Fun?

[CrunchyMand]

I just don't know where to start. I have lots of unschooling friends and unschooling theory seems to imply that if learning isn't fun and relevant to the child it is damaging them. I want my child to ENJOY learning, is this possible with Classical? Do your kids enjoy their studies? I want a well educated child that enjoyed their childhood and their homeschooling experience. Is this possible with WTM?

[Mandy in TN]

Some kids have fun with whatever and some kids don't have fun no matter what. lol

Mandy

[Jayne J]

I go with Aristotle on this. He said "All men by nature desire to know. " So, is our school fun, as in clowns and puppies and lollipops? Nope, not here. Is it fun in the sense of making sense of the world and satisfying our desire to know, even if that takes a little 'hard' or 'boring' work? Yep. I don't think it is realistic to expect that all learning is going to be fun. Even most unschoolers I've talked with say that the child does hard work to gain the knowledge they desire, only unschoolers allow the child to decide where that work will be done (what topics etc). Whether that is appropriate is another discussion and an area where certain types of classical and certain types of unschoolers will never likely agree.

 

My dc struggle with some of their work. They have days where they dislike lessons. But there is nothing that makes homeschooling so wonderful as the pride in their faces when they struggle with something and win. Or when they make connections they would not otherwise have made if they had not persisted when things were difficult or dull. I say it is absolutely possible to enjoy a Classical WTM education, but it may be a slightly different type of enjoyment than one might initially think.

[Alte Veste Academy]

I believe kids should be engaged in their learning. Sometimes engaged looks like plain ol' fun, sometimes it looks like insurmountable frustration, but mostly it looks like inherently interesting, consistent work. We do use a lot from WTM. With a few notable exceptions, we use a classical approach. My kids are thriving on it. However, I will say that the attitude of the teacher is of incredible importance. If learning is presented as drudgery, that attitude will be contagious.I think many people transfer feelings about their own banal education onto their kids. But most learning is inherently interesting to those who haven't had their innate curiosity squashed out of them by school.

[briansmama]

We strive for engaging here too. I find that just like adults, children typically enjoy work that is meaningful and of quality. So, I work to bring them history and science through quality literature and interesting field trips, projects, nature classes/videos, etc. I only require that they read quality books and listen to good stories.

 

I don't try to make everything we do entertaining though. Just high quality and engaging.

[Incognito]

I love to learn, and we love to do things together, so it hasn't been too hard (so far) for learning to be quite fun around here.

 

My kids are still quite young, but we cover a lot of interesting things and have a generally classical approach. They seem to enjoy what we do. I have approached the problem of a negative attitude or complaining as a behavioral issue, not a learning issue, and I nip it in the bud as best I can, so the bad attitude does not become part of our "school" time. Practicing printing has probably been the closest thing to a disliked thing in our days, but I have done what I can to make it a positive experience for the kids (and me) by finding material we could enjoy and that is not overwhelming.

 

FWIW, much of our learning is fairly organic - for instance, my kids don't really know I set out to introduce them to Shakespeare. They know that they found the story of the Twelfth Night funny and intriguing and complicated, and that it was by Shakespeare, a writer from about 400 years ago, but they don't know they were supposed to "learn" about him, because I don't structure it that way for many things.

 

Also, FWIW, because I do not accept a bad attitude from my kids about learning I found it very hard to teach a small group science class for kids recently. If a child came with a bad attitude I had very little patience for it, and wanted to send them away (like I do with my kids, but I couldn't, of course). I know that good teachers are good at getting kids to engage by making them excited about the material. I'm not a particularly good teacher, but I do love learning alongside the kids and when they have a good attitude it works well for all of us without me having to have the skills a classroom teacher needs. I am working on being able to win the attitude of kids, but for now with the kids that were not my own who I needed to keep engaged I tended to vary the activities a lot and not go too deep and that helped.

[CrunchyMand]

Thanks, this is helping me to see it a different way. I want engaging and comprehensive. I want his education to open up doors for him. I will get my WTM book out again and start planning

[Alte Veste Academy]

Thanks, this is helping me to see it a different way. I want engaging and comprehensive. I want his education to open up doors for him. I will get my WTM book out again and start planning.

 

Before you start, another thought or two... :D My plans always work best when the kids get some input. So, there are book lists everywhere. I read through them all, pick what I think are the best of the best, then let the kids choose from that whittled down list. I get what I want and they get what they want. I make sure there is time for rabbit trails and let the kids pick those. Even SWB recommends this in WTM. Etc, etc, etc. Everyone can be happy. You can also teach to your kids' strengths while shoring up their weaknesses.

