Since ditching k12 earlier this “school year,” I’ve been looking into other ways of schooling. Even though I think we are more eclectic than unschoolers, I’ve found the info over at An Unschooling Life to be pretty helpful. She just published the 11th Unschooling Voices blog-letter.
1. Honor your child’s feelings. – Colleen posts a lesson she learned the hard way, about listening to what our kids tell us about how they feel.
2. Stephanie shared this little gem:
My role as facilitator is to observe my children, to know when to step in and when to stay out of their way. I do not want to hinder the learning process, I want to nurture it and watch it flourish.
3. Mandaroo talked about how a virtual school practically destroyed her daughter’s love for math and learning. I saw much the same thing happen with GeekBoy after a few months of using k12’s math program. There were daily assessment tests, and repeated lessons if he didn’t pass, and pressure… Suddenly he hated math. We had to abandon math workbooks altogether. We began only doing math using real-life situations. We let him have his own house bank account. Now, he spouts out math facts at the oddest times. Funny how that worked out.
We ditched the math workbooks too. We’re at this point where he “gets” the basic operations, but needs practice on the facts before we can move on to serious fractions, decimals, etc. We are using bigmathtime.com and really love it. It costs $5 a month, but it’s lots of fun and he looks forward to doing it each day. They recommend doing a printed lesson once/week but it’s always stuff the child has mastered already, just to practice doing it on paper. You do lessons and skills to unlock games… for Benny it’s taken the pain out of drilling.