~a month of unschool~ how did paul revere text?

Posted on August 12, 2013 by marybethrew

this past month was very full! as all summer months seem to be.

~games~ quinn has been pretty fired up lately about angry birds games, and though we do limit his screen time to 30 minutes per day, he seems very focused on games in general. he is exploring how to make his own games (with paper and for example, using the paint program on my laptop to play dots-and-boxes) as well as playing games with us. he also seems to be in full-time project mode, always making something involving paper, markers, scissors and tape. often the paper games are angry birds oriented, but other times they are based on other themes. he also has invented quite a few angry birds games that he plans to develop, (you know, once his computer science training is wrapped up) including angry birds “ice” (which is about penguins) and angry birds “hedwig” which is, of course, about owls.

~quinn is interested in map-making, and we have done some maps of our garden (i had drawn one to help myself plan my planting, and made him a copy of it to color in and utilize however he wanted.) this was his drawing of foxglove from the garden.~

~we’ve been attending one day per week of the our living school summer program. quinn has become fully steeped in the culture surrounding the ols show-and-tell morning ritual, which involves tea and closing chant and various rules of decorum such as saying “does anyone have any questions or comments?” and then saying the name of a person who is raising their hand (rather than just saying, “what?”) quinn has showed his photo of the bird who visited our house, his map of the zoo from goodnight gorilla, his star wars sticker book, and a small notebook he made by cutting out small pieces of graph paper, stapling them together, and enlisting me to write out his agenda for the next time he visits the aquarium, as a checklist.~

~one of the lessons we got to be a part of at ols was for the 4th of july. we got to look at a replica of the declaration of independence, and watch re-enactments of the ride of paul revere and the battle of lexington. the best part of quinn’s day was watching the battle of lexington reenactment. for me, it might have leaned towards listening to the kids animatedly discussing how slowly word traveled from the colonies to england in the late 1700s, when there were (gasp) “no cell phones?!? how did they even text?!!!!!!?”

“they must have had to go home and send it from there!”

“or maybe even… write it down on paper!”

we also took home a fourth of july crossword and did it together, from which discussions of george washington and the first 13 colonies were started.

quinn expressed to me that he wanted his own hook and cubby at school. it makes me happy to see him feel a sense of ownership for this school. since we were going just one day a week, we arranged for the time being to have a hook (with his name above it) and will see about a cubby this fall. this fall’s outlook for school is still a bit up in the air, but i will talk more about that soon.

~camping~ so much learning going on at the campsite. quinn learned about the inside of a firework from a word scramble worksheet, and then got to set off some of his own at the campsite. there was also lots of river fun, bucket helmet pretend play with all the kids, and all manner of outdoor fun. ~

~we spent about a week hanging out with my mama friend vanessa whom i’ve known for 6 years (practically ancient times in internet years) but only just got to meet in person! we had a lot of fun, and quinn and noble seemed to sense they had been pisces brothers since before this meeting. in fact, they took right off, discussing how “we are almost exactly the same!” listing their age, the fact that they’ve both lost teeth, that they both almost skipped the same number when they were counting landmarks on the map of the trail we hiked, and that they both like to collect sticks. there is a whole world of background to the story of my friendship with vanessa and the dozens of other women i met through her online, and it ranges from mind blowingly beautiful love and support i have received throughout my journey as a mama, to other times that were incredibly ugly and painful and heartbreaking. but i really feel like the boys summed so much of it up for me in a nutshell how i feel about all these women, my online tribe, which has fragmented over time. i think if we could ever get past the surface of things, the outer bits where we see how we differ as parents, women, citizens of the world, and focus on what’s inside, we really are almost exactly the same.~

and of course, more of the usual:

~kitchen elfing~ also not pictured, car washing and vacuuming.~

~beach romping. quinn has been having fun picking out his own clothes to wear, and this general theme revolving around his red/orange shorts has been popular. he wears it with either a red or an orange shirt, often with red socks if they are clean, and sometimes even a red hat and his boots or sneakers with red on them. he usually has a theme he is going with, though i am not sure how this red/orange look relates to being an ewok. (it just does.)~

