A Typical Day

I’ve wanted to write a post about what our days look like around here, to give you some glimpse into what home learning looks like for us. As the name of the blog suggests we are on the ‘unschooly’ side of things for sure and I am deeply committed to self-directed learning.

My kids are still very young and as such they do require my guidance and active engagement much of the time. My oldest can now work by himself for longer stretches of time, but I do believe that exposing him to the myriad wonders of the world and facilitating his access to them, is still my responsibility.  As most unschooling parents will attest, unschooling still requires a good deal of work and dedication from parents. It is up to us to ensure that our children are exposed to a variety of opportunities and that they have the necessary tools and resources to discover and develop their passions (see my post on Pirates and Passions). What our children take from what we offer, what they decide to dive into or reject and how they choose to work and explore, is of course in the final instance, up to them.

As I mentioned, our days have a structure to them, though it is generally very flexible. Around here we’re very early risers (or at least the kids and I are). I know a lot of home learners tend to stay up late and sleep in, but here we’re often up quite literally before the crack of dawn. If I want to have a moment to myself to prepare for the day I need to get up before the kids wake at 5/5:30. If I’ve gone to sleep early enough and my little one hasn’t woken me up more than the usual 5 or 6 times during the night, then I do get up somewhere after his 4 a.m. nursing. At this stage, I usually can’t get back to sleep as I’m simply too excited by the thought of drinking my coffee in peace.

Usually my little one wakes up first and I bring him downstairs. We usually play a little with his blocks or books (he absolutely adores books, even at 15 months), until my older son wakes up.

Around 5:30 my oldest comes downstairs and I make him a cup of herbal tea. I try to set up something on our table to get started with. These days it’s usually artwork.

Just in the last month or two his interest in drawing has increased by leaps and bounds. At present he’s really in to drawing ships and rockets.

After he does a few pictures he usually wants to either do some imaginary play or maybe work on his Lego. He has built some amazing creations and he’s hoping to make a Lego stop animation video as soon as I can find some time to help him with this (and read the camera’s instruction manual, ugh).

While he’s occupied my little one and I get breakfast started. We usually eat around 7 and after we’re done we usually start on either some math, read some stories, check our calendar or just do some writing. My 5 year old has no interest in phonics and prefers to just draw letters in his book. I don’t want to push him, as it has the potential to turn into something he dislikes which I know serves no one.

He does however love math. We have the MathUSee primer book and manipulatives. He loves the manipulatives because they look just like Lego (though don’t stay together as well). My son likes to be the teacher here while I do voices and pretend to be a group of his imaginary friends. We sometimes work a little in the book, though most often we just play with the manipulatives. My son has discovered a good deal working with these, for instance figuring out how to make ten using different combinations of the manipulatives. In any event, the sheer joy I saw in his eyes when we opened the box and he saw the Lego like construction was enough to sell me on their usefulness!

If we don’t have a set class that day I then usually do a little cleaning with my younger son while my older son plays Lego, play-dough, dress up, does more drawings or gets engaged in something else on his own. Sometimes I just read to them while they are playing in their room, or other times we put on a record and play our instruments. We have a snack around 10:00 and at 10:30 I put my little one down for his nap. My oldest usually watches a show for an hour or so while I get the baby to sleep. Depending on how tired I am, I either rest, write or do a little more housework.

Half way through nap-time I usually go upstairs and read to my older son or just hang out and play with him in his room. When the little one wakes up we usually have lunch and then go out.

Our afternoons usually consist of either a bike ride or walk to the park if the weather is nice, or a trip to the pool, library, museum, or a play-date. Yesterday we had to stop on our bike ride to play in the leaves for a good long while.  We’ll often also hit the grocery store and do other errands afterwards and then head home.

Usually I tidy up and try to get dinner started while the kids play some more. My oldest might draw some more, look at his books, or build some more Lego. My youngest loves to help clean so I turn the vacuum on for him, or give him a spray bottle with water and vinegar to wash the kitchen floor. Often we’ll listen to an audio book or some music while we work.

After dinner, it’s usually bath time. Baby goes to bed around 6:30 and my older son watches a little more while I get his little brother down. If my partner is working late (which is usually the case), then I go in to my older son after I get the little one down and read to him. I cuddle him until he falls asleep.

