This first came to me with a two year old and his dinosaur toys. I knew homeschooling would make sense for us as soon as I got the idea, but we jumped into a much bigger world of education the first time I said, ‘well I don’t know, wanna go research on daddy’s computer with me?’
Through playing, youtube watching, playing, youtube watching, playing, and research, each new dinosaur ‘toy’ we got was quite a massive educational building block and puzzle piece.
The main lego pieces are bricks and plates. (the plates are one third the depth of bricks).
“Hey, can you find this 2 by 3 plate? It’s called a 2 by 3 because it’s two rows of three. How many posts does it have?”
“1,2,3,4,5,6!”
“See how much faster I can count them because of how I am just adding groups of numbers? See how they are organized in rows and columns?”
The whiteboard has had many letter games, tic tac toe games, and all sorts of pictures set up for them in the morning (which caused me to search youtube for ‘how to draw characters’. (I suck at it, but they don’t realize it yet!). It has little dots on it in a grid pattern which have many advantages down the unschooling road for sure.
Slacklining allows a person to quickly and consistently experience and work against a range of stresses and forces that our bodies are fighting against all the time…without the advantage of the ground’s stability! One of the reasons you don’t really pay attention to all these forces throughout your day is because the ground you are walking on or the chair you are sitting in is stable. The ground is pushing up on the chair with the same force you are pushing down on it…but on a slackline, what you are pushing down against is flexible. And wobbly.
What do you do with a toddler who loves the music time you have together, but you aren’t a music teacher and you only really have some plastic instruments and a banjo you only have because someone once asked you if you wanted a banjo or a ukelele?
Well look who learned ‘righty tighty lefty loosey’!
My advice for people who are about to buy ‘toy tools’ for their wee ones, let them use the actual tools! A socket wrench, baggie full of nuts & bolts, and things with holes in them will go a lot farther than a ‘plastic tool bench toy’
Among the many unschooling and life benefits that come from unicycling is the socializing. (one of the other ones is that if you can physically walk and have access to a unicycle, you have all you need to be able to do it)
What’s the first thing people think about when trying to get your kids more socializing? Sports. Sign them up for soccer or baseball, right? Not necessarily!
He’s been watching a lot of youtube videos. He noticed that they always ask to subscribe to their channels and asking the kids to comment. It’s pretty funny watching it in real life!
What we are doing though, it building ‘speaking in front of camera comfort’ which will translate easily to ‘speaking in front of people’ comfort.
Fidget Spinners, huh?
This is our unschool version. It’s like a fidget spinner and an old fashioned sit-n-spin (remember those?).
If the kids like a movie…and there are Lego sets from the movie…the next step, if it isn’t obvious, couldn’t be easier…get the Lego!
Frozen and Moana have been seen a bunch of times. I’m not sure play time could ever truly match up to watching time (especially based on my teaching philosophy…watch whatever videos you want for as long as you want, give or take…)
I didn’t know what she was talking about until I saw the video and I noticed little green individual styrofoam dots missing from the trees…and the white ones that were used to accent the waterfall 🙂
Little kids love (well, whatever you teach them to love, in this case, toys and instruments) toys and instruments. They also love the playing down by the river. (The nitrate-heavy, city-gross, unswimmable river) Dad loves to unicycle. Sounds like a plan!
He was watching some youtube video with his little sister and it was an alphabet video about animals. I asked him what they said for Q, and he didn’t know…I went back and found it. It was Quiz. He asked …
“Dad, can we make a video about a dino battle for kids? i bet they would like that.”
I knew he wanted to make a dino battle video because that’s what he was watching when he asked it.