Tag Archives: unschooling

Learning (loads) in Lanzarote

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The unschooling diaries: weeks eleven and twelve

We spent a week in the Canary Islands over Easter, and once again I have been blown away by just how much there is to be learnt from travelling. We weren’t even motivated by anything more than the desire to get away somewhere warm and spend some quality time as a family, but the tremendous scope for discovery and new experiences that Lanzarote had to offer completely surpassed our expectations.

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We were especially lucky, I think, with the base we chose. We stayed in the most wonderful eco-resort in the North of the island, away from the main tourist trail. We slept in gorgeous yurts, which was an experience in itself. Our closest neighbours were chickens, ducks and donkeys, and there was a lovely solar-heated pool. Not forgetting the playground, which was right outside our little complex: it had a trampoline, and climbing frames, and a boat, and sand, and dump trucks, and little houses, and for Arthur it very quickly became home.

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Outside of our little idyll, there was a whole new world to explore.

Unsurprisingly, the sea was central to much of our experience: admiring it, travelling across it, eating its many fruits, and of course swimming in it. We found an incredible lagoon, and some magical tidal pools. Between those and the pool Arthur well and truly shook off any wintery reluctance to jump right in, and his confidence and skill in the water came on in (literal) leaps and bounds.

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He was mesmerised by the little fish that swam around our ankles as we paddled and splashed, but it didn’t stop him enjoying them on his plate, too… I’m not sure how many three year olds would demolish boquerones with quite as much relish as this one did. I like that he’s happy to eat fish that looks like fish, though – and that it gave us the opportunity to talk about where it came from and how it had been caught. I don’t want to freak him out about the food he eats, but I think it’s useful to be able to make the connections and understand our world better – especially when it’s him asking all the questions!

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Away from the sea, there were of course the volcanoes. In the run up to our trip we’d watched some videos and talked about the volcanoes we were likely to see there, and wherever we went Arthur was full of questions about the nature of the mountains around us. We took a (very windy) trek into the lava fields, climbing up to the top of one volcano to peer into the caldera and walking into the depths of another. Both were long dormant, but that didn’t stop the incredible power of nature being evident everywhere we looked.

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One of the other highlights of our trip was completely unexpected. I had never heard of Cesar Manrique, but he was an inspirational artist and architect who through his work and his vision had an enormous impact on the infrastructure of the island. We visited several of the sites he created, and Arthur soaked up the paintings and the sculptures and the unusual spaces, as well as being fascinated by the exhibitions about the landscape around us.

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Last but very much not least, inspired by an advertising board that caught Arthur’s eye in the airport, we took a trip on a submarine. It was the first time any of us had been on an actual submarine voyage, and it blew all of our minds a little bit – but especially Arthur’s. Just the whole mechanics of it was pretty exciting, watching the little screen at our seat compute our depth, the pilots with their illuminated control panel and the propellers at the rear. And out of the window we saw wrecks, lots of fish, and even a diver feeding a huge ray. It was pretty cool.

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It was all pretty cool, actually. And it really got me thinking about how we can work some longer trips into the next few years. It’s one of the main reasons I’m not super keen about getting stuck back into the constraints of the school system any earlier than I have to, and why I’m trying to evolve my working life into one I can take on the road with me.

We shall see…

For now, though, we have plenty of memories to be mulling over. I’m going to make a photobook for Arthur so that we can pull it out from time to time and be inspired afresh by our experiences. It’s a lot to compute for a growing mind after all!

 

Why early mornings are good for my wellbeing as well as my word count

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My efforts to be an early bird have ground to a halt since coming back from holiday. It was only a week, but I clearly did such a good job on getting away from it all and relaxing that I have completely forgotten how to motivate myself to get up in the morning – and it’s not just my writing that’s suffering.

