You Don’t Have To by Laurie Wolfrum
Are you coaxing your child to sit and do math or write an
essay?
Is it affecting your relationship? There are alternatives! We’ll
talk about how to help your child pursue their passions, how learning happens,
and the role of a parent in an unschooling home.
1. Reviews
This is the time of year I’ve finished doing reviews
for homeschooling families. Many of the parents I’ve talked to are pleased or
satisfied with how homeschooling is going, but others feel it’s a struggle.
It doesn’t have to be.
Homeschooling parents don’t need to coax their
children to do lessons “for their own good.”
2. Curriculum
-
You don’t need to try to make your kid
understand what a curriculum states is important for them to know at a specific
grade.
-
You don’t need to follow a curriculum.
Instead of hindering our children’s learning process
by directing them to study what others think they should know by a certain age
or grade, we can help them to find resources and do the things that they are interested
in and trust that they will take from them what they need or want at that time.
We can also trust that they will make learning
connections and that this process will continue throughout their life. (Refer to Sandra
Dodd’s Just Add Light and Stir post in resources.) Just
as it does for us! In addition, we can be available for answering questions or
suggesting ideas that they are free to take or not.
Allowing and supporting your children in learning
this way can take a huge leap in trust, especially if we went to school and
even more so for those that studied education.
People can feel fearful when they do things
differently than the mainstream. Homeschooling is already outside the
mainstream, and unschooling is a minority within a minority. Feeling fearful
can be very uncomfortable.
What do people naturally do when they feel fear?
They try to quell it or find ways to cope with it.
One of the ways parents may feel more comfortable
with homeschooling is by choosing to use a curriculum. It may help alleviate
their worries, may give them peace of mind knowing experts have devised the
curriculum, and they may trust that by following it, all the important bases
will be covered.
Whether our children attend a public or private
school or are homeschooled, we are still responsible for our children’s
education.
When people enroll their kids in a school, they feel
like their child’s education will be taken care of by the teachers and they can
let go of some of their worry.
Perhaps some of the reasons people decide to follow
curriculum are that:
-
It helps them feel like someone else is
sharing the responsibility of their child’s education
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It is simple in the sense that there is
specific information to study and the plans are already laid out.
-
Someone else already did the thinking
about what to learn and when.
-
If the parent gets their kid to do the
lessons, they believe that their child will know all the skills they need to
know.
-
There won’t be gaps.
Sometimes parents feel comfortable with the way
their children are learning, except for certain areas.
People may say they are unschooling except for math.
Their reasons for doing so are along the same vein as those who use a
curriculum.
Using a workbook, following a curriculum or doing
structured math lessons may help them feel like they are covering what they should
be covering, there won’t be gaps in their child’s knowledge, their child will
have a good knowledge base and be able to sequentially build upon it, and their
child will have a good understanding of the math skills they need to know to be
successful and competent.
(Pam Sorooshian math audio)
Do the people
who write the curriculum know your particular child? No!
The curriculum
designers don’t know anything about your particular child or life. Like school,
curriculum is designed to mold and shape and control the masses.
Following
curriculum places the parent in the role as teacher.
The parent
feels pressure to follow the syllabus and get kids to do the lessons and tests.
The child may
feel pressure to prove they can do the work and get good grades.
In doing so,
instead of a child seeing himself as capable of learning what he needs to when
he needs to, he may become dependent on others to know what he should know. His
self-confidence is affected. He may not trust himself because he isn’t being
trusted.
Other children
may feel resentful at being required to study and get tested on information that
doesn’t seem relevant. Not only may
they get turned off to learning and feel all those other things that affect
their self-confidence, but the parent-child relationship may become
adversarial.
Rather than
spending a lot of money and time trying to get your child to follow a
curriculum or use a curriculum so that you can say you did math or spelling, consider
using your time and money to follow and support your child’s interests.
If you are
feeling unsure about trusting your child’s learning process, invest time to
find out more about unschooling and how people learn. Pam Laricchia’s book Free To Learn is an excellent resource
as is John Holt’s How Children Learn.
John Holt, in a 1980 interview with Mothering Magazine said, “The human animal is a learning animal. We like to learn. We
need to learn. We are good at it. We don’t need to be shown how or made to do
it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to
regulate it or control it.”
3. Learning
and connections
There is a saying that “You learn from the company you keep” And we humans do!
We have been learning from
those we identify with for thousands of years.
Frank Smith’s book Learning and Forgetting explains how
less experienced members learn the skills and knowledge required from more
experienced members of a social group or "club."