~oh, and you know, the inescapable learning that goes on due to living, as we do, on the discovery channel.~

a month of unschool

Posted on July 1, 2013 by marybethrew

field trips! unschooling is always a field trip-oriented way to learn, but there is something about late may/early june that inspires an upsurge in field trip activities even for us. the gravitational pull of the open world becomes stronger and we do not try to resist. we went tidepooling and saw one of our local harbor seal colonies quite up close. we caught an especially negative tide that was perfectly timed for mid-morning, and got to hike to the very farthest extent of that beach- quinn is getting to be an impressive hiker and didn’t complain a single time, rather, he urged me to hike out to the tippy-farthest rock we could stand on, which afforded us a beautiful view of a natural arch i had never laid eyes on. unfortunately, i had forgotten to charge my camera batteries the night before, so we will have to return to that spot someday soon. quinn proceeded to land his whole right leg in the ocean upon disembarking from said tippy-farthest rock, and experienced a moment of despair at having his boot filled with water, but we recovered and after dumping out boots and wringing out socks, proceeded to hike slowly back, stopping to study critters (hermit crabs, anemones, urchins, chitons, etc.) and build rock snowmen on the way.

another field trip was strawberry picking with friends, and from there we convened a picnic in the waterfront park, where the kids could splash in the fountains, their orbits around the picnic blanket sized naturally according to their age.

creativity; quinn is interested in puppet shows lately. after reading if you give a moose a muffin together, he began making scenery and sock puppets for a puppet show; he also cut out “battle scene from hoth” printouts that i belatedly downloaded (did you know may the fourth be with you is star wars day? i will remember to celebrate this holiday in the future!) and added paper loops to them to make finger puppets, and re-enacted battles on hoth for me numerous times; captain pirate made strawberry jam; also we are building ewoks! so far we have tackled the pattern making, which involved tracing, enlarging (big ewok), shrinking (for two baby ewoks that he plans the big ewok will carry in a basket); cutting out the pattern after i drew it was all quinn; and we began cutting fabric from an old furry brown coat, though given quinn wants the big ewok to be quinn-sized, we will need to scavenge more old brown coats; quinn helped me do a round of tie dying for some custom etsy orders- he has good hand-eye coordination and control with a squirt bottle and made an excellent assistant.

reading; we moved up a level to a new box of bob books– we recently tackled one that involved the word family crown-clown-town-down and also contained many of the color words, as well as the word “another” (!) and he is really getting the hang of it; he read parts of the grinch who stole christmas to me one day- i learned from my mom while we were on our trip that it’s not necessary to discourage him from using what he knows from memorization- he obviously knows much of the grinch by heart, but he did notice when he had a word just slightly off, like would instead of could, and he’d go back and correct it. my mom also encouraged him to “use your picture clues” and that was one thing i had not been doing with him, like somehow if i expected him to decode the letters themselves, devoid of “clues,” it would make him a better reader. after a little thought, i think i’m getting the hang of this, too; bedtime reading now is the star wars trilogy; i just found some star wars books online that i wish i had seen before i ordered the plain text one i am reading, these have lots of great pictures from the movies. i am going to save up my pennies to get them for quinn at some point (they are only one penny, used, actually, but i have to save up for the shipping) because i can envision him spending hours reading them to himself in the not-too-distant future.

reading/geography/paleontology/history/miscellaneous…. one day quinn was asking questions about the continents, so i pulled out the atlas and he sat for a long time flipping through pages naming continents; that same day, based on thoughts that occurred to him while gazing at an atlas, he was interested in skeletons and mentioned dinosaurs, and when i pulled out two more books- one on skeletons, and one on dinosaurs- he flipped through the dinosaur book for a while and found a page on which he recognized a photo. “this is crystal park palace, mama. it’s where they built a life-sized iguanodon model, but before they completed the model, they had a whole dinner party inside the ribcage! for twelve people!” i glanced at the caption, and sure enough! crystal park palace it was. he seems to retain facts that he learns from what he calls “learning movies” with a great deal of accuracy. sometimes i swear i even hear a trace of the accent of whoever was narrating the movie, and wonder if he is actually quoting, not just paraphrasing what he has learned. but again, i think memorization is a talent i should encourage. though i am an unschooler, and obviously not big on assigning arbitrary rote memorization, i do think the things he chooses to lock into memory have meaning for him, and that is what unschooling is all about- making meaning for ourselves from the world around us.