Before I went away I had a post milling around in my head about how many unexpected upsides there were to getting up early to write: now seems like a very good time to get it down, and remind myself of all those reasons in the process…

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It makes for a much healthier start to the day

I’m not entirely sure why, but waking up earlier seems to reduce my desire for coffee. I find myself feeling all virtuous and full of good intentions, so my early-morning typing will be accompanied by hot water and lemon and a large glass of berocca – saving the all-important coffee for later. My mum has long extolled the benefits of lemon water first thing, and it certainly seems to have some sort of magical properties! It might just be that I’m taking time to hydrate myself properly before starting on the caffeine, but for whatever reason that just doesn’t seem to happen when I’m getting up an hour or two later with a toddler scampering around my ankles.

It lets me focus on writing before my head gets too full with everything else

I’ve written about the positive effect starting early has on my writing before, and in the six weeks since then my word count has climbed by almost 25,000 to 38,000 words. I’m not going to pretend those words have always been easy to come by, but they are a damn sight easier to put my finger on first thing in the morning than later in the day. The last two days, having wasted away those precious minutes with the snooze button, I’ve tried to sit down and write in the afternoon – but nothing. Not a jot. There is simply so much else going on in my world that even if I turn over my to do list it’s still glaring at me from the corners of my mind. First thing in the morning, it doesn’t get a look in – I’m pretty sure my brain knows that it should count itself lucky enough that I’m even awake, let alone tackling all the other things I should be doing.

It means I can spend the rest of the morning playing without feeling guilty

Playing is a serious business in this house. Having taken the decision to unschool my preschooler rather than sending him to a childminder or nursery to engage in the early years curriculum, I know that I have a responsibility to tune in to his learning needs – which at the moment are all about play. He is getting increasingly good at playing independently, but he of course loves it when I join in – and we try to get out of the house as much as we can too, to meet friends or do group activities or just explore our neighbourhood. If I’m not careful, I can spend half of this time with my mind elsewhere or my eyes on my phone, trying desperately to fit in little snippets of work. But if I’ve already squared away a good stint of writing before he’s even up then I find it way easier to be fully present for this time, saving up the other tasks for when he’s chilling in the afternoon.

It lowers my stress levels for the rest of the day

This completely links to the point above, but I think it’s important not to underestimate how powerful starting your day with a good dose of achieving is for your self-esteem. When I don’t manage to get up to write, I spend the rest of the day chasing my tail, being eaten away by the niggling feeling that I’ve let myself down.

It makes me less tired

Now this one’s a bit counter-intuitive, but I guess makes sense when considering everything else. My justification for the repeated tap of the snooze button as 6am gradually disappears from view is that if I could only get a bit more sleep then the rest of the day would be so much more manageable. But that never actually seems to be the case. If I don’t take charge of my day, and instead fritter away the beginnings of it in broken sleep, then when I am finally forced out of bed by a hungry toddler I am way more weary than I would otherwise have been. And it doesn’t go away either – without the boost of confidence and everything else that comes from starting early I find myself sleepwalking through the rest of the day, counting down the minutes until I can collapse into bed again. Until the evening of course, when that second wind creeps over me and makes me stay up way too late. Again.

Now I realise that for those of you to whom early morning chirpiness comes naturally much of this will seem painfully obvious. But it does not come naturally to me: I have, for as many of the last thirty-seven years that I can remember, been a fully fledged night owl.

The time has clearly come for a shift, though. And I’ll be taking these words with me to bed tonight to make sure that at 6am tomorrow morning that snooze button doesn’t even get a look in.

 

Writing Bubble

 

You Baby Me Mummy

A lesson in slow crafting

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The unschooling diaries: week ten

Arthur has yet to show much of an interest in arts and crafts. When he was tiny he just couldn’t abide the mess – he’s still not super keen on getting paint on his hands. Now that he’s older he’ll dabble, but it’s still really not his ‘thing’.

I’m ok with that – mostly – even though my inner crafter is crying out for an excuse to spend afternoons surrounded by tissue paper and glitter and it really doesn’t help my fear that he’s missing out on something by not being at nursery when I see all the pictures of toddler creations fellow mums share proudly on Facebook. But when over breakfast one day last week he started getting enthusiastic about the idea of making some Easter cards I couldn’t help but get a bit excited. Not least because it meant we might finally got round to saying an extremely belated thank you for his birthday and Christmas presents…

The teacher in me leapt to the blackboard to note down his ideas (sidetracked a little by Winnie the Pooh as his most vivid understanding of Easter comes from ‘Springtime with Roo’ – I have no idea where the armour came from).

