We’ve been giving this unschooling thing a go for a couple of weeks now and I wanted to share a little about it. Unschooling can be hard thing to learn about because it’s not like unschoolers have this hour-by-hour schedule you can just follow. Unschooling will look different every day and every week and will vary greatly from family to family and season to season.

I tried my best to document our learning for a week both for my sake, so I can actually see that we are learning, and for your sake, so I can share it with anyone interested in unschooling.

I tried to write things down shortly after they happened, if I waited until the end of the day chances are I would forget half of what we did. Some days I did better at documenting than others but it should give you a general idea of our days.

AN UNSCHOOLING WEEK IN THE LIFE
WITH A 3 & 6 YEAR OLD

A few things we did every day that I did not include in my daily lists:

• listening to our current audiobook (The Horse and His Boy)
• reading picture books together
• Raeca’s independent reading (she’s currently finishing a chapter book every day or two)
• their general free play together.

MONDAY

• watched The Spiderwick Chronicles and compared the movie to the books (we talked about his while we were watching and afterwards)
• played Skipbo and Robot Turtles
• Raeca played Lego Lord of the Rings on the projector via the computer with her dad
• lots of creative writing
  • learned about alliteration
  • created alliteration people descriptions
  • wrote a chapter of a story and learned about settings and character and included an alliteration
• watched Octonauts and learned about sea creatures

TUESDAY

• creative writing
  • wrote another chapter together
  • Raeca typed up a few paragraphs herself
• spent a few hours playing with friends
  • preformed a play together
• researched a ideas for a future sewing project
• created a page in art journal with the current memory verse
• played restaurant and added bill using mental math

WEDNESDAY

• had poetry tea time
• Raeca typed a few more paragraphs from her story
• played outside
• played with friends for a few hours
• created DIY kites with a plastic bag and string and used them outside

THURSDAY

• watched the Kratt Brother’s Australian Adventures
• picked out books at the library

FRIDAY

• created a Rube Goldberg machine
• learned what Rube Goldberg machines are and watched a couple of videos on Youtube (our favorite)
• created another Rube Goldberg machine
• dressed up and preformed magic tricks
• thought of more alliterations
• played at the park
• Raeca played Lego Lord of the Rings on the computer with her dad

SATURDAY

• learned more about Rube Goldberg machines and found an app to make them
• made up a song on the piano
• worked on cracking some secret codes from this Usborne pack
• we had an outing to a 1920’s Boomtown at our local-ish museum, there was also a model train show (lots of Lego trains too), as well as a Game Changers which is this cool display that explores the history of video games, and there were vintage games to play on supersized controllers – everything from Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis to Mario on the classic Nintendo to Guitar Hero. It was really full the day we were there but we finally purchased a membership so we’ll be going back soon!
• when we were back home Raeca built a Lego horse-pulled firetruck like ones we had see at Boomtown

A few thoughts . . .

Monday (and the week in general) were definitely screen time heavy but we were all recuperating from Ephraim’s latest seizure and lack of sleep for a few nights.

I have a love hate relationship with screen time. It can be easy to become to dependent on it but some days it can be very useful and educational. Generally when the kids are sick I allow more screen time to help us get through. We also have more screen time now, in the middle of winter, when it is too cold to go out most days than we do in the summer.

I’m actually impressed with all the learning that took place, admittedly there was a part of me that was scared we wouldn’t learn anything at all.

Not really surprising but a source of encouragement is realizing that because we made the decision to unschool we felt much more free to follow up on interests and questions the kids had. Instead of saying something like, “we’ll look into Rube Goldberg machines more later, after we do math” and then missing the chance to learn when they were engaged in a topic we took advantage of the interest and learned about them right then.

Do you unschool at all?
What are your thoughts on it?

Even though this is a week in the life instead of just a day in the life I am linking up with Simple Homeschool’s Day in the Life, maybe I’ll share a complete day in the life in the next few weeks.