Another day in the life...

We had our home day today. Boy, did *I* need it too. It is definitely days like these that I love about unschooling and can truly appreciate the "learning through life" the "organic learning" the "natural learning" or whatever you want to call it.

Sure learning happens all the time for everyone, but since we rely on this style as our primary means of learning I sometimes wonder if it really can work out longterm. I had a bit of a week of feeling overwhelmed, reflecting on and getting angsty over whether I was doing an injustice to my children by unschooling, blah blah. Yesterday morning I met up with a friend for coffee while the kids played in the adjoining playground and it refreshed and revived my soul. Then, a wonderful flowing day like today (which do seem to happen quite frequently even if I feel that sometimes they're not often enough) make it all so worthwhile.

I was also able to pinpoint where things felt off during the week - as I often read on online unschooling forums (and witness it for myself), kids *will* feel boredom and loll around and appear to not be getting anything out of the experience, but before you know it they move on into a new phase and discover new things, get creative, burst forth with curiosity and questions once again. It's amazing to just let it happen and know that they will move on past it pretty quickly and given the space and time to do so. So, after Nathan having a few flat days where he seemed tearful over many things, bored with life (even though he doesn't say so, his body language speaks it for him) and nothing seems to interest him nor satisfy him for long he seemed a changed we lad this morning too (and consequently wasn't annoying his sister and setting her off either!). Seems we had spent a few days bouncing off each others moods and we all needed a bit of balancing out again!

First up, after a bit of morning TV for the kids and internet time for me, we made some yoghurt and squeezed a bunch of oranges to make ice cubes that the kids love to chomp on throughout the day. We then decided that we'd make some little cheesey bread buns for lunch so got that going too.

We then read from our latest Laura Ingalls book "The Long Winter" and it seemed to spark a few things for Nathan.

He was asking what muskrats were and why and how they lived in mud huts. After a bit of googling, this inspired him to want to build his own. So we went out to the garden and he collected together materials for mixing together and worked on moulding it to the shape he wanted. He had decided he would make a little hut for our new frogs to have as a shelter when they arrive next week for our little garden pond. We set it to dry in the sun and when checking on it later as we went to feed the chickens, we discovered it had bird footprints in it and was partly scratched away! Still, hopefully it will survive long enough to dry out completely and see how we did.


(check out the change of clothes in between shots - no wonder I wash so many clothes a day...)

Danielle spent a bit of time working on her swinging and singing...

From reading The Long Winter we also got on to discussing seasonal changes and how animals and birds instinctively know when to migrate, when to build and extra insulate their sleeping place for the winter, and how their fur coats grow thicker and then thin out again as summer arrives.

We watched a large flock of blackbirds (about 20 of them) descend on our garden in one spot and constantly jumping, flying, leaping around for a few minutes before moving on. The kids were fascinated and it was one of the first things they told their dad about when he arrived home after work.

We wondered where the chickens were. We'd let them out to roam around but all we could hear was a huge clucking/squwarking racket coming from the nesting box. All three of them were squished in obviously trying to (or wanting to) simultaneously lay their eggs!

While doing a bit of tidying up and household work together this afternoon, Nathan was continuing to make sense of death, birth, marriage, having children and family trees and how they all fit together (including step parents and children) - these were once individual topics, but I notice they get blended and roll on together during our conversations these days.

The topic then moved on to animals in the wild and their life and death cycle. He then mentioned someone needing their heart cut out and a new one put in and wondered if that could happen - so we discussed donors. And then pondered if we could eat heart which lead onto discussing offal. He then asked about when I had broken some bones as a child - the hows and whys which then moved on to technology. Love it! I broke a bone at school and my mother couldn't be contacted, he wondered why not, so I explained how there were no mobile phones back in those days and we had no answer phone - so when the school couldn't get my mother at home, there was no other way of her getting the message. This of course led on to inventions and inventors.

During the afternoon I was sorting out booking a campsite for some summer camping in January. Nathan has been looking forward to camping again since last summer. So he wanted to write out a list of what we needed to take with us. While working on his list he was having me help spell the words out but had things click with turning a noun into the plural form (without me mentioning about nouns and plurals just yet though lol).

This afternoon the lego came out which hasn't really been played with so much recently. He picked up one of his little cars and decided to have a go at replicating it out of lego.

Later on the kids wanted to jump on the computer for a while, so I showed Nathan a new website I'd come across with some games based around animals - it had games based on mammals, birds, amphibians etc as well as what were herbivores, carnivores and omnivores. I wandered off to read a book in the sun with a cup of tea and they then switched to the Reader Rabbit Maths CD for a little while.

As he was watching me prepare dinner he was chomping away on a few of the nacho chips we were going to be using and started rattling off a few number additions based around how many he was eating and had left to eat and asking what some larger numbers were added together. A few days back we were talking about roman numerals again as they came up in one of the library books we had out. Our dominoes were sitting nearby at the time and he started fiddling with them and forming the numerals.

This evening while we read a few more pages from The Long Winter he picked up another book we had started but put aside (The Hobbit) and said that The Hobbit had more pages than The Long Winter. But after showing him how to flick to the back of the book and compare them we discovered that there was a difference of about 50 pages.

Such simple things to be talking about and learning from - but no less significant...