The Reluctant Unschooler

Parenting Wild Things Book Review

2011-07-27T08:02:00.000-07:00

When our unschooling experiment started, I scoured the internet looking for real life examples of what unschooling looked like in different families. One of the first blogs I found was Bohemian Bowmans...at the same time, a friend told me I should be reading this blog. Then I found some Twitterati who unschooled and lo and behold I found this chick on Twitter ...same person. AND THEN ...she was on a Christian Unschooling group on Facebook. Coincidence?? I think not.

And then....she said she was writing a book. At first I was skeptical. I mean .."wild things"? Who calls their children that? Sure I have a crew of wild thing..and I thought I had a good handle on parenting them.

But after I read a sample chapter I knew I wanted to read the whole thing and was eager to support it.

Parenting Wild Things is like sitting down with a girlfriend over coffee...latte...iced tea...to vent, commiserate, encourage.

Jessica writes from the heart.
She shares wisdom from a very real place where many mothers are at but don't want to be.
She encourages us to see our children in a new way and to always be examining our own hearts.
She even, in her gentle way, "redirects" commonly perceived notions of Biblical parenting.

It was an eye opening read that made me want to run home to my babies and speak to them respectfully, listen to them and treat them like aliens. (yes, aliens...read it, you'll get it.)

I am excited to read through it again, this time with others to do the challenges at the end of each chapter.

You can purchase the (reasonably priced) ebook here. Do it, you will not regret it.

In Which I Survive the Homeschool Conference.....

2011-06-23T19:28:00.000-07:00

This past week my husband and I attended our state's annual homeschool conference. We had been many times in the past, but this year was different.

First of all, when you've gone to such a conference many times, by the fourth or fifth time, there really isn't much more to see or hear. It's like living in the same town as the state fair, or favorite theme park. You've seen it all. There is nothing new under the sun (just ask Solomon. He wrote a whole book about it. So we knew we would not be spending all three days. We chose which day offered what we wanted to hear the most. It was all about the big names. I wanted to hear R. C. Sproul Jr and Doug Phillips and Kevin Swanson. We didn't get to hear Mr. Swanson, but were blown away by the former two as well as Norm Wakefield.

The second reason it was going to be different was because it was our first year going as an unschooler. I already had a taste of the challenge at the homeschool used book sale I attended a few weeks back. Normally I would ooo and aahh about all the great deals on the curriculum I needed and be rapt with joy over new books to inflict upon my children.

But this was not so.

It was a frustrating yet frugal morning. Instead of deciding what my children should be doing, I browsed with the few I brought to see what excited them. I asked them a few times if they liked this or that and gauged their response. An "Oh, that's cool." meant I should not bother spending the money for something that would sit on a shelf. An "Oh wow, that's awesome!" meant I should seriously consider forking out the dough. We ended up coming home with some gems for all ages.

But back to the conference....... The vendor hall is HUGE and spans two rooms. Almost every thing a homeschooling momma could want is in there. You get to dig in to all the curricula in hopes that this one or that one will be THE ONE. The one that will make your kids want to learn what you want them to learn, what they should learn. We used to spend hours there trying to decide what we should buy for the coming year.

But not this year.

We knew we would acquire the books that the children requested. Math workbooks for the younger children and some fun workbooks for the real littles and handwriting for all. Honest, we asked them. This is what they wanted. Then we had fun looking at all the FUN stuff. All the stuff we never bought because we were too busy doing SCHOOL and wouldn't have time. We bought the girls a finger rope game book, the boys a wood carving book and tools. We bought the first book of the Life of Fred in hopes they would like it. We bought some good history books to have around. We bought a few Bible studies to do with individual children and together. We bought two volumes of a cartoon themes story of the Civil War. The boys LOVED them.

Without buying so much curriculum it was a frugal afternoon as well.

Surprisingly we thought we would have to translate all we heard into unschoolese but were pleasantly surprised. Here are some of what we heard from these great leaders in the homeschool movement:

R.C. Sproul Jr. "Stop doing school at home." "Don't buy Bible curriculum, just talk to your children....What kind of curriculum did Joesph [the father of] buy?

Norm Wakefielf "God [not ourselves] teaches our children." "God teaches through life experiences."

Purty cool, huh?

Being veteran homeschoolers, my husband and I were given the opportunity to talk to some new home school parents that we knew. We told them to relax. There was no need to spend hundreds of dollars for a kindergarten curric for their little boy. I told the mom her boys were bright and smart and forcing school on them so early was squash their natural desire to learn.

Wise advice...wish I had gotten it way back when...

Will we go next year? Maybe, with a baby :D.

Of Marbles and Memories

2011-06-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

Today I was on my game. I was productive early in the day, but fizzled out before noon. ~~Coffee~~ lack of planning I am sure was the culprit.

Did any learning happen today? Well...

