The Story of The ‘O’ Page, by Faith, aged 4.

Once upon a time, there was an owl who liked olives. He shared them with the octopus. Then they went to see the orangutan to ask him for bananas, but all he had was oranges. The otter had bananas though and then they all were happy. The End.

(from My First ABC Book)

So what’s ‘unschooling’ to you?

I think of unschooling as self-led learning, particularly in the topics chosen and the pace at which they are learned. I would think that any parent would abandon a learning method that seemed not to work for their child, so I don’t consider child-directed methods to be part of unschooling per se. For instance, most homeschooling parents will abandon a particular curriculum if it is obviously not teaching the subject to their child. I would hope they would anyway!

I do not consider that unschooling has to be lesson and traditional class free to make it “official Unschooling ™”. Many times a child (or an adult) may have an interest that might be best explored and learned through a conventional classroom or lesson setting, such as swimming or pottery or calculus or physics or what have you. And many times a single mentor-student relationship is simply unavailable.

I have a little person here fragmenting my neatly ordered thoughts (ha!) but really I think unschooling comes down to what I call non-coercive learning. Maybe I can post more later without ‘help’

It’s Thursday, you know what that means! That’s right! LIBRARY DAY!

Kids zoned out in front of Veggie Tales at the moment. Well, as soon as I type that they are here at my side wanting to see Boogalah! (no relation to Boohbah!)

Also recommend Pencilman.

Be prepared to play these again and again for the little people in your lives, as a warning….

We’re labeling the house.

Table

Door

Sofa

Bede

(who’s not *really* a pest but is a typical younger sibling already and into everything the girls are doing)

We got the first Leap Frog video too. Kids are loving it and BOTH are sounding out words. The ability of the mind, when inspired, to learn always amazes me. I highly recommend these videos! I think they run right at 30 minutes.

Library day! Library day! More Tana Hoban! Less Arthur Geisert “Town” books and more Oink! More Robert McCloskey! More Don and Audrey Wood! WE LOVE BOOKS!

We went to the library, I think I forgot to mention in this blog. We got quite a few books and played on the really really nifty slide they had, small, but exciting. All the kids got library cards, even Bede

We are into Tana Hoban books, all 3 kids really like them. I think they would be good on many levels for kids of various age as they are wordless photo collections… my 16 month old has been fascinated by them for the composition and the color, my 3 year old enjoys pointing out what she recognizes in the pictures and my 4 year old tells a story about what is happening in each ’scene’. Older children might enjoy using them as starting points for short stories… Anyway, great books.

Still on that reading train round here. We got a Leap Frog video that looks tolerable and perhaps one or both of the girls will learn something from it. I’m going to buy some phonics books too, they are on sale at Lakeshore Learning Store currently for 25% off + homeschooler discount. I can’t get the whole set but I can buy a couple and see how they are received.

I looked at our metro library offerings for the summer and I think we’ll all go to a puppet show/storybook reading next week, see how it goes. Bede sometimes really really does not like crowds so depending on how well attended it is we may not stay for long. The library carried Home Education Magazine and I hope to be able to check out a few copies… I think the library here has me in the system so I don’t have to do all the stuff to get a new account (which is good as I don’t have proof of address)

And there is a park playgroup meeting of the OklahomaUnschoolers group on Thursday, we will definitely be going to that, yay! I hope it’s not too terribly hot but it is Oklahoma in July so I’m not holding my breath.

Faith read the first 3 ‘books’ at http://www.starfall.com tonight and did very well! She really enjoyed it and seemed to be proud of herself too.

Abby got bored, a bit, and wanted to do somethng too. Have to think of ways to deal with that. She likes to look at the same stuff but has little patience with the time it takes Faith to read one ‘page’ of a book.

Bede just thought the sounded-out-words were the funniest thing ever. Seriously, I have rarely seen the kid laugh so hard. KKK-AAA-TTT “Cat” had him about to fall down he was laughing so hard. Goofy baby.