Angela

to unschool your children, and do you assign work each day or let the
child decide when and how much?

I am asking because in my previous post re: my 9yo ds (who is not
motivated to do one math and one language lesson a day), someone
pointed out that some unschoolers *do* use texts.

Just wondering how many of you do and in what capacity......

Thanks so much and God bless you,

Angela

M & J Welch

About texts-I've some suspicion to their accuracy and bias; however, I've
purchased many texts from charity thrift stores-ones that were obviously
bought by institutional school families and never even opened-just like
new-lol! And I've accepted gifts of texts from my teacher family members
who saved the books from the garbage dumpster. We haven't had any
opportunity to use them yet. In fact, I haven't even shown them to ds yet,
but I plan to-only to let him know they exist. I don't see these texts as
an end all, but as a jumping off point. Leave the book out, maybe ds will
browse through it. Maybe he'll see something of interest and ask me about.
Maybe he'll want to learn more, and look for more info on it in other books.

I also use the texts to give me ideas-to remind me what sorts of subjects
may (I said may-as is in "maybe"!) be appropriate for ds's current learning
level.

And, lastly, I'm a book fiend. If it's got binding, and pages (doesn't even
have to have a cover! ;-) then I'm going to gape at it. I LOVE books, even
poorly written ones. (In that case, I LOVE complaining about how poorly
written they are! This morning we were shifting books in our bookshelves to
make space and dh said to me about an author-I forget which one- "Sheesh,
you sure keep a lot of this author's books around for hating her writing so
much." lol!)

Oh, and lastly for real-I always keep in mind that *I'm* the one with the
book addiction, not ds (although he's picking up on my affliction). I don't
really buy texts for him. He's just my excuse. :-) I hope he'll take an
interest in them, just as I'd hope he'd take an interest in anything I enjoy
doing, but I don't force him. (Not that I haven't tried in the past. Boy
did I learn my lesson! And ds was the teacher.)

Lee

[email protected]

> I am asking because in my previous post re: my 9yo ds (who is not
> motivated to do one math and one language lesson a day), someone
> pointed out that some unschoolers *do* use texts.

I think the problem may be not the texts, but the required lessons. I think
Llewellyn reported a story of some boy who'd hovered around the arithmetic
level until he was 15, and then suddenly dove into math and worked his way
nearly to calculus in a few months. Coercion can be very demotivating for
some people.

-xx- Damien X-)