A fun-filled day out

As blogged here.

The questions which arose from this trip and the rest of the day included...

"why are there goats at the beach?"
"how much is 100km/hr?" (he had asked me how fast I was driving)
"is a sea anemone an animal, a plant or something else?"
"what if our land had no people, no cars, no trucks, no toys, no roads, no buses?"
"what is the type of poo on the grass?"
"where is China?"
"we got 2 eggs today and I dropped one - we only have one egg today"

So much learning going on.

Other chapter books - classics? Dunno

We powered through The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton this week. Nathan just adored it. Guess it appealed to his sense of imagination and doing all sorts of things you could only dream of. I kept getting "can we read one more chapter?" to the point where my voice would start to go croaky after about a 1/2 hr.

Words like fiddlesticks and bother really tickle his fancy. Unfortunately he can't say his "f's" well atm, and it comes out as piddlesticks lol.

Classics I've read the Kids

After reading A Thomas Jefferson Education, I have decided to introduce plenty of children's classics into our daily reading. So far we've enjoyed...

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder - October 2007
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne - November 2007
The House at Pooh Corner by AA Milne - November 2007
The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe by CS Lewis - December 2007
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder - March 2008
The Water Horse by Dick King-Smith - May 2008
Heidi - June 2008
Farmer Boy - June 2008

Education books I have on my bookshelf still to read

How Children Learn by John Holt
The Unschooled Mind by Howard Gardner

Education books I've read

Dumbing us Down by John Gatto Taylor
How Children Fail by John Holt
A Thomas Jefferson Education by Oliver Van DeMille
An Unschooling Life by Rue Kream
The Unschooling Handbook by Mary Griffith

And the original book that led me into looking at homeschooling (and then stumbling upon unschooling) was Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn.

Here we go...

This blog was created as our family moves closer to "officially" schooling our eldest (who will be 5 in 2008). In reality though - life will look the same and the learning will happen the same way it always has. We are unschoolers, also known as natural learners. This is a family journey - I'm excited that my own learning happens alongside the kids, we have fun, discover and keep up the love of learning. We don't school between the hours of 9am-3pm - it's a 24/7 kind of thing.

I have read many books over the years, read plenty of online discussions and articles and feel excited to entering this next phase of life with my children. My role is to facilitate and help the kids learn more about their interests as they show the desire to. I will expose them to new experiences and information as we all ride the wave whereever that may take us.

We won't be discussing "lessons" learned or trying to categorise what their day consisted of (although I'm sure I'll be mentally tallying up "right, he spent 10mins on maths playing the fish addition game with me", "he did 1 hour of writing by copying out all the words on the ABC wall freize" and I'm sure I won't be able to resist blogging about it either at times.

I want this blog to capture our day to day life - the good, the not so good, the challenges and the excitement.