He happily settled on the idea of painted eggs though – he frequently dances around singing ‘we’re hunting eggs today!’ at the moment, and I’m very much looking forward to his very own egg hunt on Sunday. He then decided he wanted chicks in his eggs (well he said ducks, but I think that’s what he meant…) which led us very nicely to an easy to accomplish collaborative card idea. It might not be very original, but he liked it.

Having bought in some supplies (very important to have the right shades of glitter), and prepped some eggs for him to decorate, we set aside a couple of hours last weekend to make a start. And he of course lost interest within approximately three and a half minutes.

I battled with him for another two before reminding myself that that really was not the point, and calmly telling him that it was fine – we’d come back to it when he felt like it. I didn’t tidy everything away, just organised his workstation enough for it not to descend into total chaos. And sure enough the next day he gravitated towards his eggs again, did a few more minutes of gluing and glitter scattering, and moved on.

And that’s sort of been the background to this week, really. Every so often this little activity has piqued his interest again, and he’s added a little to his eggs. We’ve tried out a few different techniques along the way – stamping, mixing colours to get the shade of pink he wanted, watering paint down so he could ‘dye’ his eggs, mixing it in with glue and glitter. And every time, just as I thought he might be getting into it, he’s walked away again, his attention taken by his diggers or the urgent need for a banana.

We’re still not quite done, but we’re getting there. He’s declared that the eggs are finished at least, so there’s just a bit of cutting and sticking left. I might need to take the lead on that bit, what with it being Good Friday tomorrow and everything, but I reckon that’s ok. I can’t expect him to do all the work!


Going with the flow

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The unschooling diaries: week nine

I’ve been mulling over various different options for this post today – Arthur’s delight in playing with sand at Paignton sea front, his growing interest in helping in the kitchen, the hours of roleplay that followed when we found a Buzz Lightyear costume in the charity shop – but it’s actually an almost inconsequential moment that I keep coming back to.

Leigh was late home on Friday, but with it being the weekend I figured we’d wait for him before pushing on to bed after Arthur had finished his dinner. That’s daddy time, generally – the chats about the day and the washing things and the stories – and both of them miss it on the odd occasions when he can’t be around.

I didn’t really have a plan – which could, at the end of a long day, have ended in disaster – but as it was distraction came in the most unexpected form. I’d been unpacking a delivery whilst Arthur ate his dinner, and it had arrived in a box filled with little polystyrene pellets. I normally whip them away from Arthur whenever I order from this company, but on Friday I guess I was feeling a bit more relaxed and so I let him explore. And the resulting play was, I think, the best fun he’d had all week.

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Things started pretty simply: having watched me unpack my order from the box, he proceeded to fill it with all of his precious things and offer it to me as a present.

Then once I’d gone through and admired each of his ‘gifts’, he decided that he wanted to see what it was like in there himself.

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Then of course came the tipping out, and the moment when on another day I might have put a halt to all of it. The tuff spot comes in handy for that – even if it didn’t contain the pellets for long…

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He piled them up and drove his diggers into them, threw them in the air to see how they fell, smooshed them and squeezed them and generally just experimented with this new material that had previously been off limits.

And whilst he played I sat and watched and laughed, until his daddy arrived at the door and came in to find us giggling in the midst of a pile of mess. Fortunately he got it too.

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I couldn’t tell you exactly what Arthur learnt from this little bit of unplanned and unstructured play, but still it felt important: to give him permission to go a little bit wild at the end of the day, to go with the flow even if a part of me was raising some serious eyebrows, to let him lead and explore and make us both laugh.

As much as it’s great to have some carefully thought out activities on hand too I think it is moments like this that remind me why I am leaning towards unschooling, and the freedom it gives my son to be who he wants to be.

