Deschooling

I had a bunch of books from the library stacked in the living room for our next chapter of history, on the Aztec, Maya, and Inca, and Jonathan read through some of them over the weekend. He found a book full of activities and picked out a few he wanted to do. We listened to the next chapter on CD as he read along in his book while I gathered our supplies.

In the morning, we all worked together to make this Mayan temple pyramid:


When it dries completley, we'll paint it red, as the Mayan temples are thought to have been.

And in the afternoon, since the Maya were fond of the plangi method, we made these for everyone:

Tie-dye socks and t-shirts

On Sunday, we planted an upside down tomato plant:


We're having fun watching the leaves reach for the sun. They're actually turned completely upward, smashing into the bottom of the bucket. We're gently training them outward each day.

Monday, while cleaning out our gardening supplies, we found that a wren had put one of our hanging planters to good use:



We look forward to watching the babies grow and fly away one day. We've been looking in on them daily and Mama Bird is pretty patient with us. They're smaller than the first joint of my thumb, right now, and perfectly adorable.

~~~~~

I've been paying attention to what Jonathan does without the structure of a schedule or lessons during the day. It's been enlightening to see the balance he strikes between playing outdoors, playing inside, often with Bionicles, often imaginative games with his brothers, and reading. He often starts playing with Bionicles after breakfast, then runs outside after half an hour or so. He plays outdoors and then comes inside, settling down with one book or another. Finished with that, he often starts a project, something to do with Bionicles, usually. He really seems to naturally balance his periods of physical activity and rest, as well as mental activity and relaxation. Maybe that's my own perception, though, regarding his mental activity. I suspect his mind is always going, whether he's reading a book, cleaning up his toys, or swinging outside, staring up at the clouds.

In the last week, he's made a Bionicle book, a necklace from small, square cards on which he had drawn various Bionicle symbols--they're quite pretty--and their meanings (things like Unity, Purity, Speed, Will-Power, Strength, Courage, Strategy, Loyalty, etc), a thick deck of flash cards with Matoran language on one side and English on the other (words like shrine, wildlife, elite, spirit, energy from a star, primal, regeneration, telepathy, levitation...), and a bunch of Bionicle masks out of cardboard. He wants me to memorize the flashcards, and though I was hesitant (I'll admit it sounded like a boring endeavor to me, but I'm trying really hard to shift my paradigm over here, and was successful in this instance) it's been fun to exercise my brain and realize that I'm not addled and forgetful as I thought I was. We've also had lots of wonderful conversations about these words and what they mean to him. He's memorized the whole language and alphabet, and writes me secret messages in coded Matoran which are much more difficult for me to translate than they are for him to translate and code.

This deschooling process is as much for me as it is for him. I'm trying to eliminate some words from my vocabulary (words like teach, school, school-year, grade...basically following the very good advice found here) and haven't found it as challenging as I thought it might be, but I still find myself thinking in those terms occasionally. I don't even like the term unschooling because it puts what I'm trying to accomplish in terms of schooling. I like that it opposes "schooling" but I wish I could think of a way of expressing that without reference to school at all. All I've come up with is saying, "We're life learners," but I'm positive that won't go over in general conversation. To your average person, I'm sure that I'm a bit freaky, but I don't necessarily want to advertise that, you know?

I've felt really good about everything so far. I'm doing lots of reading from re-visiting books I read when Jonathan was a baby, to reading new suggested books from unschooling lists, to reading the unschooling lists themselves. And then there are the Little House books that we're reading every night before bed. All good things.