Well, as I said in my last post… we are starting a homeschooling support group in our area. We are at the moment 5 families that homeschool…

However, I am the only unschooler.

The first meeting was last week… we went to the house of the seasoned homeschooler so that the “newbies” could ask questions and see her material. She is not only a homeschooler, but she loves collecting homeschool curriculum, books etc and is even starting a library in which people will be able to borrow material from her to compare different curriculums before buying. So, in her house downstairs she has a classroom set up (a large table for her kids surrounded by bookcases, posters a teachers desk etc…) and she has so much stuff… too much…

The other mom’s were loving looking at everything, asking questions, comparing stuff….  though my friend Isabelle was a bit overwhelmed by it all…

As for me… I was dissapointed by the meeting. I don’t want to talk about curriculum and what kids “need” to know by what age… I don’t want to talk about the logistics of how to school at home. Half the time I was there I could not relate at all to what the concerns were… the rest of the time the colourful workbooks had me wishing that Xavier was interested in that stuff…

I am going to tough it out a bit but I am a bit worried that it will not only be what I don’t want in a support group, but that it will make me doubt my choices and beliefs.

Thanks Ania for the link to these!!

“Go to your local public school, walk down the hallways
and see what behaviors you would want your child to emulate.”
-Manfred B. Zysk

“By breaking up topics into age-appropriate subjects as schools do,
learning is divorced from real life, and therefore limited.”
-Sara McGrath

(and of course you can read Sara’s blog here)

I hope there are more of these…I love them!!

Every once in a while my mainstream schooling propaganda mind gets hold of me and I try “schooling” the kids by asking what certain numbers are etc… Xavier hates it with a passion and not only will he not tell me, he gets uninterested and almost gets upset and just says that he doesn’t know… I learned my lesson and don’t do it anymore, but then my brain starts asking if he is really learning…

then out of the blue he surprises me… he can do simple math… addition and subtraction… he knows that 2+1=3… though he doesn’t know that he knows it yet and would never admit it…

I got a game installed on the computer a few days ago that I didn’t know if it would interest him or not… it is an older game… I think 2001 but it is not really dated… “The Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions”… pretty much the goal of the goal is to do “something”… it can be to get a mouse to his cheese or a bowling ball into a basket… to do what you have to do, you have to build a contraption… you use ropes and pulleys, springs and generators, gravity etc… it teaches you how gears work, how ropes and pulleys can work, how somethings are heavier than others…

logic…physics….

I started to play the game and naturally Xavier sat down next to me and watched… then while I was up and doing something he decided to play and was really good… we went back and started his own game and now he is advancing though the levels… today as Simon sat down next to him and he started a new level he pointed out how many of each thing that he had for that levels contraption… (eta… it is shown by having a small number next to each picture)
He is learning without knowing it and applying what he is learning seamlessly and unconsciously… this is the way that he learns best… It makes me proud that we can provide that environment for him…