Friday

They began with Pokemon and My Little Pony watching.

Then we made double chocolate muffins together. At the end they put the chocolate chips on top. “Mama, I don’t have enough.” “Well, if you have two muffins that each have two on top and you want three on top, then how many more chips do you need?” “Two!”

There was lego and pony play.

After lunch we headed up to Storm Mountain where we love to hike up to the stream and then climb up and down the rocks in the stream. On the drive up, Lilah noticed a truck blowing exhaust out of a pipe on the top. “Look, that truck keeps doing that. Yuck!” Which led to a conversation about pollution, what pollutes and what doesn’t. Gavin remarks, “If people want to see the North Pole when it’s all melted they’ll have to build a platform for people.” Lilah says that to build it without polluting more, they would have to use divers instead of machines.

As we are hiking up the trail, we hear some birds. Gavin asks, “Mama, is every sound in music a note?” I try my best to respond and give him a few ideas in answer: Every musical tone is a note. There are 8 notes and then they repeat. They are called A through G and that the whole group is called an octave. And, that everything in a piece of music can be written and read. “Maybe we can learn how to read music?” We continue and observe what’s around us. A grasshopper jumps on my ankle and the kids are fascinated.

They found a nice flat slanted boulder to slide rocks down into the pool below. They had races and decided big ones moved faster and made larger splashes. We looked for frogs, but didn’t see any. We did spot a bird taking a bath in the stream and bobbing up and down. Lilah called it the bouncing bird. It was fun to watch it as we moved along behind it. We kept our eyes out for stinging nettle (We are learning to recognize more plants in our area and that and poison oak are what we started with) and found some beautiful maple leaves to bring home and press. The leaves are beginning to turn! Gorgeous! We watched the clouds swim across the sky and found a new trail down to the car.

A stop at the store and then we came home to dinner with Daddy. A wonderful day.

unschooling

Thursday

Gavin watched some Pokemon while Lilah slept in.

We got some balloons at the dentist’s office so they tried tying things to the strings and seeing what would weigh down a balloon. Large legos do, as well as toy ponies. Then there was face drawing on the balloons, and looking through them to see the world in different colors.

Lilah and I pulled up a few carrots in our garden.

A last thank you letter was written, with fancy lettering. If you wonder why it takes so long to finish up thank you letters, that’s because Gavin has left school with an ongoing anxiety and upset triggered by writing or even talking about writing. There was what I feel was too much pressure too early on him and now he has little confidence and rarely can find any sense of achievement or enjoyment in writing. It’s something I am hoping can change in a more patient environment. I wish that he’d been left to his own timeline and been encouraged to find ways of enjoying it. Now we have an opportunity to find ways for him to build confidence and enjoyment at home.

Every time he’s asked to write he asks for help from me, no matter if it’s actually challenging or not (I always help him and sit with him to support him) he says he feels scared about doing it wrong. Today, he enjoyed making fancy lettering, though he still felt anxious and began to panic several times. I’m calling it a small victory.

Then there was lunch and then we all agreed on a plan to go to the Museum of Natural Curiosity. The kids read library books for the half hour drive. When we arrived, we felt very lucky when we discovered there weren’t very many people there. We spent a lot of time climbing in the rainforest area. Lilah felt safe enough to try the spider climb today since it was relatively empty. She really enjoyed it. I went in with her and Gavin for a few minutes. It’s the kind of thing I could have spent a whole day in as a kid.

We went into the water works area and experimented there with water pipes, wind power and earthquake resistant building.

Then we explored Kidopolis, painting with tempera and bubbles, making floating heads in the Magic Shoppe, pretending to be employees and customers at the bank, and playing with stop-motion animation, making their own short films.

We came home, ate together and then off for an evening walk.

It was a very good day.

unschooling

Wednesday

They started off playing coolmathgames.com (Duck Life, for those of you in the know). Then we watched Pokemon and Pingu.

Then there was lego play and organizing, and a letter to grandparents written.

We pulled out the marimba, steel drum and our other drum and played scales, Oh Suzannah and experimented. “What does it sound like when you drop a lego person in the drum?” “…on the marimba?” “He’s playing music!” “I like to just try different things!”

There was puzzling on the puppy puzzle we’re in the middle of.

We watched John Oliver And Cookie monster, On The News Beat

and checked out An Icy Solution To The Mystery Of The Slithering Stones, an article about the moving boulders in “The Racetrack” which I visited as a kid.