 



Deconstructing daffodils

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The unschooling diaries: week eight

Between Valentine’s, an anniversary and Mother’s Day we have had a lot of flowers in the house recently. Which of course has been lovely, but for Arthur has also proved an irresistible draw. Several times I have come into the kitchen and found him looking sheepish with pollen on his fingers and petals scattered on the floor at his feet. It’s hard to get cross, because I know he’s just curious. So this week I thought I’d play him at his own game…

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Our garden is generally looking a little sorry for itself at the moment, but in the midst of all the work that needs doing there is a determined patch of daffodils that Arthur and I have watched grow and flower into a sea of yellow and green. One particularly dreary morning I ventured out whilst Arthur watched me through the rain in his pyjamas, sticking a tentative toe over the threshold before deciding that inside was a much better place to be.

I picked out a daffodil and handed it over, explaining that I thought it might be interesting to break it apart together and see what was inside. He was a bit reticent at first, taking time to hold and admire the whole flower as the rain broke and sun began streaming in through the windows. I’d never actually seen him handle a flower so carefully. Still, it didn’t take him long before he took me up on my offer.

He explored the daffodil’s trumpet before taking it apart in strips, then gently peeling away the petals. I encouraged him to smooth the pollen with his fingertip, and we paused at that point to talk about what it was all for.

We talked about the bright yellow colour attracting the bees, who buzzed around between the flowers and took the pollen from stigma to stamen so the flowers could make babies. He was curious, so I found a video on YouTube showing a bee doing exactly that, and he watched, intrigued. He’s generally quite interested in bees at the moment because of his current obsession with Winne the Pooh (when I asked him what he thought the pollen might taste of he answered quite confidently ‘honey’), but that’s another story…

After our little introduction to botany he wandered off to do something else for a while, and when he came back I’d set out paper and glue so he could stick the parts of the daffodil on. He was keen to cut up the stem at this point – a good time to practise using scissors, and discover that the metal ones were much more effective for the job than plastic. We talked too about how the stem was like a straw, sucking up water to keep the flower alive.

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I had thought of labelling the parts of the flower once he’d stuck them down, but he’d lost interest by that point and it probably would have been a step too far anyway! As it was he began to understand, I think, a little about the fascinating construction of a flower, laying down foundations for future conversations when we’re out and about.

And now I come to think of it he has held back from randomly destroying any flowers since, so maybe it has served to satisfy the curiousity that was driving him – for now at least.

 

*A little note of caution: daffodils, whilst fascinating, are not edible and are actually toxic if consumed. I made sure Arthur was aware of this and washed his hands carefully after our exploration. Please make sure you supervise your little ones closely and seek medical attention if they do accidentally ingest any part of a daffodil.*

10/52

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“A portrait of my child, once a week, every week, in 2016.”

These diggers have come everywhere with us since we bought them last week.

I really try not to just randomly buy stuff for Arthur, but he is so completely fascinated by anything to do with construction that when I saw them online I couldn’t resist. They are the first things he wants when he wakes up: he came out of his room a few mornings ago, earlier than usual, and headed straight towards the stairs instead of into me for cuddles. When I asked what he was doing he said that his diggers needed him because they had been having bad dreams.

At home he plays with them with kinetic sand, or on his road mat, or with his trains. Sometimes he just lines them up carefully in front of him so he can look at them more closely: he knows the names of almost every part of them, and will happily relay them to anyone who will listen.

He’s been having some trouble with the tracked excavator, because the rubber tracks keep coming off when he drives it on the floor or in the tuff spot. We worked out, though, when we took them to the beach, that it just needs rough ground beneath it and it works just fine.

The things you learn when you spend your days with a three year old…

Linking up with Jodi at Practising Simplicity for The 52 Project. 

Creative construction

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The unschooling diaries: week seven

The fascination with all things construction (and demolition) that last week led us to the library has directed lots of Arthur’s play over the past few days. He has gathered his motley collection of construction vehicles with the kinetic sand in the tuff spot, brrrrming them round his little building site which I sense still has further to evolve.

