quote of the day and more on unschooling

"By nature people are learning animals. Birds fly; fish swim; humans think and learn. Therefore, we do not need to motivate children into learning by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do - and all we need to do - is to give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for, listen respectfully when they feel like talking, and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest."  -John Holt


Some days I feel like I haven't spent enough "educational" time with Jude. Then I have to remind myself that I need to rethink my own idea of educational time. Most of what Jude knows was not learned by sitting down with a workbook or even a book at all. It was learned in conversation with us, and not the kind of conversation where a parent talks to their child as if he were a child only capable of learning at his grade or age level. When Jude asks me question I give him the kind of answer an adult would expect, if I don't know the answer then we look it up together. He has learned most of the math he knows just by us talking about it at random times. We were somewhere a few weeks ago and I was telling him about negative numbers. When we got home I drew a number line for him so he could have a visual. I hadn't thought much about since then because I wasn't trying to teach him about it, I just thought he might like to know. So anyway, last night he wanted the dry erase board off the wall to draw on. I got it down for him and he began doing math problems with negative numbers! I was impressed enough that my 5 and half year old would do math problems for fun but the fact that they involved negative numbers was enough to set my mind at ease about our amount of "educational" time spent together. 

When he was done doing his math problems he scribbled around and then he told me that (in the lower left corner) is what Japanese math looked like! I thought that was funny :)