The Curriculum Series, Part 3
Part 1: Live and Learn.
Part 2: First How, Then What.
(Attention non-homeschoolers: big long list of Fun Stuff below! Scroll down to below the Dali painting.)
I’ve been hearing from a lot of people who took the “What kind of homeschooler are you?” quiz and came up as unschoolers, much to their surprise. It seems many of us recognize those muddy children in the first question as our own, and our families do a lot of experiential learning. To learn about Native Americans, we might try our hand at grinding corn to make our bread. Our dining-room tables are buried under “3 marbles, 2 dominoes, 5 Scrabble tiles, a 1/2-eaten jelly sandwich, 1 basket of unfolded clean laundry, 4 broken crayons, 3 markers (1 without a cap), a can of fish food, 2 screwdrivers, and a hammer.” When Life interrupts our plans with a sick relative or a cross-country move, we scrap the plans and learn what the roller coaster has to teach us.
Home education is a lifestyle as much as it is a school choice. Its rhythms and possibilities are so utterly unlike institutional education that it sometimes takes us a while, as homeschooling parents, to shake off the years of training that told us “education” was answering enough questions correctly on enough tests to earn us the grades that satisfied our parents and teachers. Whether or not we would remember the answers to those questions a year later seemed to be beside the point.
But once we do shake off that notion, we discover that there are a lot of other notions out there about what a good education is and how best to achieve it. And here we are back at the how.
Let’s look at some of the different answers to how and talk in very practical, specific terms about what stuff you can use if you want to educate your kids according to a particular how or method.
First up: Unschooling.
“Melting clocks are not a problem in your reality. You are an unschooler. You will tolerate a textbook, but only as a last resort. Mud is your friend. You prefer hands-on everything. If your school had an anthem, it would be Dont Worry, Be Happy.” (From Guilt-Free Homeschooling’s What Kind of Homeschooler Are You quiz.)
I’m laughing here, because the rest of this post has a completely oxymoronic premise. “Hi, I’m talking about curriculum! Let’s start with unschooling!” And unschooling is about learning through following your interests, not following a predetermined sequence of skill-building exercises and fact memorization. Unschoolers don’t try to recreate school at home, so who needs curriculum?
But I think of curriculum—all those books and schedules and lists and kits and guides and videos—as tools. Just because I have a good tool set, that doesn’t mean I’m a carpenter. I might just be a person who likes to make stuff, in which case a good hammer and saw come in handy.
So what are some of the tools a household of unschoolers might use? Besides the obvious, I mean, the good books, the art supplies, the kitchen, the garden, pretty much the whole wide world. Here is a list of Some Particularly Cool Stuff My Kids and I Have Learned a Ton From or Just Plain Had a Good Time With:
Settlers of Catan
, the board game. Jane got this for Christmas last year. We’ve been obsessed ever since. Except when our friends hijack it and keep it for weeks because it is that great a game.
Signing Time DVDs. Catchy songs, immensely useful vocabulary in American Sign Language. I trumpet these wherever I go. We talk about Rachel like she’s one of the family.
Prismacolor colored pencils. Indispensable. I was amused to see that Jane mentioned them in the first line of her “I Am From” poem. She’s right; they have helped color the picture of her life.
Uncle Josh’s Outline Map CD-Rom
. Because maps are cool, and maps you can color (with Prismacolor pencils, hey!) are even cooler. The kids are constantly asking me to print out a map of somewhere or other. You can find other outline maps available online (for free), but I like Josh’s for clarity. And once when I had a problem opening a particular map (it’s a PDF file), I called the help number and it was Uncle Josh himself, a most amiable gentleman, who quickly solved my problem.
The Global Puzzle
. Big! Very big! Will take over your dinner table! (So clear off that laundry.)
Set. It may annoy you that your eight-year-old will be quicker at spotting the patterns in this card game than you will. There’s a free daily online version as well.
Quiddler
. Like Scrabble, only with cards. This, too, can be played online.
