I'm a believer!

I've never been a fan of the form of homeschooling called "unschooling." Child-directed learning seems nice when it comes to figuring out how many legos they need to build a castle, but not so much when it comes to math or reading. (Even though it could be argued that the lego example actually is math.)

It all seems too random--hoping that the child wants to learn what they need to know for the future. Also too easy on my part, no need for planning or organizing when you follow the kids' interest.

But I've been watching my kids in the past week or so learning when I haven't "assigned" much at all. They have played with their legos a lot. They've started to build bigger and more structural things. They have used every blank piece of paper in the house to draw robots. Their robots are amazingly complex creatures with names and histories. Of course the robots all have enemies they fight too. I've watched Harry read every book I checked out of the library the other day, learning even more about Ancient Rome. All of these have been because they were interested in what they are doing and they've been learning from each of these experiences. Oh, this morning Harry learned on his own about negative numbers when he was subtracting stuff on a calculator.

Then I started thinking about colors. Way back when I sat Harry down and told him I was going to teach him the names of the colors. So we looked at books, we made his own little booklet, we had "red" day and "blue" day and even colored our food to match. And still after all of that he continuously mixed up red and green. It drove me nuts--he should know the colors by the time we finished our little unit. I worried that Harry was color blind. Finally I just gave up. And you know what, somehow along the way, he learned all of his colors. I did similar stuff with Sam, but I also just trusted that he would figure out his colors. Annika, well, she's on her own. And you guessed it, she knows her colors. Already.

She also just woke up from her nap, so I'm going to post this and finish my thoughts later.