Jeopardy!

Watch Jeopardy with your kids.  This does many things:

1.  If you can answer at least one question that a contestant can't, your kids will think you are really smart!

2.  This may spark their curiosity about a variety of topics.  Days later my kids will come back and ask about a particular question and want to know more about it.

3.  It is a fun bonding time with your kids.

We don't watch Jeopardy every night.  We can go for months and not watch it. I record the shows and when we have some downtime we'll watch a bunch in one fell swoop.

Enchanted Learning

I used stuff from Enchanted Learning a lot when my kids were younger.  Now that my youngest is nine, I don't use it much (in fact it might have been a year since I've gone to their site).  But when the kids were younger I found that it was a great resource.  If a child was interested in a particular topic, I'd check out Enchanted Learning to see if there were any neat print outs I thought my child would enjoy.  My youngest daughter likes cut and paste stuff and coloring. The boys liked puzzle pages and dot to dots better.  I'd print out the pages and stick them on our breakfast table.  Sometimes the kids would go right to them and sometimes they would sit there for a couple of days before being noticed.  And sometimes they'd just get used for scrap paper!  Sometimes there'd be something that I'd intentionally want to teach and then I'd use them as a basis for a short one on one lesson.

Foreign Exchange

One way to enrich your family life is to host foreign exchange students.  I think one reason I like doing this is that since I can't travel myself, I can do it vicariously through foreign exchange.  Now, I'm not up for it every year because so much is often going on, but we've managed to host 4 different times over the last 13 years.

The first two times we did this, it was through a program our church was involved with, the goal of which was to promote peace in Northern Ireland.  This program took one Catholic child and one Protestant child from Belfast and brought them together for one month in the U.S.  This was a pretty structured program.  We had to agree to attend certain events held in our area for the Irish kids.  These events were actually quite fun for my children to join in as well.  They were things like a big fair that a local country club held for the kids or going to a water park as a group.  Initially we didn't know where we were going to put the kids in our house.  We lived in a very small rambler at the time.  However, it had a damp ugly basement.  The basement had been finished off by the previous owners.  The decor was a 1970's Italian Wine Bar.  Oh my, was it ugly!  Fake brick, exposed particle board which I think the former owner thought resembled cork.  It didn't.  Ugly dark wood paneling.  Fake painted 'wooden' beams.   The two nice things were that they put in really nice Italian tile on the floor.  However, since it was chilly down there and my little kids played there, we wound up putting carpeting over it.  There was a very ugly but very powerful wood stove, which I grew to love.

Anyway, I digress.  There was a sort of room at the back of this that we used for storage.  When I impulsively decided we should host some Irish girls, we wound up cleaning out that room, scrubbing, vacuuming and dusting it.  We had my husband's childhood bed in storage and we borrowed another one.  I bought an old dresser with a mirror from a used furniture shop, hung up some pictures we had in storage from my old apartment, and finally bought some new matching comforters and a couple of cute throw rugs.  Voila!  We had a passable guest room.  So the girls stayed there.

It was a wonderful experience, not without some strain and inconvenience.  But the benefits far outweighed any of that.

                                                           
The next foreign exchange student was some years later.  We had moved to a bigger house but one that didn't have a finished basement.  So we finished it.  One reason why I was excited to have a guest room down there was so we could host again.  This time we hosted a 15 year old French boy for three weeks.  A desperate call came out over the yahoo list of a local homeschool group begging for someone to take this boy!  Apparently the time was drawing nigh, when he was supposed to arrive but no host family had been found.  So we volunteered.  Charles-Hubert was a funny kid.  His parents were desperate to get him into something other than videogames.  However, my kids were huge gamers at the time so he pretty much played videogames over here.  Occasionally I'd drag him out to do some sightseeing, only problem was, he absolutely wilted in the heat here.  Poor thing.  But it was still a good experience.  It's neat to see your corner of the world through someone else's eyes.  I was very nervous cooking for a French kid, assuming he was used to much better fare, but the truth is American junk food seems to appeal to all teenagers, even ones from France!

This past summer we hosted an Austrian student through 4H.  This gentlemen was a 20 year old university student and spoke English very well.  He was absolutely delightful!


So if you can swing it, I highly recommend opening up your home to foreign students.  It is such an enriching experience in so many ways.  We plan to host again in the future.

Decorate with Maps

I think one of the main roles of an unschooling mother is to create an atmosphere in the home that encourages learning.  One way to do this is by putting things on your wall!

For instance, maps!

These are both in our study or computer room.

Here's another U.S. map in our upstairs hallway.  I just kind of stuck up there!

Then you can also get those shower curtains that have the map of the world on them.  This one is kind of cool in that it is from a British Co. so some of the place names or the actual places they note seem to be a bit different from what an American publisher would use or show.

This is the globe in our family room.  It's right under the TV.  My husband got this for his birthday about 9 years ago.  Before that we had one of those standard issue table top globes which worked just fine, too.  We refer to this globe all the time.  One of my kids once joked that if our life was a TV show we'd have a 'going to the globe' theme that would have to play every time we used the globe to find a place.  Having the globe near the TV is actually helpful.  For example, the other night some of us were watching a music history dvd and the professor was talking about how the fashion and music of Turkey became quite popular during the late 18th Cen.  My 18 year old son immediately got up to look at the globe to see where exactly Turkey was in relation to Western Europe.

And to conclude the geography theme here, this is our atlas which has a permanent place on our (very messy) family room coffee table.