Sunday, October 12, 2014

Our unschooling journey so far

It's almost mid-October so we've been doing this for about 6 weeks.  We took a couple weeks off for a family vacation but really, that was tremendously educational in itself.  We drove through 5 states and spent a week at Disney.  We visited an aquarium and learned about marine animals and also spent an afternoon at the ocean.  We talked about geography, climate, weather, money and many other topics. 

Our days at home have settled into somewhat of a routine.  There is no video games or tv before 3.  The kids read or work on their homework for their Pioneers classes.  They play games on the ipad or DS, which is a video game but since it's not on the big tv, I'm okay with that.  And really, they get tired of that fairly quickly.  I have thought about saying that they can only play educational games on the ipad during the day but then I'd have to monitor that and also decide what constitutes an educational game.  There is logic and cause and effect in any game and those are good things to learn.  So I have decided to let them choose what they play for now.  They also play outside and play cars, legos, house, etc.  There have been very few times that someone said they were bored.  And if I offer to play a game with them, they always say yes. 

The first part of our school year was really about trying this out and seeing how we liked it and also getting ready for vacation.  Now we've tried this out and discovered it seems to work really well for us and now vacation is over.  I'm ready to add in some field trips and science experiments and see what we can discover together.