The kids learned once again to work together to accomplish a goal (laundry).

They learned efficiency (cleaning house in an hour).

The learned perseverance (pulling weeds in the garden and picking up trash in the yard).

We also spent some time going through scrapbooking materials which led to looking through pictures. We did not allow ourselves to get sucked in too much but I love looking at old pictures of my oldest son and know how far he has come.

We prepped dinner, made and ate lunch, did a bit of ironing.

I read Voyage of the Dawn Treader at lunch at we speculated what Eustace would find in the cave. Since I have neither read the story nor seen the movie and the rest of the children have, they were all too eager to tell me. (I'll spare you the spoiler in case you haven't read it yourself).

After lunch the older kids read to the younger kids each a book while I worked on a menu and grocery list. The oldest mended an old dress for her little sister and improved a shirt she wishes to wear to the wedding.

Then everyone went their separate ways. Most of the kids went outside where they jumped on the trampoline, rode bikes, played in the water table, played in the sand box. A few stayed inside to play with a marble drop and magnetic letters. The twelve year old finished prepping her garden for planting then colored in her room. The eight year old planted some basil indoors.

When Dad got home he finished the horse coral, clipped more chicken wings and raked the hay area.

Sent the oldest for drinks from Sonic with the baby.

I signed kids up for T-ball/Baseball and Kids's Quarters at an old historical fort later in the summer.

I also ignored a whole pile of ironing that needed done and is cluttering up my living room in hopes that someone else will do it :).

Now I'm about to finish dinner and get the kids in to do their chores.

A productive day...but typical unschooling? I dunno.

Boiling the Frog Slowly

2011-06-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

Boiling the Frog Slowly.

That's the description Harvey and Laurie Bluedorn gave for teaching some boys to write in their book Teaching The Trivium. I laughed when I read it because it described my two oldest sons perfectly.

Both boys do not naturally write. When they were assigned something, they would certainly write: simple, brief sentences. And I tried..really...to Let. It. Go. and just let them write. But my inner B.A. English degree is difficult to repress. So I may have squelched their desire to write by editing and helping them to edit their own work. Sure, writers need to be able to check and fix their own work, and oh..uh...be able to read it for coherency, but my boys needed more time practicing putting all the random and plenteous thoughts bouncing around in their heads through their arms, hands and onto paper.

But now there is a turning of the tides.

We have been living our unschooling experiment for about three weeks now. And although we have kept busy with projects around the house, there have been times when the children have been left to their own devices. I have been mostly firm in my wish for them to not rely on electronics for their entertainment even when they ask me a bajillion times a day to play Wii or on the computer.

On one such occasion, my son was extremely out of sorts. He had done all the things his heart desired and didn't know where to go next. It was the bajillionth and one time I had been asked about the Wii so I said to my son. I says...son, DO something. DO math, write a letter, copy out of a book, copy a poem, WRITE a poem. Just DO something.

His eyes lit up. He immediately wanted to write a letter and had two friends he wanted to write to. So he got paper and I showed him how a letter is set up and he went to town. He finished the letter and I read it out loud to him. He found the parts that didn't make sense. (And the parts we couldn't even read.) and fixed it.

He had a reason to write, so he wrote. A duh moment for me.

Later that day, I told him he could write whenever he wished about whatever he wished. He could have a journal. His eyes lit up again. His oldest sister had just cleared out her room of old, unused journals. I found the most masculine one and told him to keep it. The only stipulation, after his talk turned to drawing cartoons in said journal, was that he only draw in the margins of the page. He agreed and has stayed up late most nights writing. He hasn't shared with me what he has written and I haven't asked.

And then a funny thing happened.

My writing child, the 12 year old girl, said that his journal looked like the one she and I share. I told her it was the journal I had given her sister at 12 or so to write prayers to and for her future husband and to dream what she would like for him to be like. Instantly she asked, can I have a journal like that? So we dug through the discarded journals for one for her.

And then the other non writing boy asked for a journal. We found him another less masculine journal. I don't know if he has written in it or not but I am very glad his interest has been sparked. The frog may need to be simmered on low heat for a while.

Our Well Intended Beginnings Part 2

2011-06-18T12:42:00.000-07:00

Our first year of homeschooling was very eclectic. I don't recall the specific materials we used, but I do know that we got most of our curriculum from the library and did lots of projects. It was a fine year and I hardly noticed the extra work of having little ones around.

But then in fourth grade......we got serious. I bought all that was needed to provide a fourth grade education. I even made intricate unit studies. And for all the time spent preparing, my little student was very reluctant. She didn't WANT to do all the fun things I had planned. And doing ALL the aBeka work was hard. (She recanted on her hatred of unit studies when she reached 11th and 12th grade just so you know.) I had even set up an elaborate Montessoriesque school room for the two year old. She also was less than excited.

But we trudged through forcibly and completed most of the work while we started down the path for adopting the two little ones.