[thebacabunch]

I do like to have fun with school. I also like them to be engaged. They aren't always having fun and school often just sucks. SO does life. Our kids need resilience and perseverance. They need the self esteem that comes from hard WORK and accomplishing something difficult. I would never cheat my kids out of the things they don't want to learn or the opportunities to learn through trials. I remember many college courses that were difficult, boring, and unengaging. Can't graduate college by taking only what we want to take, kwim?

[Eagle]

We try to maintain a balance of structured and unstructured learning. I think part of a classical education is incorporating learning into your day-to-day life. Here's what works for us so we can provide our ds with a classical education with a lot of fun unstructured learning thrown in:

1. Keep structured school time short.

2. Have plenty of interesting reading material available.

3. Multi-task play time with audiobooks, educational videos and classical music.

4. Limit (eliminate) daytime/weekday tv time.

5. Follow your child's lead for topics of interest.

6. Allow messy experimentation if your child considers it fun.

7. Filter toys, games, etc. that come into your house for educational value as well as fun.

8. Make time for outdoor exploration.

 

We spend a short amount of time daily on main subjects (currently math, spelling, handwriting). Every few weeks I evaluate if it is time to mix things up with our core. Swap spelling for grammar for instance. I don't like to have too many subjects at a time because it makes the structured learning time too long.

 

Reading is integrated into our daily life and is not considered part of school. I make sure we have books available for which my son has expressed an interest. This could mean getting a few chapter books in a favourite series from the library to have available that week, or purchasing a nonfiction book on a subject my son finds interesting. DS helps look through the library listings for what to put on hold for the next week -- this also includes educational videos. He *loves* Eyewitness videos, so we get 3 or 4 a week to watch while we eat lunch. He's just discovered Bill Nye, so these are now on his library list as well. On weekdays there is no tv watching in our house during daytime, other than sometimes the educational video during lunch.

 

He really likes art, so I schedule one morning a week that we will focus on art or crafts. This doesn't mean we don't do art at other times, but it means we always get to it every week. It makes him happy that his interests are considered a priority for our schooling. Science is also a favourite of his, so we do a lot of science experiments. He is learning, but thinks it is really fun. He often wants to keep playing with our experiment materials after we are officially done. I think it is great that he finds it so interesting, so I allow him to keep experimenting even though it means my kitchen gets trashed.

 

We have a lot of quality board games that reinforce learning. We also get puzzles that correspond to something we are learning about (solar system, geography, dinosaurs). We own a lot of living books and audio books, which help increase his learning without having it be part of school time. He might listen to Greek myths, Shakespeare, or classical music while playing LEGO or drawing. This is just considered something we do, and is not "school". We read Life of Fred and play math games on the computer for enjoyment.

 

By filling our home with quality books, games, puzzles, educational videos, and building toys (and more importantly NOT having purposeless things available) we basically guarantee learning is taking place. DS also spends a lot of time outside exploring in our backyard, which is wonderful for learning, his imagination, exercise, and positive attitude.

 

When I look at our days, ds is learning all day long. But if you ask him how long school takes he would say 45 minutes to an hour. Most of our learning is not during "school time", even though we follow a lot of WTM content.

[duckens]

urpedonmommy says:

My dc struggle with some of their work. They have days where they dislike lessons. But there is nothing that makes homeschooling so wonderful as the pride in their faces when they struggle with something and win. Or when they make connections they would not otherwise have made if they had not persisted when things were difficult or dull.

:iagree:

 

Other things I have wondered about unschooling:

1) Yes, a 7th grader can learn all of their times tables in an afternoon......but to really know times tables and all math (decimals, fractions, money, time, patterns) takes years of study and practice. Sure, some kids can learn their times tables at a late age and major in Physics in a top university. Most can't.

 

(We are a science family, so learning math --the language of science -- on schedule to do Calculus by Freshman College is important in our family. If our children develop different interests or goals, we will reassess the math marathon of reaching Calculus).

 

2) Unschooling takes a special kind of parent AND a special kind of child. The child must be self-directed and self-motivated. The parent must recognize the interests of the child AND have the wherewithal to nurture the interest with appropriate books and activities (and money).

 

Example: Two siblings attended a (mostly unschooling) Waldorf school. Older sister learned TONS that year. Little brother spent the entire year playing on the playground in a "Lord of the Flies" fort. At the end of the year, the parents agreed that little brother needed a more structured learning environment.

 

3) I'm not sure that dd6, or any 6yo would know the right questions to ask. Last year I organized learning units on weather, rocks, and volcanoes. Dd enjoyed these units, but I doubt she would have been self-motivated to say, "I want to learn about volcanoes. Let's make our own book about them!" And yet, she takes pleasure at understanding material on tv or in books about these subjects now.