An Icy Solution To The Mystery Of The Slithering Stones

There was some balance beam play.

They played a game of Magic The Gathering; a practice round, because Lilah is still learning how to play on her own.

Lilah and I went to pick up a friend from school and played on the playground together. We came home and read Elephant and Piggie books and played with legos and hexbugs and stuffed animals with Lilah’s friend. Oh, and there was some hula hooping.

All of it was wonderful.

unschooling

Tuesday

They played on the computer at coolmathgames.com, helping each other when they got stuck.

Breakfast and request for me to read more Juniper by Monica Furlong. We only began yesterday and are halfway through because they keep asking for more. It’s a wonderful story and they are fascinated.

They built spaceships for their lego characters and then animals with magformers. “I need a tongue! A triangle piece!”

There was some more letter writing to friends.

We cut open the celery stalks that we put in water and red food coloring over the weekend and checked out the red xylem inside. The color went all the way up the stalks and into the leaves! They really enjoyed cutting it and checking out the inside and comparing our dyed and undyed celery.

We mailed letters at the post office and learned what a parcel is. We talked about where post offices are in our city.

Back at home, we had lunch and lego play. They made geysers today, thinking of our recent trip to Yellowstone and recalling geyser names they’d seen there for their creations. Then they watched The Lego Movie while I did a bit of weeding.

Afterward, more lego building and reading Beautiful Lego by Mike Doyle.

Then, we are off to the library where choose books to bring home. Then Gavin reads aloud while we drive to pick up our CSA share and back home. And more reading of new library books and a chapter of Juniper.

It was a wonderful day together.

poetry, unschooling

Friday

They started with Pokemon watching and animal mazes and lego play.

We spent quite a bit of time watching construction on the street outside our house. “What are they doing now?”

Gavin worked on more letters to friends, each with a drawing, while Lilah wrote a message and drew a picture on a card she started yesterday for her friend.

There were spinning like a top in the living room breaks and an Ironman Uno game. They made a maze out of cardboard and clear plastic packing for the stuffed animals, stuffies as they call them. Then more letter writing.

We followed a conversation round and round (as I like to) beginning with horse riding, then horses riding us, then horse writing, which was explained by Gavin as writing letters to horses. We spent many minutes telling each other what we’d put into our letters to horses. “Dear Horse, do you prefer apples or carrots?” “Dear Horse, do you like bunnies?”

There was lunch and then good friends visiting, with lego play, stuffed animal festivals and an imaginary school session before goodbyes. Gavin did some research online about how to make a robot.

I read Pippi Longstocking to the kids. She went to the circus and then danced with some would-be burglars. We love Pippi. She went up against the strongest man in the world, but as she pointed out, she’s the strongest girl in the world, so of course she came out on top.

Afterward, there was dinner and poetry reading: Margaret Atwood, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot. We all took turns choosing and reading.

You Begin

You begin this way
This is your hand
This is your eye
That is a fish, blue and flat
On the paper, almost
The shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
Or a moon, whichever
You like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
Is the rain, green
Because it’s summer, and beyond that
The trees and then the world,
Which is round and has only
The colours of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
And more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
With the red and then
The orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
You will learn that there are more
Words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
Like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
Your hand to this table,
Your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
Which is round but not flat and has more colours
Than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
This is what you will
Come back to, this is your hand.

Margaret Atwood

It was a peaceful day full of reconnecting with friends and small important moments.

unschooling

Thursday

They began with computer games and pokemon watching. Then puzzling and a bit of balance play on the balance beam.

There was oatmeal muffin baking. And talk about rising batter and baking powder and falling as the muffins came out rather flat. But they tasted delicious anyway!

While Gavin worked more on our latest puzzle, Lilah glued some flowers we pressed from a hike earlier this summer onto card stock to give a friend.

Gavin wrote some thank you letters for friends. He embellished one with a Spiderman illustration.

Lilah read several Elephant and Piggie books by Mo Willems to me. They are some of our favorites!

There was lunch, more writing and balancing.

We did some silly walking, inspired by Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks and some more lego play.

Then off to City Creek Canyon to go up to the top for the last time before they close the road for the season. We went two miles up, to the snow data collection whiz-gigs. Right near the bottom we spotted a lynx cub a little bigger than our pug heading down toward the creek. No pictures as I was busy watching and pointing it out to the kids. I didn’t expect unschooling to pay off like this, but I was very excited! I’ve never seen a wild lynx close. It looked like a big cuddly cat with a short tail. Amazing!