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Whenever we’ve been out and about he’s been drawn to diggers and steam rollers and cranes. There seem to be plenty around – way more than I’ve ever noticed before. But maybe that’s just because I wasn’t looking properly.

Back at home, he has taken tremendous delight in directing me to build increasingly complex creations using duplo and his train track only to smash them to smithereens, scattering pieces across the lounge and declaring an emergency as he brings in the nee naws to sort it all out. I’ve had to resist the primal urge in me to get irritated at this wave of destruction – I know it’s important that he explores how things break as well as how they come together.

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His impulse to understand how things work has been focused on the vehicles themselves. We’ve found a great selection of YouTube videos that he watches with studied concentration as they break down the complex operation of an excavator, for example, into language that a preschooler can understand. The vocabulary is precise and the mechanics stretches even my understanding.

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The most fascinating aspect of this play for me, though, has been how he has taken it into his whole body – a kinaesthetic exploration of the engineering concepts underlying the things he observes. He stretches his arm out like a crane, his movements slow and robotic as he fashions his hand into a scoop, all the time replicating the mechanical noises he has heard with his voice. He loves it if I join in too, both of us together forming a human construction site.

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If I were taking the lead on his learning, I’m not sure I ever would have thought to take this topic in all these different directions. Even with my background in physical theatre I don’t think I’ve ever stood and worked out how to move my body like a crane. He is literally consumed by learning – and the power of that is more than a little awesome to behold.

 

Library love

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The unschooling diaries: week six

I used to visit the library all the time as a kid. I loved to read, and it was the perfect way to feed my insatiable appetite for books. My mum tells me that she used to take me and my three brothers every week: we’d each choose our books, and when we got home I’d power through my selection before hoovering up everyone else’s.

I’ve never stopped loving books, but somewhere over the years my enthusiasm for the library (at least as a source of stories) faltered. I’m pretty sure it had something to do with all the fines I managed to amass as a teenager…

And then libraries began to fulfil a different need as I began to study. I savoured the quiet and calm they offered in the midst of my frenetic student life, but I would use them to sit and pore through piles of reference books instead. Before Arthur came along it had been many, many years since I had given the fiction section more than a passing glance. And it has taken us until very recently to begin to see its full potential.

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We signed Arthur up to the library when he was tiny of course, and enjoyed several sessions of ‘rhythm and rhyme’ until somehow other things started to take over. There were so many other activities to go to, playdates to be had – and that’s all before the irresistible pull of the beach come rain or shine. He’s always loved books, but there have always seemed to be plenty at home.

Except when I started to think seriously about unschooling the library started to take on a whole new significance. What better place to let Arthur loose on the captivating potential for human learning? A place where he was not restricted by prior choices I’d made on his behalf and could truly follow his instincts to find the things he was interested in and wanted to learn more about.

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On our first visit a couple of weeks ago that meant mainly playing with puzzles and looking at the globe whilst I picked out a few books I thought he might like to read at home.

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But this week was different. To start with the trip was initiated by him – he’d been flicking through a ‘Thomas and Friends’ magazine we’d picked up and come across an advert for ‘Bob the Builder’. He’s never actually watched or read anything about the eponymous handy man, but still somehow he was on his radar, and he wanted more. I said maybe we could go and see what we could find at the library, and his eyes lit up with enthusiasm.

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He gravitated straight for the board books when we arrived, finding one all about construction which he began to read to himself. We then went together to the longer picture books and found a brilliant book about demolition. The new concepts and vocabulary he learnt has influenced his play all week, and talks are now afoot with his dad about building a crane…

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We chose some other books together too, read one on the sofa in the library and took the rest home. Not only has he enjoyed the ones we picked out, but he’s also found a renewed enthusiasm for reading his own collection. It’s made bedtime a bit more of a protracted process, but I reckon on the whole it can only be a good thing.

 

Building blocks

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The unschooling diaries: week five

One of Arthur’s favourite activities at the moment is building things with Duplo. He was given a set for his second birthday, but it took a little while for him to see the appeal (beyond eating or throwing the bricks anyway). This year, with the addition of a fire station and Batman set, he is well and truly away.