For example –
Early craftsmen learned
their trade through apprenticeship.
Elder tribesmen pass on
their knowledge to the younger members of a tribe.
Music instruction involves
working with a more experienced or master musician.
Under these circumstances,
learning is effortless and the learner retains the information.
Learning happens easier when
the learner is interested and the reasons for wanting to know and understand
are meaningful to the learner.
There is a quote that I’d like to share
with you by Katrina Gutleben. She wrote, “Learning can
only happen when a child is INTERESTED. It he's not interested it's like
throwing marshmallows at his head and calling it EATING.”
Real
learning occurs when something is understood and remembered,
not when it is memorized and regurgitated back for a test.
Children have an innate motivation to learn what
they need to and what they are interested in. Actually, people of all ages do!
Think about yourself as a parent. Before you had
kids, would you have thought deeply about homeschooling or how your child would
best be educated? Before you were pregnant with your first child, did you know
the many birth and child care choices you would be making? We become
knowledgeable when we have a need or desire to know.
People want to do many of the things others do in our
culture and society and they are wired to learn. When we are motivated by
something meaningful to us, we find out what we wish to know and we learn all
along the way, including from our mistakes. We make connections with
information we already know and this process continues throughout life. There
is no information that is irrelevant or unworthy. Everything we learn has the
potential to connect to something we’ve learned previously.
4. The Role of An Unschooling
Parent
Unschoolers value their family’s hobbies and
interests and take each other’s needs and wants seriously.
When someone in your family wants to try something,
help them find a way to do it. That doesn’t mean without any thought. Be
thoughtful. If you have concerns, bring them up. If it won’t work because of a
conflict, see if you could brainstorm alternative ways that it might.
In
my opinion, the most important role a parent can play in a child’s life is that
of trusted partner, facilitator and friend. That doesn’t
mean never saying no or cow-tailing to any family member. It does mean that to be trusted by your child, you must
be trustworthy and that you must trust your kids, including their learning
process.
How
can we can trust our kids to learn? By noticing how naturally they already have
and by paying attention to what they are currently learning.
- Notice the things that they learned to do
naturally - like walking and talking.
- Notice that they want to do the things that enable
them to belong and fit in with a group that they identify with.
- Notice the skills that they’ve picked up because
of their interests.
Communication
is something people naturally want to be able to do with one another. Reading
is one of the ways that people communicate. Let’s take a look at some of the
reasons why a person may want to read.
We are surrounded by literature. It’s on lables,
signs, in books and in games.
At some point, when it is meaningful to them, kids
have a desire to want to know what is written. It’s important that they want to know, not that someone else
wants them to know.
Some reasons a growing person might like to read
are:
- to
recognize his name (which might lead to wanting to spell and write it)
- to read a book, card, email or note by himself
- to
understand game or other instructions
- to be able to skype chat or read game chat
- to be able to read texts
Before kids know how to read, they may start to
recognize popular signs like McDonalds. They may ask you to tell them what
something says.
Even after they can read, they may ask you how to
spell or pronounce certain words or want to understand how to use them in a
sentence.
Conversations and explanations about words are a
part of our regular life. Li, for example, is 14 and has an interest in
understanding new words almost every day. He often asks me for the meaning of a
word and how it might be used in a sentence. I define it and tell him synonyms
for the word. Sometimes I provide an example of using it in a sentence. Li
wants to be sure he understands and will typically say, “So could you say….”
and use the word in a sentence that he constructs.
Playing with words is fun and creative to me.Years ago I heard about sentences with puns in them
called Tom Swifties. A few weeks ago, I
got excited when I noticed there was a chapter about them in a book called Puns and Games. While we were riding
home on a long trip, I shared some of them with Jim and the kids. Here are some
examples from the book:
“I want to be a doctor,” said Tom patiently.
“I’ve struck oil,” said Tom crudely.
“I love pancakes,” said Tom flippantly
“My glasses are fogged up,” said Tom optimistically.
“Fire!” said Tom alarmingly.
We then tried making some of our own up. Ie. “I go
to church every Sunday,” Tom said religiously.
On our way back from Portland’s First Friday Art
Walk on September 4th, we put on an audio story called Rain Reign which was one of the titles on the Maine Student Book
Award list. The story is about a girl who is very excited about prime numbers
and homonyms and wants to be sure she and others follow all kinds of rules
correctly. Since there are so many examples of homonyms throughout the book and
because they meant so much to the main character, I think it is something that has
made a big impression on those of us who listened to the story. Makana, part
way through one of the chapters, asked me to pause (paws) the story so she
could share some homonyms she thought of on her own.
