A Story, A Story!

Jacob amazed me tonight. Part of our bedtime ritual is story time, when I get to read to Jacob while baby sister (hopefully) falls asleep in the other room. Tonight, Jacob asked me to tell him the story of how Baby Bird and Baby Bird's Mama and Dadi Saved Christmas. I asked him how that story went, and, well, look at what came of it.

How Baby Bird and Her Mama and Dadi Saved Christmas

By Jacob Schindler, Age 3

Once, there was a baby bird named baby bird. And she said to Santa, I need a need a new sink because the old sink is broken. And she built a Christmas tree and put candy and toys and stickers and stamps on it!

And then what happened?

And a strange thing happened to the Christmas tree! it broke everything. The Christmas tree broke too!

How did baby bird feel about that?

Sad. her mouth fell open and her eyes stared at the Christmas tree. She said, “The Christmas tree is broken,” and her mama said, “Don’t worry, we can fix it.”

Then a strange thing happened to mama. Baby bird and Baby Bird’s Dadi flew into mama’s glasses, and then another strange thing happened! The strange thing was the mirror broke! And then I kicked and kicked and kicked because there was a bird in our house. I tried to catch that bird, but I didn’t know it was baby bird. And then the Christmas tree got fixed up and everything put back on and it was not broken and then baby bird telled santa that she needed a new sink because it was broken the end.

Did you like that story?

Yes, I did. Did baby bird get a new sink?

Yeah, she has it at her house now. Now can you tell me the story?

Alicia and I were flabbergasted.

My Inspiration

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, developer of the Atomic Bomb at Los Alamos, and avid bongo drummer. In one of his books, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, he writes about some of the influence his father had on his outlook on life in general, and science in particular.

Young Richard and friends would often go on "nature walks" with their fathers. Later, one kid teases Richard for being unable to name a nearby bird, saying, "Your father doesn't teach you anything!"

"But," Richard writes, "It was the opposite." His father had pointed out a particular bird, and "named" it with made-up titles in English, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese. Finally, he said, "You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing—that's what counts."

That is something that has always stayed with me—the difference between knowing what a thing is called, and the thing itself. It is very easy to confuse the two. One thing Feynman hated was a definition offered as an explanation. He once had the opportunity to review proposed science texts for middle- and high-school students, and hated them all. In particular, he scorned a text for saying, about various moving things, "Energy makes it go." Giving a word without an explanation was meaningless; you might just as well have said, "Wakalixes makes it go", for all the explanation it gives.

Do you have any thoughts? How detailed should we get in our explanations of things? Can we simply tell a child, "energy makes it go," and leave it at that? How much can we expect them to understand?

Our Early Reader

We were in the bookstore tonight (as we so often are) and we witnessed something truly remarkable. Alicia found a deck of cards with sight words on them—little words like "red", "and", "many", "like"—and showed them to 3-year-old Jacob. To our astonishment, he rattled through all but three of them. We had no idea that he knew so many words by sight.

Not bragging here, just thinking about the implications. Where do we go from here? Is this something we should encourage and work with, or just let it be? I'm inclined to say that we should just keep doing what we've been doing; reading to them, pointing out words as we do so, and let Jacob pick up as much as he wants. I'm afraid that if we push him, he'll get turned off of reading. Better that he should just see us loving books and learn to love books in that way.

The WORLD is my classroom!

How exciting is that? I started thinking tonight about all the CRAZY things I end up doing and then I look at my two adorable children and I realize that they are learning every step of the way. We went to the mall with Mary. While we were there Jacob continually pointed at signs reading off the letters and asking what the words said. Tonight in the car on our way home from visiting grandparents he sings out from his carseat "ONE WAY!" (to the tune of "The Sign Song" from Electric Company) as we passed a sign that said ONE WAY on a aptly signed street. Walking out the church doors a few weeks back he exclaims excitedly "There! There is the word FIRE!" I don't remember ever *teaching* him the word "fire".

