. So he hid behind a bush. Since the rock was so thin he couldn’t see the man behind the bushes. Then the rock keep on running. Then the man hopped on the rock and then the rock felt the man on his back. And then the rock flipped over and squished the man.
The End.

Every so often a discussion comes up on one of my homeschool email list about things that kids must learn. I find these discussions very interesting. Recently, on Homeschooling Creatively, talk turned to the learning of multiplication tables. One mom wrote “I think those tables are pretty darn important. You just can’t get through the math without knowing them.” I thought about this a little bit and on the surface it seemed to make a lot of sense. After all, much of higher math depends on knowing your times tables.

But then I started thinking…but what if you can get by? It is challenging assumptions like this that has helped free my thinking so that I can look at what might work best for Jason. If I think that a skill is critical and must be learned, then we are stuck and can not move forward, when moving forward might be just what we need to do. What if moving forward actually gives him the reason to learn the critical skill? Or what if putting it aside lets him have the time to mature to where he can grasp it?

Right brained kids definitely need to see the why, the whole part, where they are going…so maybe Jason will find the motivation to learn multiplication when he wants to determine the area of something (or wants to know how much money I owe him for 10 weeks of overdue allowances). Or like my friend’s son when he realized that multiplication was way faster then adding to figure things out.

For me, letting go of things that my kids must learn is critical. When I realized that if all else failed, Jason could always use a calculator to do his math facts when he got older, it let me relax. I don’t feel as much pressure to “get him to learn”. This allows me to take the time to look for ways that make sense to him and let him learn it on his schedule.

Does this mean that I think that multiplication facts aren’t important? No. Knowing them definitely (in my mind) makes a lot of things easier. And we do work on them. I just try not to stress over how fast he is learning them and we do not make learning them our sole focus in math. He definitely understands the concept which in my mind is much more important then being able to spout off a memorized answer.

Realizing that if he never learned them, he could still manage to have a productive, successful life has let me back off and give him the space and time that he needs. I have to trust that he will pick them up over time. He still does not really know all his addition facts either and still needs to calculate what 6+7 or 8+5 is (he does this by figuring out that 6+4=10, 7-4=3 and 10+3=13, and he does this pretty danged fast - pretty neat for this left-brained girl!) But I have seen these too gradually come easier and easier for him.

A friend of mine just shared her son’s reading story on a local list. He has CAPD and she tried just about every known reading program including individual tutoring. At 12 (!) he still could not read. At that point, she decided that if he never learned to read that would be ok with her and she backed off trying to teach him. She just started focusing on his strengths and would read whatever he needed read. 6 months later, he picked up a manga book and read it cover to cover. Then he read the instruction manual for a video game he was really into. Now at 14 you would never know that he was not reading 2 years ago.

This set off a storm of posts about how can you say that it is ok if he never learned to read! How can you survive in this world if you can’t read! I think that they missed the point of her story. She was not saying that a parent should not help their child to read if they need help. She was not saying that she did not want her child to ever learn to read and that not being able to read is a good thing. She was saying that no matter what a parent does, if the child is not ready, that child will not be able to read. The child has to be ready. And I would add to that, a child needs to get information in a way that makes sense to him/her.

The biggest thing that I get from her story (and something I try to always keep in mind) is that sometimes you have to let go and trust that your child will learn what they need to learn.

~Steph

Also published in Unschooling Voices #1. 

Before bed this evening, Kyle wanted to tell me something. He said that he figured out what 90+20 was. He then preceeded to explain to me that he first realized that 90+10=100. And 20-10=10. And 100+10=110. Therefore 90+20=110. He was very proud of himself for figuring it out.

Since things have been so busy lately, I had been feeling guilty for not doing more math with him. (He is a strange boy and actually enjoys workbooks!) But it has not held him back…I noticed today when we were trying to kill some time by playing Pig* that Kyle was starting to be able to add the higher numbers. Pretty cool. I love watching natural learning at work.

* To play Pig, roll two dice, add them together and the first one to 100 wins. To make it more interesting, if you roll a 1, you get no points. If you roll double 1 you loose all of your points - Kyle loves it! (And no, I don’t know why it is called Pig!) But it is much more fun then drilling and flash cards that is for sure. We found the game in The I Hate Mathematics Book by Marilyn Burns. I now carry a pair of dice with me so we always have something to play.