Alas, by 7:30 usually my day is done, although my 15 month old wakes up every hour or two so I usually am up and down the stairs to nurse him back down. By this time I’m truly exhausted and usually read a bit or watch something on Netflix and then go to bed.

So there you have it. That’s pretty much our standard routine during the week.

Once a week my mom comes over so that I can get out for an hour or two on my own.  She also takes the oldest for a sleepover on Fridays which means Friday nights I can have a little more time to myself after getting the little one down. Saturday mornings are nice and feel relaxing for my partner and I with just our toddler.

My partner works 12 hour days so I’m often on my own from morning until bedtime during the week.  I’d love to have more help of course, but I’m so grateful for the help I do have.  I also know that many moms do more with less help and more kids! I’m truly in awe here.

I think things will get a little easier once my fifteen month old is a bit older. The boys will be able to play together a bit more and best of all I’ll finally get to sleep more than an hour or two in a row!

On Praise and Manipulation

Mrs. James: “Good sitting Suzie. I really like the way you’re sitting so quietly. Bobby, look at how quietly Suzie is sitting. Isn’t she doing a good job?”

Bobby (in his head): “What the H.E. double hockey sticks is Mrs. James talking about? Why does she want me to look at Suzie sitting? I can see that Suzie is sitting, but I have no idea why this is so noteworthy. In fact, I’m sitting too. Maybe a little more restlessly because this lesson is pretty boring, but I’m sitting aren’t I? Why is Mrs. James so intent on getting me to notice Suzie’s sitting? And why is she referring to her sitting as good? Can there be ‘bad sitting’? Am I a bad sitter? Is that perhaps what she is trying to say? Why doesn’t she just tell me I’m bad at sitting if that’s the case? Also I wish someone would explain to me why she keeps referring to everything as a job. I’ve never heard of the job of sitter, unless she means a babysitter, but Suzie’s not old enough to babysit is she? Is there another job that involves just bending your knees and lowering yourself onto a chair and staying put? If so, that sounds easy enough. Perhaps I can do that job since I don’t seem to be good at this school thing. But wait, I just remembered that what I think Mrs. James was trying to imply is that I’m no good at sitting either. At least not as good as Suzie is. Maybe she thinks if I watch Suzie more closely I’ll pick up on what good sitting looks like. Maybe she is trying to help me learn to get better at sitting so that I can one day get a job sitting. That’s what this whole school thing is supposed to be about right? She probably thinks that sitting is the only kind of job I’ll ever be able to get and therefore that I should really pay attention and master this sitting thing once and for all. But watching Suzie sit quietly is almost as boring as this lesson. Oh man, if I can’t even focus on Suzie’s good sitting techniques how am I ever going to get this sitting gig when I grow up?”

Suzie (in her head): “Why the f**k is Mrs. James always telling the boys to look at me? Why does she want them to watch me sit? Every time she does this some snot-nosed boy starts staring at me. Bobby’s been staring at me now for like 10 minutes. Why does she keep doing this to me? It seems like she likes the way I’m sitting. She calls it good and refers to it as a job, but why can’t she just keep it to herself? I don’t want everyone to think that I’m an expert or anything. It’s too much pressure being the best sitter in this class. What if I fall out of my chair? What if my leg gets caught in my desk when I get up to go to the bathroom or something? Does this sitting job also mean being able to get up and down from the chair without incident? I don’t want all the others kids to think, I think I’m better at sitting than they are. God, I wish she’d just pick on someone else.

If you haven’t read Alphie Kohn’s article, ‘5 Reasons to Stop Saying Good Job’, please do.

http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/five-reasons-stop-saying-good-job/

Not Back to School September

Fall is in the air and I’m getting excited. It will be our first year of ‘officially’ homeschooling my soon to be 5 year old and I’ve been researching resources and making big plans in my head about how the year might look. This, I know, is a problem.

After many years of schooling myself—including many spent in academia—the fall leaves seem intimately connected with a sense of new beginnings and new possibilities for me. This feeling never really goes away even after 5 years outside that world.

Despite having left academia with the birth of my son and despite the dramatic change in priorities this brought, I still feel the call of the crisp air whispering: ‘back to school’.

Since my son has never been ‘in school’, I doubt if he hears the same whisperings. In fact, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. Nevertheless, September does bring about an end to the lazy days of summer and offers up a slightly more regular rhythm in its place.

