Sunday, August 5, 2007

Un-unschooling?

After three years of radical unschooling, my kids have asked for "something different, something more, something like school, but not school." Hmmm. Sounds a bit like homeschooling to me. We had a big brain-storming session so I could find out what it was that they wanted. They want lessons. They want assignments. They want goals. They want (in particular) math. They want to feel like they have learned something. So I took a big step off the unschooling platform and bought curriculum yesterday at our local homeschool conference! Wow!! That was a BIG step, too.

We came home and the kids instantly wanted to start doing the curriculum. I got up this morning and Keon was in doing math! We chose the Math-U-See system as it, well, makes sense to me and we can self pace easily with it. I'm learning things as well!

So this blog is to record the things that we do each day (or week or whenever we get around to blogging about it!) We will add photos, copies of our projects, ideas we come up with and questions we might have. I'm calling this "Learning around the world" because I'm hoping to create a sort of unit study with ships and boating as my main theme. Ships have been a part of our history since, well, gosh, a long time! Some would say since Moses built the ark, but we know that boats date back even further than the biblical stories. As we embark on this venture we hope to learn more about our world, its history and hopefully its future. We plan on studying everything from the first small dinghy that someone carved out of wood (or created out of animal skins) all the way to the ships that take humans to that great sea we call space.

2 comments:

Christi said...

Sounds like my son. He asked if we could stop unschooling this year too. I look forward to reading about your adventures.

Mel. said...

I don't know that we are going to exactly stop unschooling, but I do know we are going to have more formal studies in various subjects this year. I'm getting a bit of flack from some of the radical unschoolers because I should be talking my kids out of wanting lessons and school-looking things. Why? They are wanting these things. There is some sort of need in their lives so I'm working to fulfill it. :)