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!

What Are We Up To?

The pets are all doing well, Zippy the rat went walk about for a couple of days but was found in the bottom of Stylish's chest of drawers this morning. The noisy myna will be ready for release soon, and is learning to catch it's own food by instinct very successfully.

Stylish is still going with the science textbook, and has been playing a geography game online, learning about the different provinces of Italy, now that she has the globe down pat.

Currently she is watching a show about some young British people who have traveled to India to work in a sweat shop factory. She is is awe of the low wages, stifling conditions, and the cost of groceries in comparison to the low wages. I suspect she will understand more about why we prefer second hand shopping, and perhaps think I'm less of a stickler for fair trade and more of a concerned world citizen.

Plans for 2010

After a discussion about the difference between the UK and the USA I decided to make some plans, or at least set some goals for this year. We're going to look at some maps and learn where countries, and continents and big cities are. We're also going to do some history because I believe history and geography are very closely linked ... Queen Victoria didn't rule from the USA.

So today on my way home from the city I stopped in at a great discount book shop and bought some books about prehistoric people, Ancient Egyptians, and the Crusades. Spikee got some dinosaur ones and a crocodile one. They were all $1 each which is a bit of a bargain! Stylish also got a book all about interesting rat facts (interesting to her anyway - spare me from hearing more) which she has already buried her head in for half an hour. I managed to get myself a book to! It's called The Heretic Queen, and it's about Queen Nefertari and how she came to marry Ramses II. It starts out beautifully, I started to read a little bit on the bus home but then realised Spikee was falling asleep so I spent the rest of the trip talking about lively things.

Last week end we bought Stylish a new bike! Her old one was getting too small, knees hitting handle bars is a good indicator that you've outgrown your bike, plus it was kind of rusty. We were going to lay by one for her birthday but then we saw the perfect bike on sale so we grabbed it and it came home that same day. She is overjoyed with it - despite the fact it's pink. I actually think it's a lovely pink! And I suspect it's grown on her too, I doubt this will cause a pink revolution in the house though.