Our Unschooling Accent

I think we have a little of an 'unschooling accent' in our learning together at H Corner. I read a blog recently where someone had had an 'unschooling week' and decided they would do it once in a while. I realised that we tend to be that way on Fridays. However probably due to recent circumstances - like various illnesses in the house - we have been learning with a stronger unschooling accent than usual recently.

I think like most accents we have picked it up and it has grown a bit stronger as we have gone on. I am not prepared to ditch a learning plan for the year completely, and still want to plan ahead and have topics we will cover (my accent hasn't yet developed to using words like "unit studies" - I am quite happy with "topics" for now...!).

I will also have a maths scheme that I am basing our maths on (haven't dropped the 's' yet either - and don't plan to). I am changing tack on English (ok I might be calling that Language Arts now) and am going over to First Language Lessons for the Well Trained Mind by Jessie Wise.

I don't mind stopping to admire the view or to take a little detour on the way though. Or just take a breather because we can.

I don't really see the point for our particular gaggle of learners if we are not doing things this way. We have an amazing opportunity and privilege to learn this way and it is beneficial not only to LittleH#1 but for the other three, and Matthew and me as well.

I was going to declare Fridays Natural Learning days, or Unschool Days, or whatever. Fridays will perhaps be a dying breed in this house although currently they are my "Life of Riley" days because Matthew is at home on Fridays (for now) so there is a 'whole family' opportunity - which rarely involves the 'ordinary' learning that we do on other days.

I may still do that, call Fridays something special, but recently the Natural Learning (sounds better than "Unschooling") has spilled out into other days too and we have had some great opportunities for conversation and, well, natural learning!

We joined a new library last Wednesday and on the way LittleH#1 began a conversation about law and politics. He checked with me who was in charge of the Police, we discussed who makes the laws that the Police enforce, the Government, Parliament, elections, MPs... and then he pointed out some MP signs on the way to the Library. I quite often don't drive with music on when we are in the car because we are talking about something like that.

We picked up a number of books - the children's non-fiction was fantastic. Volcanoes and weather were the main ones. We still need to do some more on our weather topic - the science club we had joined for that turned out in the end to be a bit disappointing but we were interested enough to want to keep on and will do more ourselves. They have pored over those books, LittleH#2 is cutting his reading teeth on them and wow, he's coming on so well. There were some other stories we came home with, and all in all - a successful trip and I am not sure if we will wait the planned 2 weeks to return.

So we haven't exactly been "Reading, wRiting and aRithmeticking" but nevertheless, good progress and good learning this last week.

I suppose the word that sums it all up is Eclectic.