~Steph

I have a new post up over at Life Without School called The Isolated Homeschooler.

” One of the more common arguments against homeschooling is that it “isolates” kids. That somehow kids, if not in school, will never be exposed to the world at large. That homeschoolers sit at home all day with no interaction with anyone outside their family.

I have found quite the opposite has been true for us. School can become a crutch – you don’t need to look beyond it because all your kids’ social or academic opportunities are provided for. But I do not want to be limited by what the school can provide. Homeschooling, for me, has led to a greater involvement in my community precisely because I do not have the school to depend on to meet the needs of my kids. I can not just sit back and let the school provide everything; I need to stay active and engaged in my kids’ lives.”

Check it out!

~Steph

My friend Barb and her family were highlighted in this tv news piece on unschooling. Be sure to click on “Leaving Normal School Behind” to see the news clip.

Barb and her boys did a wonderful job at representing homeschoolers. I love some of her quotes even if the reporter did misrepresent a few things (he said that her kids will not receive a diploma and would have to take the GED or take an online course to get a certificate of completion…while it is true that her kids will not receive a diploma from the state of Virginia, she can issue her own diploma. And yes, homeschooled kids without a state issued diploma can and do get into colleges but that is the subject for a different post).

It was fun to see Barb’s boys…what I want to know is where the piles of books and papers and the overflowing bookcases were…at least that is how my house looks!

Update: Barb has posted more information about the interview on her blog. I find it really interesting that even with a story on unschooling they had to have their obligatory “mom teaching kids at the kitchen table” shot. Too funny.

~Steph

Still have a major cough and not as much energy, but starting to feel a bit more normal. We had a fun, relaxed day where things just sort of flowed very nicely. We got up and moving this morning and went to Jason’s OT. He enjoyed it and is working on something from there for me for mother’s day, but it is a secret. After that we came home and did a few miscellaneous things.

One thing that we found was a fun tangram website. Jason was way better at this then I was! We played it as a family and between the three of us got pretty good.

After that we decided to go and explore a new-to-us park. I had heard there was one really close by, but had never gone to check it out (don’t ask me why!) Had a really good time…there was a small creek and a path into the woods that we explored a bit. The boys rode their scooters a bit and chased each other all over.

After we got home, we read a bit more from the This Book is About Time by Marilyn Burns and learned about time zones, the international date line as well as the earlier clocks like the sundial and water clocks. The boys really want to make a water clock so I just need to try to round up a few things so we can give it a shot.

We finished up the day with the boys building with their legos and me actually cleaning out our closet. You can actually walk into it now! Definitely an improvement.

The nice thing about the day was that I actually felt like doing things…it has been a couple of days since I have been overly motivated. Colds do have a habit of doing that though, don’t they? And there never seems to be a good time to get a cold…hmmm…I am trying picture what that would look like! A time when lying around in bed all day would be fine, a time when there is nothing else going on, nothing that needs to be done. Do times like those exist? I guess not. If they do, I may need to try to find it…preferably when I am not sick!

~Steph

I started responding to a comment to my post yesterday about  Typical Days by momof3feistykids (another Stephanie no less!) and realized that it would probably make a good blog post in and of itself. She said in part:

“Wonderful post! I am not an unschooler, in the usual sense of the word (I make them do plenty of “schooly” stuff that they wouldn’t choose on their own). But I, too, pay attention to what they’re learning when they’re “goofing off” and even document it in my home school records. I have long suspected that one of the biggest parts of becoming an unschooler must be (in Charlotte Mason’s words) *developing the habit of attention.* Training oneself to notice what the kids are doing, thinking, and learning during their “free time” must be half the battle.”

Obviously she has a great point. Seeing the learning that happens everyday can help no matter how you homeschool. I do know that sometimes it can be hard to value the less formal “everyday” learning as much as the more typical “school-type” learning. After all, we spent 12+ years learning that only “school-type” learning was important. Yet, once we got out of school, did we stop learning?  Of course not. And the interesting thing is that I bet for most of us, that learning looks less like school and is most definitely interest driven.