I love learning from the kids and realizing that we are learning and teaching every moment of our days, every step along the way. What a blessed way to live.

I've been staying up late the last few nights because after chatting with Mary in the van to Michigan City and back I found a new inspiration to really get our school figured out and up and running. I am busy planning lessons and field trips. We haven't been home a single day this week but the opportunities, interactions, learning experiences, and fun the kids had makes up for the piles of laundry that still sit, needing folded and put away.

I love being busy, I don't mind my messy house. I love that my kids know that Mo Willems is the author/illustrator of some of their favorite books, and today they got to give him a hug and a hello! (and he remembered them from the last time we saw him!)

We are blessed to have such a rich, exciting, hands-on classroom and school is going to be one big experience after another of interacting with our friends, family and environment!

This year is going to be one of our best years ever, because I am embracing our classroom: the world around us. I am creating experiences and days full of excitement, laughter and learning that is camouflaged as just having fun!

What Shape is the Moon?

So many times, I'm tempted to "teach" Jacob, and I think he's rebuffing me. What he's saying is, "I'll learn it when I'm ready." And he does, in ways I don't even notice at the time. Ever since he learned his shapes, we've been playing a game called, What Shape is the Moon Tonight? The rules are simple: we find the moon, then say what shape it is. We even do the weird shapes like "gibbous"--I figure, to a two-year-old, "gibbous" is no more unusual a word than "crescent". Sometimes, I think he's just not interested, but then he goes to the planetarium with his mama, and in the middle of a presentation, shouts to the audience, "Mama, look! It's a gibbous moon!"

They're always looking.

unschooling

I am on a journey away from standards and objectives into true and actual learning that will change my childrens lives. The more reading and reasearch I do the more I realize that I will most likely lead my family on the adventure of unschooling. I don't feel like there is a time or place when kids need to learn a certain thing and I desire to fuel learning. We are currently homeschooling preschool and I am working on a routine and daily/weekly schedule that will work with our lives and our priorities for learning.

I researched many different curriculum including Sonlight and A Beka (and others that I can't remember the names of at this time). I feel the only *perfect for my family* curriculum is going to be the one I create for them. The reason for buying a curriculum is to have a foundation to start with. I attempted to start from scratch and found myself overwhelmed by the wealth of information I found. The need for a starting point prompted me to find a curriculum I could align most with and use it as a foundation to grow on.

With this in mind, I have purchased the Oak Meadow preschool curriculum and I am so glad I did. It included the two books Heart of Learning and Learning Processes. It is serving as a guide for me to plan my curriculum. Oak Meadow is a Waldorf-inspired curriculum. There are many aspects of Waldorf that are very in tune with the structure of our family. I am also choosing to glean the best of Montessori and Reggio-Emilia. We are running a life-based preschool where we are learning by doing. We have a weekly museum day where we go to a different museum with a group of friends to explore and increase our experience base.

I realize that this type of homeschooling is not for everyone. I am still working out the kinks. I am not a big advocate of preschool at all. I don't think we'll start any sort of traditional schooling until age 6. However, I feel the need to learn, and I am using preschool as the time to find :my: identity as a homeschooling mama. I think all the information and things that my kids will learn as we are on this journey will be beneficial, but I also think they could get it later in life and do not need to have it now.

My biggest motivator and reason for trying to find some structure to our schooling and learning who I am in my new role is because I do not want to look back and feel that I schooled Jacob at a lesser degree than the other children because he was the child I learned. I desire that as we learn together, he still gets a top notch education. This is also the reason we are creating a homeschool co-op group this fall so that he has other kids to interact and learn from. As our family grows and we create the life we desire for our kids, the younger kids will have the older siblings for interaction. I feel that even though Jacob is my firstborn, he deserves a :sibling: environment and we are creating that with a few of his peers who have temperaments that complement Jacob.

Welcome to my unschooling, life learning journey :)