I’ve never seen a geyser before. A friend asked us to go with her family up to the petrified forest. It will be an adventure.
I’ve been noticing that I should be tracking our “school” activities at this point. We are officially home schooling. Oh goodness. More things to track. So much excitement.
We are actively working on Hindi, Spanish, math skills, and history is always a frequent topic in our house. As unschoolers this is all happening in a kind of free form manner.
What does unschooling mean for us? It means that we pursue child-led-education. We don’t follow curriculums and we don’t worry about hitting the milestones exactly when everyone else hits the milestones. It means asynchronous learning. It means having middle school level discussions about the body with pre-readers.
So far unschooling means that we learn all the time, everywhere we go. We cannot put our learning in a building and leave it there. Learning is all around us.
I’m told, by more experienced unschooling parents, that with unschooling the key isn’t to sit down and map out what you will do with a year. You have no idea in advance. The key is to accurately record what you are actually doing and give yourself credit. You won’t be able to predict how your children will learn in advance.
I wouldn’t have guessed that most of our first written down math problems would be in service of selling things in the front yard. If you want to learn to make change, this is the process.
It has already been a busy year for learning things and September is only half-way through. I need to record better. Maybe if I wrote down that yesterday we studied Hindi and read books and cooked panna cotta for the first time (I didn’t cook–Noah and the kids did.) I wouldn’t worry so much that we “aren’t doing anything”. We are doing things. Just not all the things in a set order every day.
Having faith that the future will work out is not my strong suit. I guess there needs to be a first time for everything.
There’s a lot of science you can discuss about petrified wood and geysers. You can get answers from Wikipedia and Ask right there when the kids ask. it’s awesome. I hope you enjoy your trip.
We didn’t spend a lot of time on Wikipedia, but there were nice brochures and signs and we talked about a variety of stuff. 🙂 It was a nice day.
I have one unsolicited suggestion to make. I will suggest you consider using the DragonSpeaks (or whatever it’s called now) voice-to-text to record the learning activities, and to perhaps involve the girls in helping you record the activities. The voice-to-text to save your arms, and involving the girls because it will be interesting to see what they consider ‘learning activities’ both at first and after you’ve all had some practice at remembering and recording them. If the girls can use the voice-to-text themselves, it would also be a neat way to have some language & narrative samples as they grow and develop.
I have the program and you are right that I should try harder to use it. 🙂
I agree that it will be neat to hear what they think they are learning.