We've been unschooling since before they could talk! When education is this fun, why wait? Why even separate it?
Back in my day it was star wars OR lego. or star wars WITH lego!
she hasn’t seen the movies. he’s seen the ‘making of’ 🙂
dad: make sure you put those pieces together very carefully. don’t use FORCE
5yo: good one, dad
So what do you do if your kid discovers computer games and watches computer game videos on youtube?
You fit as much education into that as possible!
It turns out the kids LOVE Lego skyscrapers. They play together, (or alone) for hours. They follow common sense Lego rules like if one kid builds and ‘claims’ something, the other kid can play with but not modify or break it. Or not to worry about things falling apart on their watch if they were trying to rebuild something, but to not break something ‘just because’
So clearly I couldn’t leave one kid on the bench on the bike path and continue on another adventure trail into the woods with the other one. So what’s a dad to do?
There’s a whole bunch of sticks to slow him down…send him into the woods (which you know look a whole lot bigger to him)
This was an exciting opportunity for me to just send him off to be alone on his own. (I could always hear him and could see him from time to time)
But if you look in the video, you can see
When pushing your kid in a unicycle stroller is commonplace; even up & down 6 levels of a parking garage
This parking garage has a special place in our hearts. One of the landmarks we pass on our trips to grammas, it was one of the first examples I stumbled across of ‘introducing excitement’ to kids and how easy it is.
Wow! You know what that is??? A PARKING GARAGE!!
Week after week, looking for the parking garage, and staring at/studying it as we passed, it just became ‘our thing’.
We knew she was ‘officially pregnant’ when she cried her eyes out seeing little Anakin leaving his mom in the desert…again…seriously, we had seen this several times already…)
Star Wars has always been a big part of my life (well, only if you include making a Star Wars reference whenever possible and owning and wearing too often an adult sized Star Wars costume) but the kids hadn’t really shown too much interest…no more than any of the other things they are in to – from every comic book hero to anything that’s in a ‘Flying Bag’ (blind bag)…or anything that they have seen on youtube.
In our introductory weekly episode, the three and five year old visited a skatepark, play-drew Greek Mythology, and they experienced a variety of cutting tools that so far only dad and mom have been using.
There are many ways kids can learn but fun is always better. Let them play; when you’ve shown them how fun knowledge can be, what’s stopping them?
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.