He is sometimes quite happy to build on his own, but he especially loves to direct: sitting down with me or Leigh and getting us to help him create the structures in his mind. We had a great session this week, straight after breakfast one morning.

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I’d cleared my writing goals before he’d woken up so I was free to play without worrying about my to do list. And as we played, I was fascinated to see where the building blocks of his inspiration came from: not just the plastic bricks themselves, but the characters and narratives he was drawing from the stories he loves and the world around him to weave into the little world he was creating.

It started with a hospital – the red cross emerging from the pile of bricks and Arthur making connections about what it symbolised, and where his Daddy was working. He decided batman had an ouchy, and put him to bed to be made better by the doctor/fireman. Then he wanted a fire station next to the hospital. And then he decided maybe the hospital was on fire.

As the drama unfolded, more characters were drafted in. One of his favourite films at the moment is Toy Story, and he soon asked for Woody and Buzz Lightyear to come and play too.

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They were roughly approximated from duplo bricks, but even just the suggestion of his much-loved characters was enough to enhance his play.

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Sending Buzz flying through the air ‘to infinity and beyond’ got Arthur thinking about space and rockets, one of his other current obsessions (not that you’d ever have guessed form his outfit). The fire station/hospital was soon dismantled, and in its place we built a ‘Saturn V’. With some creative use of windows we managed to include some space for passengers, and that fired his imagination even further.

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He was quite particular with his directions for building the rocket itself. The books he’s read and the videos he’s watched have given him a clear idea of the parts needed to make up a spacecraft – he is already much more knowledgeable than me!

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We both had so much fun putting together those multi-coloured bricks, and with them cementing learning and weaving new stories. Once I’d helped him lay the foundations Arthur was happy to sit and play for ages whilst I watched, utterly engrossed in the imaginary world he was continuing to create from the building blocks around him.

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Give a boy a box…

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The unschooling diaries: week four

I ordered a new pillow for Arthur this week, and predictably it came in a box that was far bigger than it needed to be. Predictably also the box caused considerably more excitement than its contents.

The delivery arrived on recycling day, but just as we were about to dismantle it accordingly Arthur leapt in protesting “No! My train!”

Cue distraction as Leigh grabbed a crayon and began drawing on a control panel whilst Arthur watched with glee, before picking up a rectangle of cardboard that had fallen onto the floor and trying unsuccessfully to attach it to the side: “The wheels! The wheels!”. We delved into his craft corner and found a roll of masking tape I’d bought him specially – he went through a phase of wanting to tape up everything a little while ago, and now it was just what he needed to complete this job.

Once it was stuck we had to draw on the wheels themselves, and on the other side too of course. He’d also noticed, whilst delving in said craft corner, some leftover halloween decorations that he had interpreted as characters from Hotel Transylvania, his then-favourite film. He insisted they had to come on the train too, and we used the masking tape to attach them to the sides. A blue flashing light toy made the perfect lever for operating his train, and he was done.

He sat happily in his box by the front door for a while, shouting “choo choo” and “all aboard”. Then before bed he asked for a ride down the hallway, me pushing his train along the wooden floor.

The next day he was playing in the lounge, his box-train looking on whilst he built a wooden track, when he suddenly leapt up proclaiming “The carriages! I need to get the carriages!” I presumed he meant the little carriages for his brio train which have a tendency to get scattered to the four corners of the house, but when he came came back downstairs he was dragging another box behind him.

This one had started life as a robot, then turned into a spaceship, and now was being refashioned as a carriage for his train. A “sleeping carriage” to be precise.

Dolly was his first passenger, and he looked very comfortable.

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I love love love watching this imaginative play unfold, hovering nearby to facilitate its development. The whole joy to be had from a cardboard box thing is such a cliche, but so gloriously true!

The train (and its carriage) are starting to look a little battered around the edges now after some very serious playing, so they may make it into the recycling this week. But I’m sure it won’t be long until we have another creation. I can’t wait to see what it might be!