We saw many kinds of mushrooms that I hope to research later based on pictures we took. We climbed and tossed rocks in the creek. We saw a snake, lots of grasshoppers and butterflies.

On the way down, the kids were world-spinning, each choosing a weapon to master and having their own school to master it in, with elaborate backstory. “I learned to use the sword as a kid from my father.” “Well, my mother taught me to use a staff.” Then they were bears, eagles, rhinos and a rhino-corn, evolving into different forms. They found curved sticks and used them as pretend bows to hunt, “but not really, Mama, because I don’t hurt animals in real life.”

Finally, back home for dinner and evening rituals.

It was good.

unschooling

Wednesday

They began with lots of lego building…. trees, castles….

There was more Where On Earth? kids atlas reading.

We picked out some new shoes for new adventures.

How does our garden grow? Tiny lemon cucumbers are starting. Squash are getting bigger and there are lots of sungold tomatoes to pick and eat.

We walked up City Creek Canyon, stopping to throw rocks in the stream, look at plants, float bark boats down, saw some water striders and even spotted some fish. We admired milk weed pods and acorns, maple leaves and hollow stumps.

We came home and worked on a bit of a new puzzle.

Then had dinner and a game of Dominion, our new Intrigue expansion.

And it was fun.

unschooling

Tuesday

We began by building with hexbugs and legos.

Then we looked at national flags in a book.

“Can we listen to the Dreamland cd, Mama?”

There was a game of zombie dice.

“Mama, can we build a zipline for legos?” “I bet you can! Try that yarn.” “Whee, it’s going down!”

I put together an unschooling interview and interviewed the kids. Then Lilah interviewed me. I wrote them up here.

We took a trip to the aquarium and enjoyed many animals. We read about extinction and endangered animals in Utah. We spotted sea turtles and sharks, penguins and toucans eating fruit. They crossed the rope bridge.

Then, back home for brownies and more legos.

We read eachother jokes. “What kind of school do you go to to greet people?” “High school.”

Gavin read to us about carnivorous plants.

Then Lilah and I were off to gymnastics class for pull ups, balance beam jumps, handstands and then back home to show Daddy and Gavin the “broken monkey leg” maneuver.

There was Civilization playtime with Dad for Gavin during gymnastics class.

Back home for dinner, books together and cuddles.

interviews, unschooling

Interviews

I thought an interview with the kids about how they feel and what they are thinking about would help us begin our unschooling journey.

With Gavin:

1. What do you and I do together?

Ummm. Play games. Make puzzles. Watch movies. Play soccer sometimes. Play Magic The Gathering. Cuddle time and choose one song for you to sing. Sometimes play frisbee. We adventure in Yellowstone and we saw geysers. Like, Goblin Valley and California.

2. What do you like most about your life?

Everything. Games. Legos.

3. What things would you change in your life?

Sometimes you guys shouting at me.* Being not cold in the winter.

4. Are there things you’d like to do more of?

Play Magic The Gathering. Umm. I want to play more games. I want to do more biking. Watch more movies.

5. Are there things in our life you really dislike?

When things are unexpected. Like sometimes there’s certain games I want to play on certain days and you play different games and I don’t like that.

6. What would you like to know more about?

Science. More science. How to make games on the computer.

7. What are you really good at?

Math. Adventures. Playing games that are older than eight. Magic.

8. What are you not as good at?

Aiming at targets. Nothing else.

9. What do you like most about your family?

Because they play games. I like birthdays because I can invite friends. We get to read books together.

10. What do you like least about your family?

I don’t know.

11. How is your life different from other kids your age?

Because other kids like different things. People do different things at different speeds like S last year gets to do three math strips. I’m not in school. I’m homeschooling. I get to do stuff at home and do other things at other places.

12. If you had more love in your life what would that look like?

I don’t know. More time with friends.

With Lilah:

1. What do you and I do together?

Hmmm. We play games. And we read books together. And we’re still working on a puzzle. Sometimes we fly kites. Sometimes we play soccer together.

2. What do you like most about your life?

I like it because I have lots of stuffed animals to sleep with and we get to play lots of games. And sometimes I get to play all day.

3. What things would you change in your life?

I don’t know. When people hurt me; I don’t like that.

4. Are there things you’d like to do more of?

I’d like to read more books and play more games. And I also wanted to sew a lot.