“…for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children’s brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened the brain functions. up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum, because they were too rigid, boring, and “not relevant.” but the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. for the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brainpower unfamiliar to us now. in the lincoln-douglas debates of 1858 the debaters would comfortably speak for an hour or more without notes, in extended memorized paragraphs; today many of the most learned among us, raised in our most elite schools since the 1960s, prefer the omnipresent powerpoint presentation – the ultimate compensation for a weak promotor cortex.” a little food for thought from my embarrassingly overdue library book the brain that changes itself; stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science by norman doidge.

handwriting- quinn continues to have excellent writing skills, and practices on his own terms, such as writing the message on his cousin’s birthday card. i am looking forward to there being more correspondence between the two boys in the near future when they are both writing!

pe; speed and coordination- running laps around the house; agility- playing chase with the waves; endurance- bouncy house for four hours straight.

chores and money; he helped me snip apart long strings of diaper pieces i had sewn on the serger, and i gave him some money for helping, letting him know that since i would make money from the diapers, and since he had genuinely helped me, it made sense for me to share what i would earn with him. he liked that, and it happened again when he helped me tie dye. he has continued to show his innate desire to help, and routinely now will “help” in some way with dinner, sometimes stirring something really quickly and running away to play, other times hanging out for the duration and asking “what next” until i run out of toaster operating, stirring, measuring, sponging, table setting, condiment retrieving jobs for him to perform. each time we go to fred meyer, he asks to visit the lego aisle, and we do, though i have to remind him every time that i am not going to buy any legos today, that we are just looking, and that he can take note of the prices of things that he would like to save money for. he then proceeds to ask me the prices of every single box of lord of the rings, hobbit, and star wars legos on the shelves, and when he is finished looking, we move on to buying the groceries. monopoly money math must be acknowledged here, as well as quinn’s recent interest in helping me work the atm machine at my bank.

quinn and his good buddy have been playing a game with legos where they sell or rent each other spaceships or droids or what-have-you, and they will sometimes keep it going for a good hour or more, playing with small change. quinn then developed his own math lesson in his drawing book based on the game they had been playing. up until that “lesson”, he had never practiced counting change amounts, though he knew vaguely which coin was worth which amount. so this launched him into finding out that when you have 0 quarters, 4 dimes, 2 nickels, and 5 pennies, you have 55 cents!

math; aside from his money math, quinn is pretty fired up about math in general right now. (i did mention to him that the people who designed the angry birds games had probably worked very hard at math.) he is on page 82 of his jump math workbook as of this writing, which is impressive only because i have not once required him to sit down and work in his math book. each time i suggest doing some math, he decides, and often he does decide in favor. when he does sit down to do it, he will go through many pages, the other day breezing through a whole section on addition and moving right into subtraction before deciding he was satiated and ready to move on to something else. i am happy with the curriculum, there have been quite a few pleasantly playful/fun pages for him. one involved drawing pictures of the items to be added (he drew an elaborate birthday party scene with 3 balloons, 2 presents, 2 people and 3 candles on the cake; in another box he drew an angry birds star wars scene in order to add 4 + 2 + 7.) the actual math problems so far are seemingly very easy for him, but i like that for now, for confidence building, and i like that the workbook is fun-oriented. math can be seen as a foreign language to many of us, and we often hear how it doesn’t apply to our real lives, but drawing and puzzles and games do apply to quinn’s real life. another page was a very simple word puzzle, where he had to bring down the letters corresponding to certain numbers, and decode “monkey”, “bird”, and “cat”. it’s excellent cross-training with his reading level. one day recently i shared his math book and the current bob book he was reading with my coparent, with whom i have been working with a counselor in order to parent more as a team. coparent’s jaw dropped when i told him, “if he does any math over the weekend, you should know that he can now read the instructions himself.” i think he was somewhat unaware of quinn’s fast progress in reading, which i tried not to feel too smug about. it seems quinn finally did come to understand that just because he hadn’t ever read before didn’t mean he couldn’t do it. he is internalizing the message “yes i can” more and more and realizing his competence as a person.

