Baby Steps

My son is what I call a reluctant schooler.  He loves to learn, he just likes to learn things in a way that is not conducive to "schooling."  That is why I decided to unschool.  Unschooling is actually an incorrect label if you ask me.  A more accurate label, is self-directed learning.  With this model, the student decides what they want to learn about and the parent helps them do so in such a way that works with the child's learning style.  For my son, that often means as little writing or reading as possible.

Before I decided to go this route I'd signed up my kids for a Lego class that is held once a week.  The thought was that it would get my son to do some reading and writing and would get my daughter to make some friends (she's a bit shy).  At first I forced the issue of homework, but I realized that was really bothering my son so I stopped.  I ended up asking if he wanted to do it and more often than not he said no.  I found it was because of the writing aspect, so I offered to do the writing for him.

Since then, he's been reading more (he even called me out when we didn't read before bed last night).  He's also been reading more of the homework questions on his own (and let me tell you - some of those words are HARD), and today he even did some research on my computer by himself! 

I'm still trying to figure out the writing issue, but at this point, I'm just glad to see he's reading (pretty much at grade level from what I can tell) and is learning to type well (which in this day and age is probably more important than actually writing).

I've found that my daughter is a bit more like me, in that she likes to actually have worksheets to do.  For a while I wasn't having her do any, figuring she was just content to be more like her brother.  When she came up to me and said, "Mommy, I want to do school." and explained that she meant worksheets, I immediately got out something for her.

Now, she's working on writing her letters and numbers (they aren't perfect by any means but she's working on it) as well as sounding out and spelling words.  We've even been doing sight word flash cards.  Today she told me she wanted to write a story, so we got out a composition book and she drew a picture and then wrote a few "words" about it.

Days like today help prove to me that we're heading in the right direction, even if it does seem a bit slow at times.