5. Are there things in our life you really dislike?

Sometimes when someone yells at me.* I don’t like that at all.

6. What would you like to know more about?

I wanna learn more cooking and also I would like to learn more about art and I also would like to learn more about birds and animals.

7. What are you good at?

I’m very good at reading. I’m sometimes good at baking and cooking. And I’m very good at hiding presents.

8. What are you not as good at?

Creating things and planting plants ’cause sometimes they don’t grow.

9. What do you like most about your family?

I love Mama. And Daddy. And I also like about my family that they like me too. And I also love Gavin.

10. What do you like least about your family?

I don’t know.

11. How is your life different from other kids your age?

Cause sometimes (a friend) is not nice to me.

12. If you had more love in your life what would that look like?

I don’t know what it would look like. Maybe like a hundred times more than the universe.

*It hurts to hear the kids say this, and it hurts to admit that I do shout and speak in anger and frustration sometimes. Shouting and speaking unkindly is something I am working so hard to end right now. I am making progress but I have a way to go. Obviously this is incredibly important to everyone in our house!

With Mama:

1. What do you and I do together?

Hmm. We read books and we draw and we cuddle. Sometimes we do yoga and dance. I like hula hooping with you. And I like to laugh with you.

2. What do you like most about your life?

I like being able to spend time with my family and enjoying one another and the world.

3. What things would you change in your life?

I wouldn’t change much. We might have decided to invite you home for school earlier so we could have more time together and less stress in our lives.

4. Are there things you’d like to do more of?

Yes! I’d like to do more yoga, more hiking, more reading, more drawing, more painting, more camping! I’d like to tickle you more.

5. Are there things in our life you really dislike?

Yes. I really don’t like speaking unkindly to you or anyone. I want to do better at always, always using non-violent communication. I wish I could spend more time with my sister.

6. What would you like to know more about?

Lots of things! Like, how to identify the squash in our garden before they have squash, what kinds of mushrooms are edible, anything about animals, how brains develop, constellation names and positions, new words.

7. What are you really good at?

I think I’m pretty good at reading, drawing, having fun, hiking, gluten free & vegan baking, being a mom.

8. What are you not as good at?

Keeping all the dishes clean all the time, memorizing dates, talking to people I don’t know, being on time.

9. What do you like most about your family?

That we like to be together and do fun things together.

10. What do you like least about your family?

I’m not sure.

11. How is your life different from other kids your age?

I don’t have to earn a living right now so I have the luxury of spending time with my kids and looking for opportunities for us. We don’t follow a rigid schedule like most people who have to be at school and work at specific times. I have so much less stress without the outside schedule worries.

12. If you had more love in your life what would that look like?

More love for myself (my inner voice) and my body the way it is today. I would feel lighter, be more readily able to happily connect with others without the dark shadow of worry about myself that occasionally affects my interactions now. I would be more confident. The love I have from others is already full to the brim!

unschooling

Unschool Kick-off

“Mama, I’d like to do the puzzle. Would you help me?” We puzzled. “This could be a monarch but it doesn’t have enough white.”

“Mama, can we get Mung Daal? And some other new things?” We picked up our Community Supported Agriculture share and the Indian Market. And picked out some new foods to try. Then drove past new library in our neighborhood, looked at construction progress.

We made brownies – fractions and chemistry! “How many 1/4 cups are in a 1/2 cup? How can you tell the difference between a Tablespoon and teaspoon measure?”

We put up the tent in the living room to dry after our rainy Yellowstone adventure.

And read Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren, which they both adore.

We read a book about history, geography. Learned that the lowest sea on Earth is Ross Sea in Antarctica. And that in India they speak 22 official languages but only Hindi and English used by the government.

They made a pokemon deck together and cross referenced with our pokemon sticker book.

The kids made crowns, necklaces, climbing ropes out of pipe cleaners.

We had some computer time.

We picked thai chiles, tomatillos, tomatoes, eggplant of two kinds in the garden.

We looked at butternuts, dumplings and pumpkins growing at different stages and compared squash leaves. We talked about ripe versus unripe tomatillos, jalapenos.

Then we finished off our day with dinner together, brownies, card from Mama, a song and a tiny bit more puzzling for our Unschool Celebration.

And there was love.

Yes is a World

Category Archives: unschooling

Friday

Thursday

Wednesday

An Icy Solution To The Mystery Of The Slithering Stones

Tuesday

Friday

Thursday

Wednesday

Tuesday

Interviews

Unschool Kick-off