Freedom Panther

HOWDY!

Yes, I appreciate what unschooling is - for the most part! I'm still
afflicted, though, with occasional bouts of CONSTIPATED THINKING (a favorite
phrase of mine, which is a term borrowed from the movie, "Finding
Forrester."

Because I am still fighting my own way out of the box, which is within yet
another box, and yet another...you get the picture, I still sometimes grasp
for "evidence" that my son is learning and will not be mentally deficient
due to lack of stimulating and educational opportunities...so I do my best
to make "subject matter" available in interesting, interactive formats.

Part of the reason for this is that I am a self-employed massage/manual
therapist, with my office attached to my home. It really works out very
well, as I can allow Dylan to be home to follow his interests and make up
his own activities, while I'm earning an income, utilizing the education and
experience that I've spent many thousands of dollars and gobs of hours
acquiring, fulfilling my own life goals, all with Dylan just on the other
side of a closed door.

In between appointments, over long lunch hours, and especially if a client
cancels, Dylan and I have time together peppered throughout the day.
Evenings, with Dad home, brings another dimension to our family experience.

I guess it just makes me, a still-in-my-first-six-months unschooler, feel
more secure to have Dylan getting fun, interactive, learning experiences
through software and even some Nintendo games with educational content,
while Dave and I are working...then we have our family time interspersed
throughout the day, evening and on weekends.

NATURAL MATH, in particular, seems to be a method by which to reduce the
amount of agony a child must endure to learn multiplication and geometry,
etc., by learning a few concepts and principles and then having that
information available for the rest of their lives so that they can always
quickly "figure it out" for themselves, if and when they need to.
Primarily, I'm looking for the materials SO I CAN TEACH MYSELF the
principles, then mentor my son as the opportunities present themselves in a
more natural way. I'm anxious about math, as that's an area in which I've
always felt deficient.

Dylan is slowly starting to develop some interests, again, and that is
certainly helping me focus some of my energies for his benefit. Having
brought home a Calvin & Hobbes comic book for my husband the other day,
Dylan snapped it up (not having any interest in reading ANYTHING since his
Public School experience), and he ready 24 pages the first night. He looked
ahead to see how many pages there were, estimated how many days of reading
he had available to him, based on 24 pages a night, and read for only three
more nights before he refused to read anymore. Apparently, he never wanted
the adventure to end, so he wouldn't read one more comic strip, let alone
one more page, until he had at least one more Calvin & Hobbes book in the
house...Naturally, I see the beauty in this and have ordered a dozen more
books, some of which we now have piled up on the living room floor, waiting
their turn to be devoured by a happy young boy!

THANKS for your "Favorites" list regarding math, and the heads up regarding
The Complete Homelearning Source Book, by Rebecca Rupp. That is not one
I've come across, and it sounds wonderful.

No time to preview this before I send it, so I hope I have expressed myself
in the way I've intended...

I APPRECIATE ALL OF YOUR FEEDBACK AND HELPFUL HINTS, JOYCE! THANK YOU!