Other kinds of learning experiences happened naturally
over the past year.
Last fall, my daughter Makana had an interest in graphic
art. For Christmas, we bought her a Wacom tablet and she purchased a program
with her own money that one of her friend’s used called Paint Tool Sai. She
made lots of pictures. Some of her favorites are these. (Refer to Makana’s digital art
on resource sheet).
Makana read some Smart
About Art and other books that we had on our bookshelf. Because she liked
them, I found other books online that I thought she might enjoy, requested them
from the library and showed them to her. Many she did like to read. The rest we
returned. I paid attention to the books that captured her interest so that I
had a better understanding of the kind of style that she enjoyed.
We read many of the art books together. We
especially loved the Talking With Artists by Pat Cummings and Beautiful Oops! by
Barney Saltzberg.
Here’s a little blurb about Beautiful Oops!:
It’s OK to make a mistake. In fact, hooray for mistakes! A
mistake is an adventure in creativity, a portal of discovery. A spill doesn’t
ruin a drawing—not when it becomes the shape of a goofy animal. And an
accidental tear in your paper? Don’t be upset about it when you can turn it
into the roaring mouth of an alligator. (snip)
Beautiful Oops! shows young readers how every mistake is an
opportunity to make something beautiful. A singular work of imagination,
creativity, and paper engineering, Beautiful
Oops! is filled with pop-ups,
lift-the-flaps, tears, holes, overlays, bends, smudges, and even an accordion
“telescope”—each demonstrating the magical transformation from blunder to
wonder.
Makana loved that book and after reading it, when
she found a hole in her good quality drawing paper, rather than throw the paper
out or feel frustrated, she included the hole as part of her drawing.
She did the same with some marks that she didn’t
intend to make; she used them to create something else and was proud of it.
The idea of using unintentional holes and marks gave
her a new way to think and be creative.
This past spring, Makana wanted to attend a
homeschool trip to the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. After visiting the Farnsworth,
she talked about various paintings and mentioned one that she especially liked
that she noticed on her way out. She said it was inspiring.
On the way home, she asked me to buy her some
canvases so that she could paint on them. We found a pack of five large
canvases at Job Lot and she was thrilled to include in her painting the apple
tree she saw at the Farnsworth that had inspired her.
Over time, I’ve noticed that when Makana sees other
artwork, she gets her own ideas from them. She’s also inspired by what she
thinks is interesting or beautiful or by something she sees outside in nature.
So that she has an image to refer to when she draws, she has photographed some
of the things that have captivated her interest such as bugs, webs, and the shape
of a tree trunk.
I get enjoyment when she notices paintings by famous
artists and gets excited about seeing them. I love how she is excited to tell
me that she noticed a Van Gogh or the Mona Lisa or an impressionist painting
that she saw in a book while watching a video. (connections!)
During the winter, Makana asked me about art
lessons. She thought she would like to try taking them. Art lessons? This was
one of the things I breathed deeply about because long ago, a homeschooling
friend who was very artistic suggested not
rushing kids into art classes as she thought it could stifle their creativity.
Rather than listen to this fear, I thought about it.
I knew that in the past, when I followed what my children wanted to do, good
things happened. I have learned that things turn out best when I trust my
children.
I considered what could happen if Makana tried art
lessons and didn’t like them. She could stop.
My kids know that if they don’t feel comfortable
about something, we talk about it. If they feel something isn’t a fit after
all, they can find another way to get the information they desire. And they
know we will support them if they realize they aren’t interested in what they
thought they were.
It turned out that she enjoyed both private and
group art lessons and she will be continuing to take them this year.
Makana often carries her large, pink canvas bag (a
hand me down from her big sister) with her. Usually an art pad or two, many drawing
pencils and an eraser are in her bag in case she sees something she’d like to
sketch.
I don’t know how long she will have this interest. I
do know that she has it right now and I will continue to go with her flow and
offer ideas and resources that I think she will like.
4. What is important now is exactly that…what is
important to your child now.
Your homeschooled child has the
privilege of learning in his own time and way.
-
He won’t necessarily know the exact same
things as a public schooled child, a private schooled child, or another
homeschooled child.
-
He
won’t have a cookie cutter education.
-
He
will have an individualized education tailored to meet his needs and interests.
Most importantly, the journey, the
process, the living can be enjoyable and connective rather than coercive and
distancing. It can affect your life and your relationship in positive ways.
