Sunday, April 17, 2011

Unschooling

So, I know I said I was against unschooling. I had the standard, "the kids are never going to want to learning anything. They are only going to sit around and watch tv. Blah, blah, blah.". Well, I decided to do some research into unschooling because one should have a stance against something until they fully understand an issue.
I've read a few books (God bless John Holt) and visited some websites and email groups and I am hooked. The idea behind unschooling is fantastic! Children will retain information far better if they are passionate and interested in the subject. Lets be honest with each other for a minute, can you really remember the stuff you learned in the 12+ years of school? Do you remember all the dates of wars, presidents, geometry, etc? After spending 6-8 hours a day, five days a week, for 12 years in school, how much of that stuff did you retain? Were you actually interested in learning about it? Or were you just going through the motions (at least most of the time) because that is what you were supposed to do?
I love learning. I enjoyed school but I struggled in a lot of subjects because I was bored. I didn't like reading a book because that was the book we were studying. The beauty with unschooling is that you and your child can run with their interests and cover all the basis around that subject. For example, lets do dinosaurs because our house as been dino-obsessed for months now. Obviously, you cover science, math (measure dinosaurs, fossil discovery, timeline, etc), language arts (write dinosaur stories, read dino books), thematic play for younger children, history (duh), art, etc. When you approach school this way, it is absolutely insane how much your child retains. Bean is a budding paleontologist. Give him a pictures of a dinosaur and chances are he will know its name, what it ate, and quite possibly the period it lived.
John Holt is the founding father of the unschool movement. I'm reading "How Children Fail" and this quote from him really stuck out:
"Children in school are like children at the doctor's. He can talk himself blue in the face about how much good his medicine is going to do them; all they think of is how much it will hurt or how bad it will taste. Given their own way, they would have none of it.
So the valiant and resolute band of travelers I thought I was leading toward a much -hoped-for destination turned out instead to be more like convicts in a chain gang, forced under threat of punishment to move along a rough path leading nobody knew where and down which they could see hardly more than a few steps ahead. School feels like this to children: it is a place where THEY make you go and where THEY tell you to do things ans where THEY try to make your like unpleasant if you don't do them or don't do them right."

We are a big book family. We head to the library at least once a week. I'm always reading 2+ books at a time. We stumbled across a fantastic series of of short chapter books called Dinosaur Cove. We have been rocketing through them at lightning speed. Bean loves them, of course (boy loves himself some dinosaurs). I love that when we finish a chapter, he begs me to read more. It is a thing of beauty! Monster is the same way with the books he likes. Every week, one book we get always stands out for him (this week is Ten Little Fish). After we finish reading, he says, "More?". I just can't resist. We will read that book 5 times in a row :)
This week I did two new things. I made a sourdough start (I am currently trying to make it into the "sponge" now so I can make bread later) and yogurt (not in the crockpot.) Crockpot yogurt didn't get very thick and I was curious if it would thicken using a different method. It did. It's quite thick and creamy and beautiful. Go me!
Ok, Monster is awake now so I shall sign off until another time...