Unschooling-dotcom...

On incorporating learning into everyday life:

For one, it doesn't usually LOOK like what you're probably expecting. What it looks like at our house is checking on a map to find out where Seoul, South Korea is, where Ottumwa, Iowa is, where Maine is (that was easy since we're in New England anyhow), where Hannibal, Missouri is and so on - yup, we're MASH fans (even 9 1/2 yr old DS). It might look like Mad Libs.

It might look like weighing produce at the co-op when we go shopping or comparing items to find out the best deal (quantity vs price vs nutritional information). It might be playing "Geography" while in the car (you know that game, if I say "Bolivia" you have to name a place that starts with "A" like Arkansas then I have to use "S" like San Diego, and so on).

It might look like making up a story one line at a time (where each person adds a sentence and things tend to get pretty silly pretty quickly). It -might- look like my DS asking me to write down some number questions (aka math problems) for him and then him writing down some for me (he usually makes really long ones with big numbers to try to make it hard for me).

It might look like watching Iron Chef, Dirty Jobs, MythBusters, How It's Made, Spongebob, or Fairly Odd Parents. It might look like reading a Pokemon focused magazine and finding out that most of the characters either are based on real animals OR they are based on Asian, Greek and Roman legendary characters.

It might look like explaining the cardiovascular system so he'll understand why Grandpa is in the hospital (congestive heart failure).

It might look like playing Lord of the Rings videogame or designing new maps and scenarios in Starcraft (a computer game). It might look like playing any one of a number of Pokemon games (on the Nintendo DS or using the trading cards). It might look like figuring out how many allowances it'll take to get some item.

It looks like LIFE and takes no special "incorporating" - if you're living and breathing and have your eyes and mind open, you're learning something every day. And sometimes we're learning things *from* DS.

—Deb R.

For us, it isn't so much a matter of incorporating learning into everyday life, as that we live our lives, and the learning happens. It's a bit of a paradigm shift from what those of us who grow up "schooled." (And I was one of those people-pleasing, teacher's pet, 'good students' so I had a lot to unlearn!)

The best example is what happens when people ask us, 'so, do you take a break in the summer?' and we tell them, "Well, we tried to get them to take a break, but they just would not stop learning!"

Just keep in mind that if they do think of learning as being related to formal, structured things like workbooks, it may take a while for everybody to make the shift to not separating "living" and learning." Take some time to just enjoy spending time together, being a family.

We like to go out into the community a lot (best b-day presents I ever got were memberships to the natural history museum and the zoo, so we can go and enjoy them at our leisure, and not feel like we have to cram everything into one visit.) Museum, zoo, library, coffee shop, bus, park, grocery store, book store, post office, dance concerts, plays etc. We don't go with specific learning goals in mind, but the learning happens.

—Julie

Today's project is tracking down a preserve called Bar-le-Duc, named for a city and current recipes use red or white currents or gooseberries. I'm hunting for medieval references today just because I'm curious.

LOL in an "unschooling in action" moment, I just had to go check this stuff out. I checked the wikipedia article on the city and found http://www.cardullos.com/preserves_bar_le_duc.htm a place to buy the currant preserves (there were many). One interesting note on the preserve site is that the currants/gooseberries used are hand seeded using a quill. Talk about labor intensive work!

And that's how one thing leads to another leads to another leads to yet another. There was a talk at an unschooling conference a year or two ago that was called something to the effect that Everything is Connected to Chocolate. And it really is! History, Archaeology, Science, Literature, Theater/Film/TV, Culture, Economics, Biology, Botany, and tons more.

Rather than a series of boxes to check off ("I 'did' math, I 'did' History"), unschooling is a whole web of interconnected ideas where history IS math IS language IS cooking IS culture IS science... Because, in real life, they ARE connected. It's only when school takes each separate piece and makes it a goal in and of itself, rather than a tool, that it loses the connections. What's funny is when schools start recognizing this and trying to add back in the connections it's kind of like adding back artificially produced nutrients to foods that had that nutrient to begin with and got it stripped out during processing. It seems more "nutritious" but it's still not as well balanced as the original food item.

—Deb R.

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