sharon currie

stacyzme <stacyzme@yahoo. com> wrote:

I have read many of John Holts books and numerous unschooling
websites/blogs and I am both excited and nervous. Most of the
featured families seem to live much more enriching lives than our
family. I am not complaining, I love our life and felt content, but
now I wonder if it is "enough" of an environment to unschool.

So I guess I am wondering how average (god I hate that word) people
unschool. Do they? Or maybe this is also an opportunity to really
examine the "averageness" of our lives and make some changes? Are
there any reading materials that include how children are soaking up
knowledge in the midst of conventional life? Or are the featured
families I am reading about not the norm but the "goal"?"


Hmmmm... good point Stacyzme. Let's examin it coz I'm thinking the same as you. Are these featured families not the norm but goals? Or could it be just the end result of years and years of homeschooling? Well, I think our homeschooling life is pretty basic and plain and I know a few more of our homeschooling friends just like us( could be because our children are around the same age, it also means we're unschooling for about the same time).
This is my average weekly routine and I've been unschooling since February.

Monday - Staying in Day because we're normally busy during weekends with daddy.
Tuesday - we sometimes go swimming in the evening with another homeschooling friend.
Wed - At the moment it's Nowhere to go Day because our regular Homeschooling gathering has stopped until Sept.
Alternate Thursday - another Homeschooling gathering/ Nowhere to go Day
Friday - Nowhere to go Day

Unless if we are out for the 3/4 of the day (i normally schedule 1-2 outings per week but there are times we'll have events to go to, everyday of the week especially now in the summer, we have lots of excursions to parks and farms), our normal routine is PS2 in the morning till lunch, then me and son do something together like watch tv or play board/ card game, at the moment it is trivial pursuit, then it's off for a walk around the block or a trip to the library which is just round the corner from our house. Then when we're back home, son gets onto the pc games/internet while I cook dinner. After dinner, it's shower time and then it's tv time/ board game with daddy and me before going to bed at 10ish with bedtime story. Sometimes son'll last thru 3 stories, sometimes it's only halfway thru the 1st book.
Weekend is about spending time with daddy playing in the park, sometimes swimming or just potter around the house/ garden.

And to fill those days when we have nowhere to go, this summer, we'll have the usage of a private field/ farm which belongs to a kind homeschooling friend of ours, for a small token rental of GBP 10 per month which I insist she must accept. This is also my way of intergrating nature into my son's life, away from his PS2 and PC games. I can see us dozing in the fields idling away amongst all those wild flowers (and weeds)or jumping on the trampoline or helping our friend feed her sheeps. And she's got a huge vegetable patch that we can get involve with too. Or just have a party of homeschooling friends around. Today, we had 10 homeschooling families there and we got to look and examine a huge but dead dragonfly, on top of hours of trampolining and tractor riding and climbing. So here you go, another event to be made regular, added onto our average intinery.

I'm really interested to know what other homeschooler's week' s like.

With Best Regards,
SharonC


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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Kathleen Gehrke

>
> stacyzme <stacyzme@yahoo. com> wrote:
>
> I have read many of John Holts books and numerous unschooling
> websites/blogs and I am both excited and nervous. Most of the
> featured families seem to live much more enriching lives than our
> family. I am not complaining, I love our life and felt content,
but
> now I wonder if it is "enough" of an environment to unschool.
>
> So I guess I am wondering how average (god I hate that word)
people
> unschool. Do they? Or maybe this is also an opportunity to really
> examine the "averageness" of our lives and make some changes? Are
> there any reading materials that include how children are soaking
up
> knowledge in the midst of conventional life? Or are the featured
> families I am reading about not the norm but the "goal"?"
>
>

I would say we are not average. We are a large family, fairly
isolated living five miles north of a town of 2,800. The nearest
large town is 120 miles away.

Our day right now are swim team practice, big breakfast, gaming, TV,
reading, board games, training the dogs, painting. Lunch somewhere
in the middle of that.In the evenning we generally, after another
hours swim team practice, sing, dance around to music from the
computer. We play pool, check the chickens,jump on the trampoline,
play cribbage or another game. Sometimes we practice backflips on
the tramp, ride our bikes, walk to the creek and look for crawdads
or fish. Kids invite town kids out and that usually means playing
the Wii or World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero. We rent movies from
Netflix and things here settle down for the night somewhere between
11 and 1 am.

It is a good, busy, full life.

On occasion we travel. This spring we took all seven kids who are
home to Washington DC. We camped and looked all over. We just
returned from a family week, with my sibs and grown kids and their
kids to a lake. There we swam, boated and fished. We played cards
till one am. every night. We ate great food and had a great visit.

This weekend we will have two extra kids and go to a swim meet in a
town about thirty miles away.

I used to worry that my life was boring and my kids would not be
enriched and then it happened we started enjoying the day.

Good wishes,
Kathleen