In part, my excitement then is simply a desire to get back to our favourite classes, group activities and with these, the more frequent companionship of other home learning families. Nothing wrong here.

The problem of course lies in the fact that my head is still conditioned to feel this time as the beginning of something serious, some start to officially sanctioned learning. My head still wants to make plans, mark calendars and create objectives for our year to come.

My son, on the other hand, sees the rain and puts on his rainboots to go splash around in mud puddles. He sees a pile of leaves as an opportunity not to collect, analyze and label them (though on any given day he might), but more often as a primal call to dive in and swoosh and swoop them with his hands and feet. He has a sense of the changing of seasons of course, but very little sense of the dates on a calendar and their significance (barring his birthday of course, for which he’s already been completely engrossed in compiling a wish-list). His is a deeply somatic experience of seasonal change, one entirely disconnected from any arbitrary learning plans or outcomes.

This is, of course, how it should be. This is why since the day my son was born I knew I’d never put him in school. I want learning to be natural, self-directed, relevant, and yes, totally experiential. I want learning to be seamlessly entwined into the air we breathe (whether crisp or heavy and sweltering). And most of all I want to avoid any sense that learning happens only within the confines of a particular time and place, in the midst of professionals ready at hand to evaluate (and by proxy necessarily devalue) one’s experience, understanding and relationship to the world.

Despite all this, the feeling of possibility that accompanies fall for me is one that I enjoy immensely. It tells me that I still have a love of learning: of books for sure, but mostly of ideas and experiences in all their myriad forms. That this comes up more forcefully for me at this particular time of year is no doubt a product of my schooling. The trick, I suppose, is to harness the joy and passion without succumbing to any preconceived notions of how this should look for my kids.

Essentially, I want to keep this feeling of inspiration alive, while also letting go of the desire to schedule, to plan too rigidly, to approach our home learning journey with mental constructs about what ‘real’ learning looks like. In my heart I know that there is nothing I need *to do* to awaken this love of learning in my son. It has been there since the moment of his first startled breath; since his first clenching of tiny fingers around my own. If anything, the more I try to *do learning* with him (as if it’s something one can do to another), the more he resists and the less love and joy there is. If I can instead remember to trust in my son’s innate curiosity, his unbridled desire to explore and learn, than I know in my heart of hearts that this will lead us both where we need to go.

Pirates and Passions

We’ve just begun reading the Magic Tree House Series and went to the library yesterday to pick up the 4th book, Pirates Past Noon. While we were there we came across a wonderful box of pirate books, complete with little pirate puppets to take out on loan. My son was so excited he could hardly wait to get home.

As we were leaving the library he asked if we’d be able to keep these little pirates forever. He was so disappointed when I reminded him we would have to return them eventually. But then I told him that we could try and make our own.

In the car ride home he was bursting with ideas. We decided we’d try to make our own puppets (with my limited sewing skills). He said he wanted to make a pirate ship as well. We discussed possibilities for how to go about this.

By the time we got home he was on a role about all the things he’d like to make and do. He said he wanted to make a whole pirate set up. We thought about what else we could do. He said he wanted to write a story about the pirates.

We started right away. He began drawing pictures in a book and I began transcribing the first story in what would become The Amazing Adventures of Captain Crowbeard.

After finishing the first vignette he told me there would be another 347 stories about Captain Crowbeard. Alongside these and the pirate puppets and ship set up, my son informed me there would also be an audio book, a video and a music CD.

Our trip the public library had inspired what was turning out to be a franchise operation. Who could have guessed that these little puppets would have such a profound impact on my son’s imagination? Well I certainly couldn’t have.

Moments like these serve to fortify my belief in my son’s ability to direct his own learning. Watching him seize opportunities for growth with such verve, enthusiasm and strength of purpose promptly dispels any doubts I have about what we’re up to and why.

Captain Crowbeard will probably be a longer-term project (see project based homeschooling here). My son will no doubt struggle with some aspects (constructing a pirate ship that matches what he has in his mind’s eye, for one) as will I (sewing pirate puppets of any caliber). But through these challenges we will have the opportunity to grow, to hone our research skills, expand our artistic and construction abilities, and work together to find solutions to any challenges that may arise. And honestly, I don’t know what more I could ask for.