We didn’t even come here to run, we came to scooter. I had to ask them if they were ready to put their gear on and ride yet..before they tired themselves out!
During school hours, no one is there. Kids as young as brand new crawlers can have a blast here with so many slopes and angles and risk levels.
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.
It would have been great for the kids to go in and get a tour of what they do there…but also there was a sideroad that we could pull over on and let the kids out. They were pretty impressed!!
LLamas, goats, alpacas, donkeys, reindeer, sheep, pigs, horses… There’s also GIANT DANDELIONS on that side road!
It was probably a decade or two ago that I said ‘wow, I’m never going to a raspberry farm again!’ At that point in my life I had no kids to unschool.
This time when we were invited out to the raspberry farm (like those places where you go pick your own and they are like 40 mins away…each way? ugh!) I was about to tell them how completely uninterested in that I was, but as my lips were forming the word ‘nah’ I thought about unschooling in a raspberry field. Sure!
Hey kiddos, would you rather go visit Farmer Tom in the morning when he’s working on metal, or in the afternoon when he’s working with wood?
The first thing he did when he picked up the grinder was to give the kids some helmets. And pointed them to behind a safety screen. He was already decked out in safety gear – which was great for the kids to see…he’s a very careful guy to watch!
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?
I don’t want to make their unicycle lessons feel like ‘lessons’. So we bring them out with us to places here and there and get a minute or two more of practice.
You may or may not be a unicyclist if you are reading this. If you are, you would notice how naturally he’s picking his unicycle off the ground and placing it under him. Learning to unicycle is often compared to dropping your unicycle 1000 times then you can ride it…that’s not entirely accurate, but it’s close!)