Month 20 of unschooling....

We're still plodding along. Currently there's lots of Lego building, Bionicle building, movie fascination which suddenly saw me and Jnr going to the cinema 3 times already this month. Jnr is also keen to work with his pc syllabus without me having to negotiate with him to do so. He alternates between JumpStart Grade 3 which he really loves because of it's cute cartoon characters to DK's ClueFinders Grade 5 which we find alittle more challenging than the Grade 4 disc. We found this Grade 4 program more like a gap filler, with syllabus very similar to Grade 3, which was boring and slow.

We've bought the ADi's Complete Learning Pack for Year 4, but haven't got the chance to check it out yet but it does seems promising with it's cute-looking alien boy name Adi. My son has a thing for cute and funny characters.

Schedule - well, we're still working along a pattern of nonstop learning thru the pc for weeks, and then a sudden long stretch of not learning at all.

I am still constantly on the lookout for different ways to support Jnr's education. One of my HEing friend's 8 yrs old son started his own blog which I thought was a brilliant idea, so I've copied that. I suggested to son to start his own blog about his toys, predominantly Legos, and lucky me, he's sold on the idea. Hence AllAboutMyToys.blog begin.

Seeing him working on his blog made me realised that my son did learnt alot over these past 20 months. And that alot of his learning is all self- directed. Which got me thinking:-

What is he learning? I understand that he is learning, just by living life as he knows it, but will there be evidence that all these life skills can actually be translated into something academically tangible?

What I am trying to say is, school is trying to prepare it's children for life, by teaching them as much life skills as they can, their only evidence that a child has "absord a fairly reasonable level of " life skills that's been pitched at them, is exams results. But we're still not sure if the skills they've picked is more for passing exams or do they really understand what they've learnt can actually be applied to daily life?

I am now very interested to see evidence of my son applying his learnt skill to his living environment.

I supposed his blog about his toys is 1 evidence. The language skills that he's picked up has allowed him to be able to express his opinions, and write it down.

What other evidence of learning can I see?

Well, the freedom to buy whatever he wants has manifest into tremendous counting skills. Nowadays, he can very confidently calculate how many weeks of savings, or how much £ short he is, with regards to that slightly more expensive toy that he wants. He's beginning to start talking multiplications, and is able to multiply easily with 10s, 100s or 1000s. He's taken to calculating his pocket money in terms of annually- I think the idea of having a huge lump of money at one go really excites him, so much that he's suggested to me to give him the balance of his pocket money for the 2nd half of the year in one go LOL!!

Nowadays, my son is constantly looking for ways to make money- from laundry to selling me little Lego figures that he's made, and he has sold me many!! The deal was once sold, these figures were mine to keep. If he wants them back, he'll have to buy it back from me. Today, he didn't have the money to buy back a Lego Royal Mail plane from me but instead, he's offered to barter trade 2 newly bult Lego airplanes for it. A done deal!

We now have questions like how many days in such and such a month. Or how many hours in a month/ year? Questions about how long a journey will take which allowed the explanation of miles/ hour. And alot more questions, that has no link to the question or discussion before it. He is definetely learning in many parellel sequences, and all these parellel learning is moving asycrony. It seem like something in our discussion always trigger off an awareness of something totally different.

20 months on, we are now beginning to see the wonders of unschooling. We now see what every homeschooling experts is saying - "intrinsic learning". It will be really interesting to how all this little titbits fall in place, forming a bigger picture.