unschool monday - doing it all wrong.

I have been dying to join in with the owlets but have been too lazy (or busy ;-) to get into gear with it all.

Reading Shae's unschool monday post has inspired me to finally join in.

It has been a hard few months here on the farm. Towards the end of last year I realised I was doing it all wrong. My children were bored. I was using the 'unschooling' label as an excuse not to interact with them. I was so busy with my own stuff that it got easy to just wave them off (oh, we unschool - go and learn *pat on the head*). Life wasn't great.

So I started to look at why it wasn't great and what I could do to change it. The answer of course was to spend more time with my children. I thought I needed some fairly structured ways of hanging out with the kids so started exploring curriculum's.

I came across the workbox system which I love! We use it in a similar way to what unschoolers call 'strewing' (where you strew interesting things were kids will pick it up and get all inspired and stuff). We have 3 sets of drawers (one for each child) with 5 drawers each. Most nights I put interesting little things in each drawer, Tiana and Jake LOVE it, Aron doesn't really get it yet but it does hold his attention for a while.

Another thing I have recently discovered has been the Five in a Row method of 'teaching'. Again, I have adjusted it to suit our family but the basic premise is that you pick a really good quality book and read it every day for five days. Each day you talk about a different aspect of the book. For instance, the book we recently did was set in China in the 1930's. So Monday we had a talk about China - where it is, what the people look like, what language they use etc. The second day we chatted about China in the 1930's. If you wanted to do the whole maths thing I guess you could show the children an abacus and talk about its history. Out local Chinese takeaway has an older Chinese lady working there who still uses an abacus to add up orders. We went there and she showed the kids how to use it along with many Chinese words.

We used some water colours (because the illustrations of the book were water colours) and looked at Chinese art and written words. We cooked Chinese meals and Tiana grew fascinated with the clothes of 1930's China. We ended up learning about China for about 3 weeks, it was so much fun.

So, are we still unschoolers? I dunno, to be honest I'm not entirely sure of the definition. We are probably still doing it wrong but these past few weeks I have rediscovered just how awesome my children are, how much I love being with them and how grateful I am to be able to share their learning journey so closely.

This week Jake would have gone to school, Tiana would have been in Grade 2. How different our life would be! To steal from Shae's unschooling post:

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

What an adventure :D

xo