And then I got pregnant.

Don't ask me why I thought that having a baby would make homeschooling impossible when we breezed through our first year with a high needs baby, but I did. So I enrolled my beginning 5th grader into the local middle school as a 6th grader and the now 3 year old in a half day preschool.

Big mistake. Because now instead of taking care of baby at home and schooling our children myself, I found myself waking baby from a nap to haul him and his brother four times a day to and from the two schools. Not to mention the homework hassles and problems with teachers and student. It wasn't until the middle of the NEXT year that I asked myself..why am I doing this? I brought the girls home.

We made it through the rest of the year but I was still not convinced I could "handle" having a baby (now two babies and a toddler) and still do school. So I enrolled the girls in an online school which we did for two years.

I hated it. I hated being tied to the computer all day. I hated not having the freedom to learn and discover the things that interested us. I hated all the "extras" the online school made us do, when we had such a hard time trudging through the required material. And the testing. I hated the testing. The daily testing and the yearly testing. My time spent in public schools had cured me of ever thinking standardized testing was an accurate representation of what a child knew. I knew better from my days spent at Montessori.

So we said goodbye to online school and set out to find the curriculum that worked for our family. Our family had grown from one child to five, to six and they just kept coming. And no curriculum would fit our group of diverse learners.

I wanted to real REAL books and do REAL things with my children but I was still tied to the idea of "the school day" where children came, sat and learned what was presented to them. I loved the idea of planning school every summer (and usually revamped mid year).

So we found books for math, grammar, spelling, handwriting to suit each child. Our history was literature based and classic in nature. It cycles every four years to repeat from creation to present day. Our science was cyclical as well and materials are the best that our home and public library can provide. We were set. Or so I thought.

What I saw was a lot of the children ~~fight against~~ struggle with the curriculum. Bad attitudes, frustration, and a general sense of NOT wanting to do school hindered what my expectations were. Many days were a total loss as I gave in. It was on those days, looking back, that we began unschooling. Children were left to their own devices and found purposeful things to do inside and out.

My husband and I both wished that we had more time to do learning with our children rather than at them. Instead of Mom taking hours each week to prepare schoolwork for the family we wanted to just to stuff....together. My husband would do his best to do what I had set in place and even took over teaching science, we knew we wanted more, we just couldn't put our finger on what or how.

And that is how our journey into unschooling has begun.

Our Well Intended Beginnings Part 1

2011-06-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

In our almost 21 years of marriage, we have considered ourselves a home schooling family for ten of them. We didn't start out large (obviously) and we never thought we would have more than one child (ha!). Neither did we start out intending to home school.

Funny how things change.

I intended to be a public school teacher. Having been inspired in high school to become a teacher I spent five years pursuing a degree in English with minors in Elementary Education and Reading Instruction. I was going to be a teacher.

The funny thing is, when I looked forward into my future I never saw myself as a public school teacher. During college I had spent time as a work-study at a local Montessori school. It was there I learned about child-directed learning. Children learned by choice in a well planned environment. Unfortunately, the more I learned in college, the more I wanted to impose my education on the children there.

They were very tolerant of me.

I knew that without a Montessori certification (another 3 years of school in another town entirely) I had no future in that quaint little school. I was destined for bigger....for better....for public school.

Only...public school didn't want me. That is unless I was ~~related~~ had connections to someone already in the school district. So I tried my hand a professional substituting, a horrific experience I would not wish on any new, freshly out of college soul. But money is money and it was more than I had been been making as a impoverished college student and it was steady work.

Our oldest child had attended the lovely little Montessori school while I was working there. It was nice to have her as a student and to work alongside her as her teacher at times. She flourished and learned to read when she was ready. But public school was where she needed to be so we enrolled her in a charter school near her father's work. Parent involvement was mandatory. I found myself volunteering there quite a bit to "make good use" of my education. And they were all too happy to have me. I was glad to be near her still and involved in her learning.

It was through these observations that I realized that she was one of only three second graders who knew how to read. So while the teacher struggled with 15 other students, my daughter spent her time coloring. Not a good use of her time, I thought. (I also spent a day in the middle school part of the school and decided that MY child was not going to be obnoxious like those kids were.)

So at the end of the school year, we decided to inform the school that she would not be back. We experienced no difficulty in doing this.

We also decided to become professional parents. We spent ten years being foster parents. It was the most rewarding and challenging things I have ever done. And through our experience, not only did we make a difference in the lives of many children, we were also blessed with five permanent additions to our family through foster-adoption. (We were blessed with - at the writing - four biological additions as well during these ten years. Remember when I said we had never intended on being a large family?? Ya...well...)

Our first long term to adoption children consisted of an almost 2 year old and a preemie.

So there I was with a high needs child, a potty training 2 year old and a 3rd graders as I embarked on our homeschooling journey.

To be continued..............