Support…part 2…
Well, as I said in my last post… we are starting a homeschooling support group in our area. We are at the moment 5 families that homeschool…
However, I am the only unschooler.
The first meeting was last week… we went to the house of the seasoned homeschooler so that the “newbies” could ask questions and see her material. She is not only a homeschooler, but she loves collecting homeschool curriculum, books etc and is even starting a library in which people will be able to borrow material from her to compare different curriculums before buying. So, in her house downstairs she has a classroom set up (a large table for her kids surrounded by bookcases, posters a teachers desk etc…) and she has so much stuff… too much…
The other mom’s were loving looking at everything, asking questions, comparing stuff…. though my friend Isabelle was a bit overwhelmed by it all…
As for me… I was dissapointed by the meeting. I don’t want to talk about curriculum and what kids “need” to know by what age… I don’t want to talk about the logistics of how to school at home. Half the time I was there I could not relate at all to what the concerns were… the rest of the time the colourful workbooks had me wishing that Xavier was interested in that stuff…
I am going to tough it out a bit but I am a bit worried that it will not only be what I don’t want in a support group, but that it will make me doubt my choices and beliefs.
Filed under Unschooling | Comments (5)new found support…
ok… a few things I forgot to blog about…
A few weeks ago I went to my first homeschooling support group meeting and it was pretty nice.. the problem though is that it is a bit far (about 45min/1 hour away)… At the moment that doesn’t matter for me though.
The group seems to be a eclectic bunch… a few the lean towards unschooling or unschool, a few that are a bit more school-at-home… It will be nice to have some planned activities, To get out with other homeschoolers and meet up with other parents that homeschool. I think that the kids will like that also, especially seeing that other kids don’t go to school and it is not only him…
I told my friend Isabelle on that Thursday about the group and how I enjoyed it and how we had planned activities for the upcoming year and how there are a few moms near here that are now HSing and how we are thinking about starting a group…
Anyway…. Her dd had told her that she didn’t want to go back to school… (she went to K last year and was due to start G1 on the following Tuesday) and when I talked to about that she again told me how much she wanted to homeschool and then asked me tons of questions and then I said that I would share some links…
Well, on the Sunday night I got an e-mail from her saying that she is taking the leap and is going to start HSing…
She was the first real friend I made when I got here, we have very similar parenting values and I find it so exciting that we will be able to support each other…
Filed under Alternative Parenting, Unschooling | Comment (0)Melted Crayons…
I read about this on a message board so I decided to give it a try…
Started the oven at 300F and started filling 4 muffin cups with broken crayons… 10 minutes later the crayons were melted… we watched (or tried to watch) though the oven door to see the crayons melt and Xavier thought it was cool…
Then we took them out and looked at them a bit before we put them in the freezer to set…
They looked really cool but I am not really hapy with the way they turned out… I am not sure that it was because the broken crayons were cheap… or we did something wrong but they didn’t colour much…
It was still a cool experiment though… and I think that I will be trying again with some good old crayola’s…
Schools are for Fish…
Thanks Ania for the link to these!!
“Go to your local public school, walk down the hallways
and see what behaviors you would want your child to emulate.”
-Manfred B. Zysk
“By breaking up topics into age-appropriate subjects as schools do,
learning is divorced from real life, and therefore limited.”
-Sara McGrath
(and of course you can read Sara’s blog here)
I hope there are more of these…I love them!!
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what they don’t know they know…
Every once in a while my mainstream schooling propaganda mind gets hold of me and I try “schooling” the kids by asking what certain numbers are etc… Xavier hates it with a passion and not only will he not tell me, he gets uninterested and almost gets upset and just says that he doesn’t know… I learned my lesson and don’t do it anymore, but then my brain starts asking if he is really learning…
then out of the blue he surprises me… he can do simple math… addition and subtraction… he knows that 2+1=3… though he doesn’t know that he knows it yet and would never admit it…
I got a game installed on the computer a few days ago that I didn’t know if it would interest him or not… it is an older game… I think 2001 but it is not really dated… “The Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions”… pretty much the goal of the goal is to do “something”… it can be to get a mouse to his cheese or a bowling ball into a basket… to do what you have to do, you have to build a contraption… you use ropes and pulleys, springs and generators, gravity etc… it teaches you how gears work, how ropes and pulleys can work, how somethings are heavier than others…
logic…physics….