The process to trust unschooling can be
a long one. If or when you make a mistake along the way, remember Beautiful Oops! and how you can think of
it as an adventure in learning.
If you have a moment where you are
questioning the process or feel like you want to make your child sit and do a
lesson, keep in mind what Meg Cabot wrote in The Princess Diaries, “Courage is
not the absence of fear, it is the judgment that something else is more
important.“
Let your child - and your relationship
with your child - be more important than coaxing him to do lessons because of
fear.
5. Network,
Ask
There is a facebook group called My Unschooler Is Interested In. People
write what their child is interested in and others post related ideas. If you
join the group, before you post, look up what people have written before to see
if someone already posted the topic your child is interested in.
I thought we’d try something similar here. Here are
some papers to list your name and one of your child’s interests and their age.
After doing so, please pass your papers around to
others who can add some ideas to support the interest listed at the top.
If you think of some books, magazines, places to
visit, websites, board/card/video games, toys, movies, documentaries, youtube
channels, businesses, people who can be
a resource, the name of someone who is into the same thing, or any other
suggestion, please write it under the interest listed at the top.
We can leave the papers on one of the tables to give
everyone a chance to share resources they might know of.
At the end of the day, please pick up your paper to
take it home with you. You might be surprised to find some interesting
resources and ideas.
Inspiring
Resources
Just
Add Light and Stir – If you’d like a short and encouraging
daily note with a photo, subscribe to Sandra Dodd’s Just Add Light and Stir email series.
Remember
that if your “unit study” is the universe, everything will tie in to everything
else, so you don’t need to categorize or be methodical to increase your
understanding of the world. Each bit is added wherever it sticks, and the more
you’ve seen and wondered and discussed, the more places you have inside for new
ideas to stick. A joyful attitude is your best tool. – Just Add Light and
Stir 8/21/15
Pam Sorooshian – Free audio to do with Unschooling
and Math. Pam is an economics professor from California and unschooled her
three now grown daughters. http://aboutunschooling.blogspot.com/2010/04/sound-files-from-san-diego-conference.html
Free
To Learn by Pam Laricchia – Excellent book! I highly
recommend reading it.
How Children Learn by John Holt
Subscribe to Pam Laricchia’s unschooling newsletter
and email series: http://livingjoyfully.ca/newsletter/
Makana’s digital art using Paint Tool Sai and a
Wacom graphic tablet
Beautiful
Oops! By Barney Saltzberg
Talking
With Artists by Pat Cummings
Some of my favorite recordings were from the 2011 Life is Good
Conference. All the talks were great, but these three I especially loved.:
The Kids are Fine; You’re the
Problem - Laura Flynn Endres
Too often, new unschoolers focus solely on what the kids are
doing (or not doing) when really, kids are natural unschoolers.
When not micro-managed to death, kids have plenty of ideas about
how they should spend every waking minute and are little learning sponges. So
what’s the hang-up? Why all the worry?
Because we parents have a lot of baggage to work through,
baggage acquired through our own schooling experiences and through living, most
likely, in households where parents ruled and kids followed the paths laid out
for them. So let’s call it like it is – the kids are fine, you’re the problem –
and let’s examine the major obstacles parents must overcome in order to fully
embrace the unschooling life. 55 minutes
************************************************
The Dark Ages—Unschooling Tweens - Kelly Lovejoy
Tweens often seem to slink into the darkness, sleeping, eating,
and grunting. Unschooling tweens maybe even more so. This cocooning stage is
actually full of learning; and when they emerge on the other side, they are
primed and ready for the next big stage. As unschooling parents, we can face
this stage with patience, understanding, acceptance, and humor. A little faith
in the process doesn’t hurt! 57 minutes
*****************************************************
Unschooling: It’s a Mindset, Not a Skill Set - Kelly Lovejoy
Unschooling is not just how we approach education; it’s how we
approach life. We aren’t arming our children with a simple set of skills, but a
mindset that they are capable beings and can do whatever they desire. 35
minutes
You can purchase a CD of all the 2011 LIG conference presentations through the LIG Conference Store for $25.00
http://lifeisgoodconference.com/products-page/presentation-recordings/
Name of Parent:
______________________________________________
Child’s Age and Interest:
_______________________________________
List below any resources that may support the above
interest.
Ie. books, magazines, places to visit, websites,
board/card/video games, toys, movies, documentaries, youtube channels,
businesses, people who can be a resource,
the name of someone who is into the same thing, or any other suggestion.
____________________________________________________________
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