Babble. Like Boggle, only online and free.
Chronology
, the game. Like Trivial Pursuit, only with history.
Speaking of online games: the BBC History Game site is awfully fun.
And Jane was fairly addicted to Absurd Math for a while there. Need more free math puzzles? Nick’s got a bunch.
A Case of Red Herrings
and Mind Benders
. Logic and problem-solving puzzles: a fun way to pass the time on long car trips or in waiting rooms.
Zoombinis Logical Journey
computer game. Stretch your brain trying to get the little Zoombinis to a village where they can bounce in peace.
Oregon Trail
. The game that launched a massive wagon trail rabbit trail for my kids a couple of years ago—and they still aren’t tired of the game.
Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots : Gardening Together with Children
. Plant a sunflower house! Up-end a Giant Bucket of Potatoes and dig through the dirt for your rewards! Grow lettuce in rainboots! Boots! With lettuce growing in them!
Wild Goose Science Kits. Fun experiments with a low mess factor. Best prices at Timberdoodle. Note to self: remember the Wild Goose Crime Kit come Christmastime.
A microscope. Sonlight sells a nifty set of prepared slides with paramecium and other fun stuff for the kids to peer at.
If the scope sparks an interest in dissection, there’s a way to do it online with no actual innards involved: Froguts! The site has a couple of free demos to occupy you while you save up for the full version. (Which I haven’t seen yet, but it does look cool.) HT: Karen Edmisten.
Klutz kits. Over the years, we’ve explored: knitting, embroidery, origami, magic, Sculpey, paper collage, paper dolls, beadlings, and foam shapes. Look under any piece of furniture in my house and you will find remnants of all of the above.
Which reminds me: Sculpey clay. Is it possible to get through a day without some? My children think not.
Usborne’s calligraphy book and markers. I think Anne-Marie sells Usborne so she probably has more information if you’re interested.
But while I’m on Usborne, my kids also love and use at least weekly: Usborne Science Experiments Volumes 1, 2, and 3.
Muse
magazine. The highlight of Jane’s month. From the publishers of Cricket.
Classical Kids CDs. Beanie’s favorite is the Vivaldi. Alice’s daughter Theresa does a fabulous Queen of the Night impersonation from the Mozart.
Refrigerator poetry magnets. I gave Scott the Shakespearean set a couple of Christmases ago. Note to self: You are not as brilliant as you think! You were an English major, for Pete’s sake, with a minor in drama. Thou knowest full well old William was a bawdy lad. If you don’t want your little ones writing poems about codpieces, stick to the basic version. But oh how I enjoy the messages Scott leaves for me to find and then pretends he doesn’t know who wrote them:
I am
so
in love
with my
delicate
wench.
And of course of course of course, Jim Weiss story CDs. I rave about these every chance I get because they have added such riches to my children’s imaginations. For years, they have listened to Jim’s stories after lights-out. Greek myths, Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, folk and fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, the Jungle Book: of such stuff are dreams woven.
A good source for much of the above (and lots more): FUN Books.
I’ll continue to add to this list as more good stuff occurs to me. Your suggestions are welcome and encouraged!
Coming up next: Charlotte Mason. But bear with me: these linky posts take a while.
Tags: homeschooling, homeschool, unschooling, curriculum, education, educational games
Willa, one of my favorite bloggers and favorite people in general, pointed her readers toward this post at Dumb Ox Academy the other day. Faith’s blog is new to me, but I like her already. It appears we have a lot in common; like me, Faith sees good sense in both traditional classical education and unschooling. Faith writes:
I am drawn to two dissimiliar methods of home educating my kiddos. One is the structured, rigorous and time-tested method of classical schooling, complete with chanting declensions, and in depth analysis of ancient classics. The other is unschooling, following one’s bliss and trusting in the Lord to provide the pilgrim with everything he needs.