I started to play the game and naturally Xavier sat down next to me and watched… then while I was up and doing something he decided to play and was really good… we went back and started his own game and now he is advancing though the levels… today as Simon sat down next to him and he started a new level he pointed out how many of each thing that he had for that levels contraption… (eta… it is shown by having a small number next to each picture)
He is learning without knowing it and applying what he is learning seamlessly and unconsciously… this is the way that he learns best… It makes me proud that we can provide that environment for him…
the good and the hard…
Through ups and downs of craziness in this household a few things have started to change. Whether it is the diet changes that we have made or just growing up there are some really cool things happening with Xavier.
In the last few weeks he has started being able to play with play-dough for longer than a few minutes, he has started to sing and not only sing but sing songs in their entirety, knowing every word and he sings so well. There are times when the boys are playing alone in the playroom and they are not fighting but singing together… Maybe it is hearing his brother sing, maybe he is just gaining more confidence but whatever it is, it makes our hearts flutter.
Today, I sat down at the kitchen table with both boys and we did a few pages in some workbooks that I picked out at the dollar store a few years ago… Xavier picked out animals that didn’t belong, coloured and did a number activity in which he names the numbers and then coloured as many objects next to that number (like if the number was 7 and there where 10 objects he coloured 7 of them)… he got up to the number 8 and then his attention went else where… but the fact that he did it was completely out of the ordinary for him… and the fact that he sat so long was a great deal also… No forcing, no “teaching”… just learning and having fun…
(Colin loved the pages that he did too.. )
Of course there are still things that we would like to see evolve, whether it is age stuff or personality it is hard to deal with him lashing out at times. But we are working on it, showing him alternative ways of dealing with his emotions, teaching him and showing him.
Sometimes we doubt that we are getting somewhere with him,
Sometimes we feel that everything is working out perfectly.
Sometimes we have the feelings within a few minutes of each other.
Though a day like today was rough in some aspects, in others we saw change.
Tonight, before bed he was excited. He said to us that tomorrow is Music day. He got out an old cassette radio that we have and a few old cassettes (Star Wars and Close encounters of the third kind) and he wants to listen to them…
I also made a calendar for the month of March a few days ago, highlighting a few special days (Simon’s birthday, first day of Spring, Earth Day etc) and few weird days (Pig day, Toast Day) , so tomorrow is also Pig day and he looks forward to celebrating that also…
I think I now need to find a song about a pig 
A journey…
My mom keeps on asking when I am going to start homeschooling, she doesn’t get that the boys are already learning and that we won’t be doing much different, that I won’t be setting a curriculum, doing school at home, teaching the boys the same things that their peers are learning at the exact same time, in the same manner but in a different location.
I, of course, was brought up in one public school after the next. I went through 9 schools by the time I hit CEGEP, then 3 after that… One of the schools that I went to was a Waldorf school… at the time it was just starting out and was still a tiny school with not many students and I wasn’t there for long but it was the school that taught me the most about learning. In the short time I was there I learned to love learning and then school started to be tortuous.
She pulled me out of Waldorf because they were not teaching math on a regular daily basis, but when I showed an interest I learned quickly and I was able to learn in the way that I understood…
When I got to the next school I was behind by their standards and needed a tutor. The problem though was not that I was behind but that I had different ways of getting to the answer. Sure I didn’t know my “times tables” by heart like all of the other students, but I am not good at memorizing… I did know however how to figure it out and I got the right answer but just not the same way that others did….
Of course wasn’t good enough and because I didn’t have the same way of figuring out the problem I often failed and over the years of having the same “problem” I lost interest and patience.
I vouched that I would never put my children in that position when I was to have children.
So, I have always known that I was going to homeschool my kids. On the first date that I had with Simon we went to the old port in Montreal and literally talked the day away. I remember telling him on that day of wanting to be a mom, stay at home, and homeschool… I remember him asking questions about it… the answers that I gave him were all in the line of unschooling, yet I did not have a label for that yet.
After Xavier was born I dove into the world of the internet and alternative parenting and realized that my visions of homeschooling, learning through life, with no set curriculum, no grades, no deadlines, learning what interests you in the way that you understand it, learning life skills though life etc… were not just weird thoughts that I was having… it was not just part of my black sheepism, but what many other families were doing and it was all part of a whole movement of people learning at home. Unschoolers.
Though I know my goals for guiding my children through learning I have felt the need to go through an unschooling process myself. Society has brainwashed me and others to believe that learning is something that is done only through teaching, whether it is a teacher in a school or a mom at home. However, learning through life is different. It is the child that learns and guides themselves with help from others when they need and want it. I have felt the need to remind myself that there is no fix age to learn how to read, how to write… when they are ready they will make it clear and will not only catch on quicker but will catch up to where they need to be.
It is still hard at times to get out of the mindset of learning at home is not just school at home as it is for many. It is more. It is learning through living life.
Filed under Family Life, Memories from childhood, Unschooling | Comment (0)