socialization; always the big buzz word with us unschooler/homeschooler types, but i think we are enriching quinn’s life in this department as well as the others. we attended a dance performance of jane and the giant peach one night, and since james is one of quinn’s favorite stories of all time, and since quinn also has expressed interest in being one of the dancers (we are thinking maybe this coming fall might be the right time to sign him up), he was completely mesmerized. i heard an audible “awww, is it over already?” from him at the end, and he clapped quite vigorously for the dancers. in addition to our usual diet of weekly playdates with homeschooling friends, we also attended a wedding reception where quinn easily mingled among the children. when i went to extract him from the bouncy house at the end of the day he could be heard, along with the 4 remaining children, engaged in a pretend scenario in which 3 of them were wolves, one was a lion, and the other an elephant. he was disappointed to leave, but his transitions are going much more smoothly, as he finds something to help his resilience (in this case it was picking out some “easter eggs”, those little sugared almond table favors, to take home). he is more socially independent by leaps and bounds; he didn’t know any of the children at this party beforehand. i heard from him very little during the bouncy house session, only seeing him when he was desperately hungry and thirsty. he came back at one point clutching 2 pieces of hard candy and a wrapper from a butterscotch, which he told me he had already eaten and let me know how good it had been. he let me know later that all of the kids except one had been nice to play with, but one had “kept on saying mean things” to the other children. he said none of it had been directed towards him, and couldn’t remember what the mean things had been, but said that he and the other kids just tried to ignore the one boy when he said mean things.

there have been so many success stories of homeschooling and unschooling families in the news recently, and i love seeing the good press. it helps to counterbalance the negative vibes and judgment that one can’t help but encounter on this road. we recently read in the oregonian of a young woman of 16 years named tesca fitzgerald, who just graduated from portland state university at the top of the computer science department. (you thought i was going to say high school?) she is off to georgia tech to earn her phd combining her computer science with cognitive science and neuroscience. she led her robotics team to the world championships several years running, where she consistently stretched the boundaries of what the robotics software designers intended and ended up teaching them about their own tools. now just think how amazing she could have been if she had only been sent to school.

this feels to me like the most accurate picture of our typical month that i have managed to portray in the past year, and though i did go back and fill in the missing months just recently, i know they were much sketchier pictures, as i was working from the hazy distance of months gone by, when things like “the physics of the cherry pitter” have slipped from my mind if i didn’t take a picture of them. still, they are there (if you ever want to fill yourself in on our months of unschool or look back through them, you can hit the handy tag a month of unschool in the tag cloud in the sidebar and get the full list; the same goes for the tag baby which will get you the list of posts from quinn’s first years that i am still slowly entering, and am now caught up to his first birthday).

(and while i am paranthetically handling housekeeping matters, if you want to get on the email list to receive updates of new posts, it’s easy to do. if you go to the upper right hand corner of the blog, there are three little icons, and one of them is an envelope with the words “by email”. click on it, and you will be asked to enter your email address, and then you’ll get an email asking you to click a link to confirm.)

three months of unschool

Posted on August 29, 2011 by marybethrew

i’ve been playing catch up ever since my research trip, and my “month of unschool” posts are now finally caught up. here are the last three, in case anyone but myself is interested. 🙂 these were not posted in real time, in fact they were all posted today (and backdated). i apologize in advance for the running snarky commentary on socialization, i seem to have had a nerve touched on the subject. not worried enough about it to go back and edit, but i will make a note to self that it comes across a bit, well, snarkily. 🙂

if you’re ready to feast your eyes on three full months of unschool adventures avec cute boy, click onward:

may23-june 23 in which our hero catches and eats many a wild foraging morsel, practices spear hunting (in case of woolly mammoth encounter), heroically releases ladybugs into the wild, and swallows the moon.

june 23- july 23 in which knot tying and archery are practiced, quantities of berries are amassed like they are going out of style, and yet another daring release of captives, this time snails, is accomplished.

july 23-august 23 in which sunflowers, blackberries and beets all play starring roles. also, follow along with our coastal oregon canteloupe growing saga in all three chapters!

enjoy! and feel free to comment on whatever is going on in your unschooling adventure!

~a month of unschool~buoys, berries, and a boy

Posted on July 23, 2011 by marybethrew

we left off last month with quinn saying goodbye to mama for her 10 day research cruise, so this month opens on a happy note: reunion! quinn loved checking out the vessel, the giant fenders, my bunk, and practicing his knot tying on board (he is getting very good at it!) he also liked watching the hydraulic crane thingie (he probably knows the terminology better than me) lift our heavy gear to offload it to shore. we spent a week reconnecting before i went back to work, and he could frequently be seen during that time performing ship operations over the loft railing at the orange house. (here he has several crab traps set and is down filling them with crabs before he goes upstairs again to haul them in.) he also proudly wore his f/v frosti hat any time we went anyplace, even the backyard.

went picking organic strawberries with friends. socialization again!we made some fine strawberry topping that is going to be gone by august at the rate we’ve been devouring it on banilla ice cream.

