Wednesday, May 21, 2008

My kids are teaching me the "un" in schooling...

For those of you unschoolers out there--now I'm not what I'd call an unschooler, quite yet, LOL, but the more I head towards that path, the more I see it working! We've not done official "book learning" in quite a while, but Mallory is on the write on/wipe off board doing multiplication! We've talked about real life multiplication, this morning it came up when we were talking about how Koala's spend 3/4ths of their lives sleeping. I said "so in one day, they sleep..." and Mall interjected "about 20 hours!". My initial instinct was to correct her to 18, I bit my tongue and said "well, it would be 3 groups of 6", and she replied that "18 is about 20, Mommy!", then proceeded to start on the white board with multiplication problems. The greatest part of this? She's announced to me "wow! I'm really really good at this!" This is an age where a large percentage of girls decide they hate math and are not good at it all; I'm loving every moment of this and am so glad to be homeschooling.

2 comments:

A Slice of the Pie said...

I love when those moments happen.

About four years ago one of my kids accidentally set the four character parental lock on some video game system we had. All through dinner the three oldest tried to figure out how they were going to unlock it since they had no idea what they had randomly entered for the code.

They were busy calculating how many different combinations there were and how long it would take to figure it out.

After dinner, I found a website explaining the math- combinations and permutations- that justified all of their calculations. It was so cool though to listen to them arrive at that on their own then show them the "lesson".

As it turned out the parental lock wasn't really set!

I know I have experienced many other moments such as those, this one really stands out for me though. Especially because the kids at the time were 12, 11 and 8.

Roxanne said...

I love unschooling stories like this!
I lean towards unschooling- my husband is more of a homeschooler (a mixed marriage...lol)but it just all works out. We stopped doing "school work" for the summer a couple weeks ago anyway. I found your blog through a yahoo e-mail group (can't remember which one)- We're in Ocean County. Where in NJ are you?
Roxanne