Now, I would characterize unschooling a bit differently, since my vision of “natural learning” involves a good deal of behind-the-scenes path-strewing on the part of mom and dad; and from what I’m seeing on Faith’s excellent blog, I get the impression she works this way too. This post goes on to share a terrific idea for using the fridge as an “unschooling bulletin board”:
So far the categories I have come up with are: Quote of the Week, Latin Phrase of the Week, Root Word of the week, Spelling Rule of the Week, and Math of the Week. I showed them to the kids at lunch time (I was very busy setting it up yesterday morning and they were getting curious about what I was doing!). So I showed them each category. My 11 yo immediately said, “get me a pencil and paper!” And then got some himself and wrote E=MC(squared) and posted it up. I’d forgotten science! And apparently when he and his dad were attending a baseball game on Sunday, dh had explained Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to him.
Read the rest of the post to see what Faith has chosen for her first week of Fridgeschooling. She promises to share each week’s selections on her new “On the Fridge” page. I love her first Quote of the Week. It’s from A Thomas Jefferson Education, a book I found useful and interesting, living as we do in Mr. Jefferson’s backyard. (And I have just remembered with a terrible pang that I promised to send my copy to a friend ages ago. Cindy, I’m so sorry, do you still want it? Mea culpa.) Like Andrew Campbell’s superb new book, The Latin-Centered Curriculum
, Oliver van DeMille’s A Thomas Jefferson Education
makes a case for an education steeped in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans, with the parent serving as mentor, accompanying the student through the deep, unrushed study of a few key works. Multum non multa, as Campbell puts it: “Not many, but much.”
Willa herself has written several thoughtful and eloquent posts exploring the seeming oxymoron of “classical unschooling.” My own explanation of the concept is that classical ed informs the what, the content, and unschooling describes the how.
I found a major flaw in my metaphor.
I’ve been writing about what I call “tidal homeschooling,” the way my children experience an ebb and flow of alternating periods of deliberate study, directed by me, and periods of what is sometimes called “natural” learning but which I more often describe as “accidental” learning—the enormous quantities of facts and ideas children are wont to soak up when given time and freedom in which to do so. I’ve described the periods of structured study as our “high tide” times, when I charter a boat and lead my merry little crew on a fishing expedition in quest of a particular skill or subject, in contrast to our “low tide” times when they wander off, each in her own direction, to explore the shores and tide pools of the world, eager little beachcombers gathering sackfuls of treasure. Because of the high-tide voyages, I cannot accurately call us unschoolers; but because of the frequency and fruitfulness of our low-tide times, which sometimes last for months, I have shied away from various other home-education labels as well, finding more in common with the outlook of the unschoolers than with any other group. Since no label fit, I coined my own term which seems to aptly describe the rhythm and manner of learning that takes place in our family.
But I was mulling over this excellent post at The Common Room (subsequent mulling-over being the usual pleasant result of reading a Common Room post) and it struck me that my metaphor breaks down when I come to the beachcombing part.
“The adults in the child’s life,” writes the Headmistress, referencing Charlotte Mason,
“have the ‘power of appeal and inspiration,’ and the responsibility to act ‘the part of guide, philosopher and friend’ to these young people with wonderful minds but no knowledge to speak of.
“Or… we can just abandon them to their uninformed judgment about what’s important and what isn’t, leave them to their own devices, and allow them to believe that their own judgment about what is and is not important to know is just as well informed and solid an opinion as Mortimer Adler’s, Thomas Jefferson’s, Peter’s, Paul’s, or…. yours. Leaving children to pick up what scraps of knowledge they think to ask about, willy nilly, is not doing them any favors. It isn’t respectful of their situation as newcomers to the world or to the adults they will grow up to be. And if we don’t do our job as the adults in their lives when they are small, the adults they grow up to be will have a malnourished background upon which to build.’ “
For a brief moment, the unschooler in me bristled defensively. Not that I think the Headmistress was denouncing unschooling with this statement—she has made gracious remarks about the philosophy in the comments section here on Bonny Glen and elsewhere. But this statement jumped out at me: “Leaving children to pick up what scraps of knowledge they think to ask about, willy nilly…” Is this, I wondered, exactly the sort of experience I have enthusiastically hailed as our low-tide times? Allowing children the freedom to learn by undirected exploration of the world? To be sure, what I have witnessed and described as the collection of a sackful of treasures is a rich and bountiful harvest of knowledge, not an aimless scrounging after scraps. And yet…is there a willy-nilliness to their education? Am I—are unschoolers—leaving too much up to chance?