Blessings and Peaceful Pauses,

Freedompanther



>From: Fetteroll <fetteroll@...>
>Reply-To: [email protected]
>To: <[email protected]>
>Subject: Re: [Unschooling-dotcom] JUST JOINED! What do you know about
>NATURAL MATH???
>Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2002 06:20:27 -0500
>
>Welcome Freedompanther! :-)
>
>on 2/15/02 11:22 PM, polarbear48471 at freedompanther@... wrote:
>
> > So, we started unschooling in October of 2001, very loosely, I might
> > add
>
>People often mistake the word unschooling for homeschooling. Unschooling is
>actually a philosophy of homeschooling, which by it's very definition is
>loose! You can't get much looser than unschooling ;-) It gets defined
>(rather inadequately) as child-led learning, natural learning, interest
>driven learning.
>
>As a general rule unschoolers don't divide the world into subjects. There's
>just life :-) Though sometimes we share resources it may not be as much as
>you'd like. We tend more towards discussing learning from life.
>
> > *** I AM INTERESTED IN ANY INFORMATION YOU MAY HAVE REGARDING
> > INTEREACTIVE SOFTWARE, BOOKS, WORKBOOKS, TUTOR/MENTOR GUIDES,
> > MANIPULATIVES, OR ANYTHING ELSE REGARDING NATURAL MATH. Any info
> > would be greatly appreciated.
>
>You will probably find a great deal of useful stuff in The Complete
>Homelearning Source Book by Rebecca Rupp
>
>You can read about it at:
>
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609801090/o/qid=986983363/sr=8-2/ref
>=aps_sr_b_1_2/107-2415050-0048564
>
>Here's a list of math websites that have collected in my favorites that
>sounded good when they were recommended.
>
>Gnarly Math http://www.gnarlymath.com/
>Math Stories http://www.mathstories.com/
>Math Links http://www.col-ed.org/smcnws/msres/mathlinks.html
>Math Mania http://members.aol.com/rmathmania/
>Mathematical Fiction
>http://math.cofc.edu/faculty/kasman/MATHFICT/Default.html
>Absurd Math http://www.hrmvideo.com/abmath/
>Funbrain Math Baseball
>http://funbrain.lycos.com/cgi-bin/shtml.cgi?A1=../math/index.html
>Math in the Movies http://world.std.com/~reinhold/mathmovies.html
>Mega Math Resources http://members.aol.com/MrHLakeRiviera/megamath.html
>Math Forum: Pascal's Triangle
>http://forum.swarthmore.edu/workshops/usi/pascal/pascal.links.html
>
>There is also some free downloadable software divided by age and subject
>and
>computer at:
>
>Kids Domain http://kidsdomain.com/down
>
>Joyce


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Freedom Panther

Hi, Andrea,

An earlier attempt to respond did not bear fruit - don't know what happened,
other than I lost internet connection.

So glad you are also seeing positive emotional and behavioral changes in
your son. Dylan becomes more and more glee-filled as time goes on, and if
I'm not careful, I might actually let go of my concerns and be able to ride
the wave of unschooling unfettered by "old school" training which I'm still
shackled with. I suppose, in a very real sense, I AM DECOMPRESSING MYSELF,
to a larger degree than is my son.

Insofar as your son wishing to learn the Japanese language and computer
programming language, TERRIFIC! Have you found any supportive resources for
these endeavors? I have gathered a couple of resources regarding foreign
language, just in case my son shows an interest at some future date. I'll
pass them along, if you wish.

Not sure what an unschool school is, but would be interested to hear about
it.

By the by, I burned the midnight oil the other night and landed a goldmine
(for us, at least) in regards to the NATURAL MATH issue. In case anyone
else is interested in checking it out, see
www.themathlab.com/natural/natural_.htm, and the previous one I'd found is
www.naturalmath.com. Can't tell you how many hours I spent searching, all
told, but it has been well worth the effort and energy expended.

Have a great day!

Freedompanther




>From: mom2dnb@...
>Reply-To: [email protected]
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: Re: [Unschooling-dotcom] JUST JOINED! What do you know about
>NATURAL MATH???
>Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2002 01:33:15 EST
>
>
> You're story sounds like mine. My son (who's 10) started attending
>an
>unschool school in september and is still decompressing from public school.
>He still has a hatred of anything academic, but he very much wants to learn
>Japanese and any and all computer programming languages. He hates math too,
>so the most I can get him to do is play games, but he is also responsible
>for
>budgeting his own lunch money for the month(His school is in a city
>neighborhood so he goes out to eat or goes to a 7-11 almost every day)
>
> However, the fact that he has changed from being an angry, uptight,
>worried little boy to a happy, thoughtful, curious , repsonsible and
>self-confident 10 year old is amazing. Right now I don't care if he does
>any
>academics this year, I'm glad that he has become this wonderful person.
>
> Andrea
>
>
>[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>


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