Natural Learning Goes On

Lately, between the health crisis with my aunt and the fact that my daughter is going overseas for a semester (leaving tomorrow!) I have been preoccupied and rather an emotional wreck.  But even under such circumstances, kids, being kids, are still learning.

I went to bed early last night but my 12 yo son had his dad helping him solve some of the problems from Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School.  They were doing this for fun before my son retired to bed.  I came down to the kitchen this morning to find this:

And apparently Becky is back to running her own restaurant.  As you can see she's devised a survey to make sure her customers are satisfied!

I find this kind of thing so heartening.  If kids are given freedom, where they are safe, nurtured and encouraged, they do a fine job of learning.  I know so many moms who are frightened of the idea of letting go and letting their kids take control over their own education.  They say that their kids will only play mindless video games or some such thing.  But I have found in the years that I've been at this, that when kids' lives are tightly regulated they will tend to mindless stuff when they have down time.  But given more freedom they tend to do really cool, creative things just as a matter of course in daily life, like these two rather minor examples. Really, these are just a couple of little incidents among dozens that go on every day.  We, the parents, have to open our eyes, though, to see them and to value them as they should be valued.  I could have taken control and said, okay, today children we are going to do problems from this Wayside school book.  They might have enjoyed it.  But I think it is soooo much better that my son instigated this little activity.  I could have made a lesson plan that involved creating your own survey for your own restaurant, but I think my daughter probably learned more from coming up with the idea herself.

Unschooling Moments of the Week (and some Schooly stuff too)

Unschooly first:  Becky and Sean made paper airplanes, flew them and then ranked them!

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The Winner!

Becky harvested different components of hand me down doll furniture to make one beautiful doll bed!

Current most favored doll.  Her name is Mary.

Cube project from Art Class

Scratch art from art class

Our family Thanksgiving Tree.  A few more leaves have been added!

Some schooly stuff:  Seano's copywork

Becky's math

Seano's Latin

Unschooling Moments of the Week

I wasn't very good at recording things this week.  I seem to only have some shots of thing my 9 year old did.

Can you guess what this is????

Nine year old noticed that I'd somehow gotten these Ziploc vacuum bags.  I think my 18 year old son picked them up when he was running errands for me and remembered that we were out of bags.  I never would have bought these particular kind.  Well, Becky was fascinated by them.  She decided that her Webkinz animals were getting too dusty, so she hauled out our vacuum cleaner and carefully hermetically sealed them in these bags!  Becky's been getting into Webkinz a lot these past two weeks.  She goes in and out with them.  Her cousin introduced her to them and she likes to get on and play with her.

Becky also is enamored with woodworking.  Her dad likes carpentry and she likes to be out in the garage with him when he is working on a project.  So she begged and begged for an early Christmas present (!) once she saw a child-size toolkit in a toy catalog.  What can I say?  She's the youngest and spoiled!  So I gave in and got it for her.  She was so tickled.  She's not allowed to use the tools unless it's under daddy's supervision.  Here is Becky sawing her first board.

Here she is with the final result.  Daddy helped a bit.  It was a thick board and took longer than she expected to saw through with her little (but real!) saw.

Wow, you can see how incredibly messy my house is!!!!  Yikes!  I'll have to clean up more now that I'm taking pictures!

Becky, about midweek, and unbidden by me, decided to write some limericks.

Here are three that she dictated to me:

A Bumblebee

There once was an old bumblebee

Who made a wrong move and stung me.

His stinger fell off and he died of a cough,

That nasty old dead bumblebee.

A Man who Likes Moose

There once was a man from Kaboosh,

Who never ate anything but moose.

If you asked him why,

He would merely give a sigh,

That crazy old man from Kaboosh.

A Girl from the Street

There once was a girl from the street,

Who absolutely adored her meat.

But one tragic day,

She went out to play

And she never got the chance to eat.

We also did some cursive, Latin and Math this week.  And I am continuing to read aloud Jo's Boys, St. Elizabeth and the Three Crowns and this week, we started reading The Story of the Romans by H.A. Guerber (her older brother is listening in on this one as well.)

In Latin we reviewed the present conjugation of the verb to be.  She learned this at Latin Camp this summer, but we've just now gotten up to this point in Linney's Getting Started with Latin.  I wrote it out on the easel chalkboard so she could review whenever she wanted.

So much more went on this week and of course I haven't even included the other kids!  This morning Becky, Sean and I are going on a field trip to an art gallery with our home school group.  So I'm posting this early.  Josh has his Biology test this morning but Will is going to drive him to class and back.  I love having teen drivers!

Unschooling Moment of the Week

My 11 year old got a new slide whistle.  He got it Wednesday evening and recorded himself playing it Thursday morning.