Then it occurred to me that I’ve overlooked an aspect of my beachcombing scenario. I’m the one strewing the beach with treasures for the children to discover. You see, this is where the metaphor breaks down. Sometimes, yes, I am simply the person bringing the children to the metaphorical strand and turning them loose to explore. But other times—a lot of the time, when I think about it—I have visited the beach in advance and filled the tide pools with interesting creatures; I have hidden the treasures behind the dunes.
This strewing is something unschooling parents talk a great deal about. It is the same thing Charlotte Mason meant when she said, “Education is a life. That life is sustained on ideas…we must sustain a child’s inner life with ideas as we sustain his body with food,” urging parents and teachers to provide hearty feasts of ‘living’ books and firsthand encounters with the natural world. Of course, Miss Mason recommended regular and orderly mealtimes, while an unschooler would probably say that the human mind thrives best when allowed to graze. But in both cases, we see a committed, thoughtful parent doing the shopping and preparing the food. I am doing just as much preparation (to jump metaphors again) during our low-tide times as I am during high tide. Whether I am piloting the boat on a fishing trip—as I am doing now with our studies of German and Shakespeare—or whether I am hiding bits of sea glass in the sand for a wandering child to discover (or not), my role is indeed that of “guide, philosopher, and friend.”
And so I see that my metaphor needs tweaking. And I continue to chew on these ideas (with apologies to the gentle Headmistress for running off with her post in my mouth), which—like everything connected with Charlotte Mason that I have come across in the past ten years—provide such stimulating nourishment for my own mind.
At any rate, the tidal homeschooling metaphor is not a method; it does not shape what we do. It is useful insofar as it is a way of answering the many variations on the question, “How do you do it?”—which is to say, “What does homeschooling look like in your home?” This is a question homeschoolers are constantly asking one another, and it is a root question in many discussions between homeschoolers and folks whose children go to school. And perhaps a better way of answering it is to apply the Writers’ Rule: Show, don’t tell. I think this is why we love blogs and discussion boards: we crave these peeks into other homes.
One of my favorite “peeks through the window” is Elizabeth Foss’s lovely book, Real Learning: Education in the Heart of the Home. Here we have an entire book full of examples both practical and lyrical to the “How do you do it?” question. The Common Room family lives in another house full of enticing windows. This post at Cottage Blessings is a glimpse into a cottage that is truly a blessed place—so much so that I am daily tempted to pack up my little brood and move right in. (Wouldn’t Alice be surprised!)
Other recent peeks-through-the-window I have enjoyed:
Castle of the Immaculate
Living Without Schooling
Relaxed Homeskool
Mental Multivitamin
Every Waking Hour
Karen Edmisten
Semicolon
And these books:
• Homeschooling With Gentleness
by Suzie Andres
• Homeschooling Our Children, Unschooling Ourselves
by Alison McKee
• A Charlotte Mason Companion
by Karen Andreola—like Real Learning
, this is a book I return to over and over
• The about-to-be-published Catholic Homeschool Companion, edited by Maureen Wittman and Rachel Mackson—a glimpse through many windows!
“Melting clocks are not a problem in your reality. You are an unschooler. You will tolerate a textbook, but only as a last resort. Mud is your friend. You prefer hands-on everything. If your school had an anthem, it would be Dont Worry, Be Happy.” (From Guilt-Free Homeschooling’s What Kind of Homeschooler Are You quiz.)