we found a great new unschooling friend in the form of sparkle stories. listen and love. checked on our food share potatoes, coming along nicely. celebrated the 4th with fireworks on yaquina bay. quinn and dada put together a new bow for quinn, and have been crafting arrows for it one by one (complete with feather fletching and stone points!)

tree climbing- it’s on every mama’s list of skills a child needs to learn, right? also, reading in bed in the morning. ahhh, success. he loveth literature. and, would you believe it, even more socializing? (witness the delicate dance between a boy and a girl sharing strawberries, while the boy can’t be bothered to take off his headphones to accomplish the negotiations.) and behold, our canteloupes are holding their own… they said it was impossible, but we are so excited to be eating homegrown melons… in late fall. hehehe.

zucchini muffins are in season! quinn takes great joy in bundling me up some parsley from the garden- very, very securely. he’s even eating actual green things, namely peas. “look at that captain and crew of peas in there!” and you may notice a theme with the bow and arrows… i am quite impressed with the way he has taken to the concept of practice. a few short months ago, trying and failing meant frustration for him, in many areas, but he is now very content to try and try and try and try again. it is amazing to see, and makes me think of things like musical instruments in the near future…

bring your mama to the fun work day of the year out on the siletz river… quinn helped my colleagues and i collect snails, as an annual survey of their parasite loads that we perform for fun. quinn got to help collect specimens, feed them (true story: you have to feed organic lettuce to snails, the conventional lettuce kills them), and study their parasites under the microscopes, as they shed them (ahem, poop). definitely counts as science, and not sure, hmm, as socialization? wait, does it count if you can hang with adults…..?

i suppose painting with kids in the backyard must count… we got the honor of returning to the river to release (and catch again, and release some more) the snails of research. volunteer potatoes were dug to make room for more brassicas in the garden, and as a friend put it “it’s like buried treasure!” and this small pirate sure had fun.

cherry foraging mission to the valley… 9 pounds gleaned. also encountered: hawk, dragonfly and turkey vulture medicine, mullein, various other plants of medicinal interest scoped out for later harvesting… a snake that was so sound asleep it let us take its picture… and the site of a future cherry tree (hehe i post pictures of poop).

oh right, we were actually in the valley to pick marionberries, the cherries were a side tangent. the marionberry farm was a return to a place we loved last year- red barn farm, where you too can pay for something genetically almost identical to a blackberry, and yes it is worth every penny all you oregonian too-cool-to-pay-for-blackberry types. i will eat my share of the free variety, but i am looking forward to enjoying organic marionberry lavender jam and other treats this winter… and hey, there is our melon growing gangbusters! woot!

~a month of unschool~ wild and woolly

Posted on June 23, 2011 by marybethrew

both mama and quinn have been spending lots of our passion for learning and time and energy devoted to gardening and vicarious farming endeavors.

quinn enjoys watering and harvesting quite a bit. he got to help collect eggs at our friends’ farm one night.

a fresh stack of library books has been inspiring our reading habit. the topics have heavy dinosaur and prehistoric influences, including wild and woolly mammoths. quinn’s play at this age often involves pretending to hunt a woolly mammoth or some other large prehistoric beast, and every single walk we go on, a new stick/spear is accumulated. he is working with dada at crafting spears, adding stone points to the ends (complete with pitch and sinew- look out, mammoths!) and he seems very proud to be learning these skills. he is quite fluent in dinosaur-ese as well, and many of his stories include casts of characters such as compsognathus, tyrannosaurus rex, velociraptor, and brachiosaurus.

much time spent in the wild, natural surroundings of the coast. we found a grove of small trees where elk have been rubbing their antlers, picked wild strawberries in our lawn, spent time with our friends’ newborn twin goats, and… practiced with the spear some more.

friends who happened upon a swarm of ladybugs at the beach shared a few of their captives with us, and we released them into our happy garden.

rock climbing and tree climbing were practiced. dandelion greens and wild dungeness crabs were harvested, cooked, and consumed.

salmonberries foraged. potatoes planted for donating to food share. a few doses of socialization, whether we unschoolers need it or not. 😉

raptly listened to music at the celtic festibal (his term), where his dada happened to be running the sound board. colored in a welsh flag, though he’s irish, because come on, a red dragon makes for a very cool flag. more ~~socialization~~ hanging out with dear friends…