Monday, March 21, 2011

Unschooling Monday!


Today was a busy day (like every other day). Summer is in its' last days and the last week or two have been absolutely divine. Perfect weather for walking to a friend's house and picking blackberries on the way, gardening, and also for more mundane tasks like washing and scraping paint.

We were about to throw out an old blanket when Spikee decided to make it into a boat in the back yard and asked me to go boating. So we got an atlas and used the map of the continents to decide where we were going to visit. We visited Antarctica and threw snow balls, Africa and saw zebras and ate couscous, Asia where we ate stir fry with chopsticks and spring rolls, and South America where we spotted macaws and poison dart frogs before a visit to Machu Picchu . Tomorrow we have a few more continents to visit and many more sharks to fight off on our journey. Angus had a lovely time, and the dog did too, all the while driving us crazy.

Spikee has also been really enjoying work books. He decided he wanted a text book at about the same time Stylish announced a desire to do maths out of a book (hardly a coincidence) He has one with letters and one with numbers and his dexterity is notably better now than it was only a month ago. Yesterday he drew his first person!

Stylish is enjoying the girl guides but today staged a little protest by refusing to sing what she describes as the "God" song, about "how he made hills". The teacher was rather unsure what to do because she's never encountered that before (free thinking is disturbing). She has prepared an activity for everyone to do next week, it is of course about dart frogs. She's written a list of scientific names and everyone has to find out what sort of frog they have.

She's also decided to start doing maths, and asked if we could get her a text book. She's plowing through it and enjoying herself a great deal. I'm surprised by just how much there is in it that I learnt at school but never ever used, and have forgotten. Some of the questions are so blatently stupid I tell her to forget about it. Funnily enough, I remember ripping the answers out of maths text books when she was in school. Now I would never need to do that because she does the maths for her own enjoyment, and only uses the answers to help her.

Anyone who says their child would never be motivated to learn on their own should pay attention to this!

1 comment:

karisma said...

You ripped the answers out? I don't believe you! LOL! I have been known to look for the answers at the back of the book myself if I don't know them so would could hardly do that to the kids now could I?

Yesterday we learned that needles hurt, moles that may be cancerous must be removed and sometimes we have to do things we don't choose or want to do. Not much fun for a kid who never goes to the doctor or gets needles and gets his own way most of the time. :-(