 

Currently, we are learning about "Under the Sea" with an old curriculum from Usborne books. Today dd learned about fish that follow scuba divers, the sign language that divers use, and we read a fun puzzle story about a sea monster. Under the Sea has become her favorite subject, even though she had no interest in the subject before we started this a few weeks ago.

 

4) It's NOT fun to be dumb. This is not to be taken that unschooling kids are intellectually inferior in any way. It is, however, uncomfortable to have all of your 9yo friends reading chapter books....and you are not. Or to have your 6th grade friends able to beat the pants off you in mental math. Or to not know that the capital of your state or country. Or basic spelling rules.

 

Classical Education provides a framework for knowing

what you need to know

when you need to know it

to get to where you want to be.

[Lilaclady]

I think in some ways unschooling fails to work for us because my kids do not know what they do not know. I can't expect a 6 yr old or should I say most 6 yr olds as there are always exceptions, to know enough to be able to say I want to learn only this or that. It is just too much responsibility being given too early.

Last yr for our science, I asked my dd1 what she would like to study and she told me life science, because that is what she has done and she liked it. I decided to do chemistry instead, at the end of the year, she agreed that it has been a very fun year and she had learnt a lot and had enjoyed the experiments.

She will not have been able to experience that if I had just let her do what she wants. I think older kids in middle and high school are able to benefit more from having a student directed learning but I think it is better if a parent layers the foundation in the early years busy exposing the kids to as much as they can.

[DoppeltGemoppelt]

CrunchyMand,

Ask yourself this question: What is fun? In my opinion you can only have fun, if there is also the opposite. Take a poor child from across the globe for example and imagine his everyday life: walking a few hours every day to get firewood and water, going most days without food, encountering diseases and no hope of this situation ever changing. His life does not look like much fun to us, even though I'm sure he does have fun sometimes. Let's assume this child and his parents where brought to the US. All his previous worries would be gone and he can life a life in amazing luxury if he just did a few hours of schoolwork every day. Fun? You bet!!

 

So why is it that our children do not think that a life of studying hard is fun? Because they have a very different perception of "normal". If you were to make your children's everyday life harder (studying more, helping out in the house more etc.), you would actually lower their bar of what they think of as fun.

 

Complicated to explain, but I hope I got my point across. If you define your own norms, then everything out-of-the-box will be fun for your children. Only if make them work hard sometimes, they will also have fun!

 

[Trilliums]

When my kids were younger we did very little structured school work. But, we read library books extensively, we listened to audio books on chemistry, biology, history, etc. We mixed up stuff (literally) and talked about why it was doing what it was doing. We played with molecule sets, geometric shapes, weights and measures. We watched documentaries on math and a myriad other subjects. We looked at the periodic table above our kitchen table and talked about it. We asked questions and found the answers. We looked up word meanings in the dictionary. We talked and joked and imagined.

 

Did I sit down and ask my kids what they wanted to study? No. But I didn't stop what they were doing/reading/building because it was time to move onto a new subject either. And I did brings TONS of materials into our house for us to look at and consider. Did we read it all? No. But did we follow sparked interests? Yes. Did we have fun? Yes. Were my kids ready for high school level material when they reached grade 9? Yes!

[Jayne J]

 

 

I never tried unschooling, but I guess I don't grasp the concept. I can't imagine chasing every single whim my kids have. I do do that to some extent. It doesn't have to be an either or. My kids have a heck of a lot more time to pursue interests than what they would have if they were going to school.

When my kids were younger we did very little structured school work. But, we read library books extensively, we listened to audio books on chemistry, biology, history, etc. We mixed up stuff (literally) and talked about why it was doing what it was doing. We played with molecule sets, geometric shapes, weights and measures. We watched documentaries on math and a myriad other subjects. We looked at the periodic table above our kitchen table and talked about it. We asked questions and found the answers. We looked up word meanings in the dictionary. We talked and joked and imagined.

 

Did I sit down and ask my kids what they wanted to study? No. But I didn't stop what they were doing/reading/building because it was time to move onto a new subject either. And I did brings TONS of materials into our house for us to look at and consider. Did we read it all? No. But did we follow sparked interests? Yes. Did we have fun? Yes. Were my kids ready for high school level material when they reached grade 9? Yes!

 

 

Agreeing with both ^

 

I know that at our house we pursue our passions after the days lessons are done (or during some lessons, or on the weekends, or etc.). Just because we have formal, parent directed (chosen) lessons does not mean that we do not help or encourage our children to pursue what passions they have. All of our lives are "educational" and only *some* of it is planned by me. We are generally done with lessons by lunchtime, and my dc have all the rest of the day to pursue whatever they choose. And I am thrilled beyond belief to help them do that in such a way that says, 'Isn't this fun!' It doesn't have to be either/or. Learning and family life are far more organic than that.