I do not know if we really fall into the unschooling camp…there are so many debates over who/what is true unschooling so I try to stay away from defining ourselves. We are very relaxed in our homeschooling, some things we do look schooly and others most definitely do not. I base what we do on what works for us rather then try to follow a specific philosophy. The great thing is that since we are homeschooling we can do what works for us and adjust if we need to.

~Steph

Coincidently enough, two of my homeschool email lists had posts from moms wanting to relax their homeschooling and asking what a “typical unschooling” day looked like. Well, we never really have a “typical day” around here as much of the time we are winging it. I have general ideas of things that I want to accomplish each day and we have our activities schedule which drives the schedule somewhat. A lot of what I capture on my blog is “typical day” stuff and so I have added a “Typical Days” category.

Yesterday was not exactly a typical day, but I thought that I would write about it because I think that it illustrates what a lot of people worry about when they start becoming “more relaxed”. That the kids won’t learn anything if they don’t “do school”.

I woke up all set to get the kids moving to their dentist appointments at 11am. Kyle woke up not feeling well and said that he had a headache. Turns out that he was running a fever. Time to rework our plans! Luckily other then the dentist appointment, we had nothing that we had to do. We had a very busy week…drove back from the beach on Monday. Tuesday we had co-op and karate. Wednesday we went to a cool traveling show called Native Lands and spent the whole day outside. Thursday we got our hair cut (and man did we need it) and games class. So today we were going to hang out at home. Which I guess is what we wound up doing, just slightly different then planned.

Since Kyle was feeling so badly and I had some things that I needed to get done for VaHomeschoolers I decided that it would be fine to have a total veg day. Which meant that Jason played a lot of game cube and we all watched a lot of movies. And did nothing that looked like school. So what did we do all day? Let’s see…

Jason spent a lot of time working on his Paper Mario game. The interesting thing is that in the course of playing that video game, he needed cheats. Which meant that he needed to use the computer to find them (I am letting him do his own research and typing with my help). And once he found them he needed to find the applicable part. Which meant not only was he reading but he was skimming (the cheat was over 100 pages long and had walkthrough and tons of other game information) and using the info that he was reading to figure out where he was. Not an easy task for a kid who has only been reading for a year. Oh and don’t forget that since he was using my laptop he spent quite a bit of time using my touchpad (working his fine motor skills - this was not really easy for him!) At one point in the cheats they had written the answers to some riddles backwards…at first this really challenged Jason, but by the end he was getting the hang of it (this was a great use of his visualization skills - something that he works on a lot in OT). Then the game itself is just a series of problems to solve, trial and error. Lots of critical thinking and problem solving and experimentation going on there. At a couple of points during the day, Jason did go outside and ride his scooter and jump on the trampoline as well.

I read several books to Kyle while he laid on the couch and we watched part of the original Pink Panther movie. The boys did not really like it too much, so we switched over to Ice Age. I love that I now have a laptop because I can spend more time with the boys while they are playing or watching and I can get things done as well. It is fun to just hang out with them and we had some really nice and fun convesations. Kyle napped on and off throughout the day and I got some things done around the house. Then I remembered that we had taped a program off the science channel called the Unfolding Universe…all about black holes and space and cool stuff. We watched that until bedtime. Jason really got into it and was asking all sorts of questions and was surprised by some of the things that he learned (like how when the sun becomes a red giant it will engulf the earth’s orbit so that the earth is just an ember rotating within the sun).

So here we basically had a day where “all” we did was watch tv and play video games. Yet I can see where learning did take place. Does this mean that all I want is for my kids to sit around and play video games and watch tv all day? No…but not because learning won’t happen (because it does). Rather because there is so much to life and part of my job is to expose them to new and exciting things. So we do many different things, but those things also include video games and tv. For us, it is all about that ellusive thing called balance.

What I have found is that seeing the learning that happens when we are “doing nothing all day” helps me become more comfortable with relaxing my homeschooling. As my friend Shay likes to say, “there are no educational emergencies”. If you “miss” something and it is really important enough, there will be plenty of other opportunities to learn it.

