A Day in the Life of an Almost Unschooling Family
In my heart I am unschooler who is just waiting for her kids to take the reigns.
I'm so bad with keeping things structured; mainly because my boys don't seem to thrive that way. That's too bad too because I KNOW I would! I love structure!! I love routine and I love order. They don't.
They're carefree boys and they like to be continually surprised and excited but they have flat out asked me to plan school things for us to do each day. But often I find while I am sitting around trying to find something fun for us to do today they're already busy and in the thick of learning without me.
Ian was busy playing with our magnetic blocks again this morning. He disassembled yesterday's house and rearranged the blocks to make a giant space ship complete with docking station and landing pad. It only took him minutes to have the whole thing completed. He just amazes me with his creativity and his building skills.
The kid, who will give up on any worksheet within seconds of receiving it (& who gets so overwhelmed with making mistakes), will think nothing of trying a million times to get a building just right even if a part of it keeps collapsing. His space ship was quite impressive and I told him so. I don't think I could have come up with anything like that!
The boys sat down to eat breakfast and watched a bit more of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 1. I'm fearful this is going to be a bit too scary for Alec and Evan but so far they seem OK with it.
I was reminded of why I don't really like worksheets as I watched the boys working and debated if they were learning anything new or just filling in the blanks to say that they had completed math today.
While they were working on math, Evan and I were playing sight word Bang! and he did great with the words. He has so much fun with this really simple game. Of course it doesn't hurt that I almost always loose and get three Bangs first. Today I managed to find all three Bang! cards before he even found one! I think this batch of sight words is finally sinking in! I've noticed his attention to words and letters growing lately.
I think that pride and determination to read other environmental print is really going to help him make reading click-- and hopefully soon. We're seeing signs of it all the time. He's working so hard and doing really well but he knows he can't really read well on his own yet though I keep encouraging him to try. We also read another book called I'm Not Afraid of Anything. We sounded out the title together and took a picture walk. He then read through the entire book and I told him he could put it up in his room since he didn't have any difficulty with this one.
Once we were done reading we started to play Add A Bug together for his math practice. We have long since gotten rid of the 1,2,3 dice that came with the game and we play with regular dice. We also make up rules as we go along; like deciding when to end the game. He did a great job adding up every roll of the dice and also with reading every square he landed on. He wasn't even upset when he lost 15-0; he just shrugged him shoulders and said "oh well, at least the game is over." Apparently as much as he wanted to play, it must not have been as much fun as he remembered. I think he's really outgrowing this game and we need to fin a new game for him to play.
I sent them outside. They ended up playing together until it was time to leave for their dentist appointments. They were having so much fun together and I love to see them soaking up the fresh air and sunshine. They dug in the sand, laid on our dock and watched the fish swimming by, they played Heroes of Olympus, Harry Potter, X-men and more. It was a great day.
I'm so bad with keeping things structured; mainly because my boys don't seem to thrive that way. That's too bad too because I KNOW I would! I love structure!! I love routine and I love order. They don't.
They're carefree boys and they like to be continually surprised and excited but they have flat out asked me to plan school things for us to do each day. But often I find while I am sitting around trying to find something fun for us to do today they're already busy and in the thick of learning without me.
Ian was busy playing with our magnetic blocks again this morning. He disassembled yesterday's house and rearranged the blocks to make a giant space ship complete with docking station and landing pad. It only took him minutes to have the whole thing completed. He just amazes me with his creativity and his building skills.
The kid, who will give up on any worksheet within seconds of receiving it (& who gets so overwhelmed with making mistakes), will think nothing of trying a million times to get a building just right even if a part of it keeps collapsing. His space ship was quite impressive and I told him so. I don't think I could have come up with anything like that!
The boys sat down to eat breakfast and watched a bit more of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 1. I'm fearful this is going to be a bit too scary for Alec and Evan but so far they seem OK with it.
I was reminded of why I don't really like worksheets as I watched the boys working and debated if they were learning anything new or just filling in the blanks to say that they had completed math today.
While they were working on math, Evan and I were playing sight word Bang! and he did great with the words. He has so much fun with this really simple game. Of course it doesn't hurt that I almost always loose and get three Bangs first. Today I managed to find all three Bang! cards before he even found one! I think this batch of sight words is finally sinking in! I've noticed his attention to words and letters growing lately.
I think that pride and determination to read other environmental print is really going to help him make reading click-- and hopefully soon. We're seeing signs of it all the time. He's working so hard and doing really well but he knows he can't really read well on his own yet though I keep encouraging him to try. We also read another book called I'm Not Afraid of Anything. We sounded out the title together and took a picture walk. He then read through the entire book and I told him he could put it up in his room since he didn't have any difficulty with this one.
Once we were done reading we started to play Add A Bug together for his math practice. We have long since gotten rid of the 1,2,3 dice that came with the game and we play with regular dice. We also make up rules as we go along; like deciding when to end the game. He did a great job adding up every roll of the dice and also with reading every square he landed on. He wasn't even upset when he lost 15-0; he just shrugged him shoulders and said "oh well, at least the game is over." Apparently as much as he wanted to play, it must not have been as much fun as he remembered. I think he's really outgrowing this game and we need to fin a new game for him to play.
I sent them outside. They ended up playing together until it was time to leave for their dentist appointments. They were having so much fun together and I love to see them soaking up the fresh air and sunshine. They dug in the sand, laid on our dock and watched the fish swimming by, they played Heroes of Olympus, Harry Potter, X-men and more. It was a great day.
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