Unschooling? Chasing happiness

Are we Unschooling? I really don't know. The way I understand it, Unschooling is about letting the child direct their learning, not making them do school work they don't want to; providing them the means to learn what they want to learn, when they want to.  It definitely takes away pressure and adds a lot of joy to our lives.  Our unschooling looks like this:

I've given up on "structure" in general. We have "learning time" in my bed, reading Life of Fred, doing MadLibs, and for my little guy, doing Language Arts from a "1st grade everything" kind of worksheet book. I don't force writing on PJ, but I compromise with "I'll write this sentence, you write the next." He does all right with that and seems very happy with an approximate hour per day of studies. He's only 6 and pretty brilliant, so I'm not too worried. Especially when Daddy comes home and goes to give them kisses and PJ pipes up with some comment about what comes at the end of Daddy's sentence. Or when he's adding 8+8+8 while driving to meet friends at the beach. Clearly we're learning.

I am wishing for more social time. We haven't had enough. This past week we were able to spend time with PJ's BFF, Henry and his sisters Keely and Sadie. I had to share this picture because they are just so freaking cute. They were winding down to a little Scooby Doo on a Friday afternoon.



"Essay" on Sea Monkeys

As for the T Man, age 8.5 and going on 14, trying to tell this little bugger anything is a challenge. He shut me up in the car the other day when I asked if he knew where the word "riviera" came from. He said "No, and I don't want to know. I'm just not interested in it." Well alrighty then. I think he's being a disrespectful brat, but then I guess he knows what he doesn't want to learn about. I just wish we had a better, clearer idea of what he does want to learn about so I could feed his thirst for knowledge. I'm pretty sure that he thinks he knows everything already: just like a bratty teenager. (sigh) The boy's reading and Science is middle-school level, he has an amazing grasp on History, his sense of humor and understanding of the world is outstanding. His math is coming along - Dreambox just moved him into pre-algebra, so he's definitely on the right track.

T will do a minimal amount of formal study time without a fuss: a couple of lessons on Dreambox, rapt attention to Life of Fred and MadLibs, and will occasionally do a paragraph of writing. Outside of this, he's doing what he wants. He reads voraciously, researches things on the web, and does any kind of web games he can find that are free. These past couple of weeks I rebuilt a couple of old desktop PCs for the boy's exclusive use. (T had already broken my laptop screen hinge and downloaded malware and I really need to make this laptop last for another 6 months or there's no Christmas gifts under the tree!)   So now they each have a PC that is fast enough to accommodate Dreambox, Ooka Island and whatever kind of malware or virus they wish to experiment with. I can easily wipe and reload.

Lately T has figured out how to download maps for Minecraft and load them, he has been downloading Google Chrome apps, and then he found Wizards 101 which has turned out to be fairly educational. The important part is that he become comfortable with the computer and confident installing software, learning the file system, and also researching fixes on the web. This is where the future is, barring zombie invasions or the loss of electricity ;-)

I'm feeling so much better, so much more confident that this new direction of less formal study is the way to go.

We are happier. Shouldn't we chase happiness? I am sure many agree that chasing A's is better... just maybe not for us. My loving
sister, Aunt Mimi, says "This is OUR TIME NOW."   She's right - we need to make the most of it. So... in case their is an outbreak, a Zombie invasion or the lights go out and all hell breaks loose on 12/12/12... we've certainly had a good time while it lasted. ha ha

So, what do you think? Should I be worried that what we're doing is enough for now? I'm just curious if I'm delusional...