So my advice to you, if you want to relax your homeschooling, is to start small and ease into it. Start letting go of your “school work” gradually and start looking for the learning that is going on. My personal feeling is that everyone has their own comfort level and you need to work with that. Of course others recommend to go cold turkey at first…whatever works for you! There is no right way or right destination. Follow your gut, look for the learning and see where it takes you. That is the beauty of homeschooling. You are never stuck. If something is not working for you, keep looking until you find something that does work. It is up to you.

And now it looks like I caught what Kyle had. Joy of joys. I think that we may need to find a friend for Jason to go play with so us two sickies can crash all day. The fun never ends…

~Steph 

A friend of mine started a community homeschooling blog called Life Without School and asked me to be a featured author. From the blog description:

“Life Without School is an on-line publication and blogging community. We live our lives without school. For some, Life Without School begins as a conscientious choice that is whole-heartedly embraced. For others, it begins as a quest for second chances and new opportunity….”

 Right now there are 9 featured authors and periodic guest authors. Definitely check it out. Up now is a great post by Tammy on Finding This Life about how she came to unschooling and what that means to her family. I love her take on it…rings very true to me.

“How we educate our kids is a perspective before it’s a practice. All homeschoolers might use textbooks, use real-life experience, use lists, use all the different tools available to learn (yes, even unschoolers). The difference to me between an “unschooler” and any other method is not necessarily what we do, but the perspective that got us here in the first place. What we “do” all day is irrelevant. It’s the “why” we do that’s revealing. It’s the “why” behind the practices described in books, elists and websites that explain far more than the actual educational tool itself.”

What a wonderful journey!

I am constantly learning lessons during this homeschooling journey we are on (probably more so then the boys!). Often I end up re-learning those lessons many times. But it is good to get a reminder every once in awhile. Really good.

A couple of days ago, the boys decided that it was time to go toy shopping. Between Jason’s birthday, Christmas and over two months of untouched allowances, they each had a bit of money burning their pockets and I had been putting them off for awhile. My only condition was that Jason needed to figure out how much money he had to spend.

Some background…a few years ago I started acting as bank for the boys, mainly because we tend to forget to give them their allowances. This way we have a written record of when we give them their allowance. When they get Christmas or Birthday money they can either keep it in their banks or “deposit” it with me. Then if they are out and want to spend their money, we deduct it from their “account” when we get home.

It had been a while since we had updated their balance, so we needed to add in Christmas money, Birthday money, 10 weeks of allowance (!) as well as deduct for money spent on snacks after swimming and few miscellaneous purchases.

I have to say that I was duly impressed. Jason did adding and subtracting (much of it involving carrying) in his head without missing a beat. No hemming, no “I can’t do this”, no “this is too hard”. He just did it. Because it was real and it would give him an answer to something that he really wanted to know. And that is the lesson that I need to remember.

Jason has a love/hate relationship with math. He is very instinctual and can completely get math concepts but he HATES remembering math facts. My challenge has been to balance these two sides. As he gets better at remembering the math facts, he gets more confidant at figuring things out on his own. But he does need a push now and then. So we do “do math” but not tons of drill and I try to throw in enough “fun math” (he likes the Marilyn Burns books like The I Hate Mathematics Book which focus more on the fun math concepts).

Now that we have started multiplication, we have been having lots of conversations about not seeing why he needs to know math. Part of this I realize is that I tended to do most of the everyday math for him. The idea being that he would see how I used math and start wanting to do it on his own (please don’t laugh…it is working great this way for Kyle! He is constantly telling me to stop so he can figure out things on his own.) But Jason has no problem with letting people do things for him…not because he is lazy, but because he is a perfectionist. If someone can do something easier/better/faster then he can he prefers to let that person do it.

So I now make a point of letting him do the everyday math we come across. It has become a running joke between us and I think that he is seeing that there is a point in knowing his math facts. In fact I think that I scored some points when we talked about how mulitplication would have been a much faster way of calculating how much allowance he was due (he manually added up his allowance 10 times rather then multiplying by 10).

But it is times like these where he does math pretty much effortlessly that help ease my worries that math computation will never be easy for him. It will be. I know that. I just have to remember it. And if all else fails he can use a calculator….

Also published in the 4th Homeschooling Country Fair.

Also published on Life Without School.