Whiteboards

One simple thing that has inspired and helped us so much on our unschooling journey, is the presence of a couple of whiteboards in our house.  Blackboards are good too.

When I was growing up we had a big blackboard in what we called our Rec Room.  It was fastened to one wall and we played school all the time with it.  This is how I learned to read the summer before I went to Kindergarten.  My sister, who is 4.5 years older than me taught me, using some old readers we had floating around the house and that blackboard.  She just mimicked what her teachers had done and I learned to read!  We had that blackboard for decades and we did all kinds of things with it:  I loved to draw on it, we wrote down song lyrics or poems, we wrote notes to each other, we played hangman, etc.  When we were putting on shows for our parents, it became the marquee announcing the show!

When my kids were little and we were just starting on our homeschooling adventure, I had my husband paint the back of our kitchen door with chalkboard paint.  I used it to teach the kids phonics and simple math problems.  It was so handy and made teaching so easy.  I could do short little lessons while cooking!  And the kids liked writing with chalk much, much better than sitting at the table with a pencil and workbook.  I discovered I could write something there on the board and they'd study it on their own over breakfast.

Then we moved to our current house.  I put up a small chalkboard but it kept falling down!  Then we finished the basement and I had my husband put up a great big white board down there.  When I was feeling schooly that area was our 'classroom' and when I was feeling unschooly it was our 'learning center'!  LOL!  But the truth was I didn't like going down into the basement very much so it didn't get that much use.  Now it is pretty much abandoned.

The old abandoned white board has worn this grinning set of braces for many months now!

Instead we got one of those chalkboard/whiteboard easels.  That has been such a blessing!  It has gotten so much use over the years.  It is pretty beat up.  We use it a lot.  Sometimes for short lessons in math and Latin, sometimes just for fun.

The current state of the white board easel.  A little comic by Becky.

The flip side:  I think a friend of my 11 yo did these drawings.

My two youngest have little whiteboards by their beds.  They often write on them.

Now of course you do have to be careful with whiteboards.  I like to buy the low-odor variety of markers.  If you have little ones who might decide to decorate your walls with a marker, you probably want to put them somewhere hard to access.  One thing I've found for that sort of thing, is to keep all the markers on top of the fridge or some such place and then just take them down when your child requests and you can supervise any little ones OR when the little ones are napping or perhaps strapped into a high chair!  And one must be diligent about putting those caps back on tightly!

So something simple like having a white board or chalkboard to write/draw on has really encouraged my kids on a path towards literacy, been a wonderful creative outlet for them and is also very handy when I, the parent, want to impart some knowledge in a quick informal way.