Adventures in Unschooling

When you unschool, even if you believe in it, you almost constantly have to readjust the "school mentality" those of us who grew up in "the system" have.

Mal will be 4 in three months (!!!) and many of my friends, the ones whose kids aren't in preschools, are starting to do "schooly" things with their kids: pre-writing, lessons, that sort of thing. I'm not saying they're doing anything wrong; in fact, when D was this age, we were already a year into gymnastics, tae kwon do, and had daily "desk time" where we did sort of semi-formal stuff from a fun workbook I'd found at Sam's or something like that. Of course, we'd bag all of the homeschool stuff to go have fun, but I do get it.

As we've moved fully into unschooling, though, I've seen how my older kid thrives and how my younger kid has all of the curiosity and enthusiasm typical to children.

With Toys R Us closing, we've gotten Mal a few things we wouldn't have bought otherwise (a Jet robot suit, a Vampirina house, a LandSpeeder he doesn't have yet so shhhh), including a big Cars Florida 500 racetrack.

He's played with it for hours already, and I just got it put together at 4:30 yesterday afternoon. A "schoolish" mindset would say, "That's great. It's important for kids to play. But academics are also important." To which I would say: This is literally a crash course in physics.

My son has done a ton of experiments in the past half day: How far will the car go if I push it? Can the car rest on the sideways part of the track without falling off? Does it make a difference if I direct the cars to the outer or inner lanes? When using the motor launcher, what difference does my pushing the car into the feeder make versus just letting it roll in without the added boost? How is all of this varied with a lower, slimmer car? With a big, boxy van? Heavier? Lighter? If they're backwards? Upside down? Plastic vs. metal? Why do cars keep rolling out of the stands and how can I make that stop? How is the set behaving differently now that the batteries are dying (they're old, but the only D batteries we had in the house when I put this together)? Why won't this cat get the heck out of the way?

Neither Mal nor I could articulate the physical laws behind any of these observations, but the fact is that Mal is learning things. He's observing information that he will be able to implement to interactions in the future. That is precisely the point of learning.

And even the most confident of us unschoolers sometimes need the reminder.