Piano

Being unschoolers at heart the idea of having a lesson based learning program is not top on our list of things to do, so I was a little sceptical back in March when Jon's bosses wanted to have Calvin on board for the piloting of their still in development preschool piano program. The program included weekly private lessons as well as weekly group lessons. It was of utmost importance to me that Calvin not feel pressured but self motivated to play the piano, and how can we assure that when we're carting him to lessons twice a week at night quite four years old?

We put our concerns aside, however, agreeing to the proposal, and at the same time started taking some measures at home to help it along. It's Rousseau who advocated that the teacher (in a one on one context) should learn, or at least pretend to learn, each subject along with the student. I can't get entirely on board with that—not only is it just not feasible all the time, I don't believe in lying to him to achieve an effect—but there are times when the genral principle makes sense to me, and since I really don't know anything about playing the piano I decided to take it up as a hobby right along with my son. It can be a little daunting to pick up a completely new subject at an older age, especially when sharing the learning process with someone so much younger, someone who most certainly will show you up, but we've had fun "arguing" over who gets to practice now.

My years of musical training are the only thing saving me right now from utter embarrassment. Well, that and the well written adult lesson books Jon brought home for me. I'm making progress and enjoying the evolution of a skill I have long coveted, but it is nothing compared to the leaps and bounds Calvin has made over the past months. In March he knew what the piano was and seemed to show an ability to keep a beat. By June he could play a multitude of his lesson songs from memory with one finger, keeping a steady beat and singing right along with them. By August he'd learned the names of all the keys on the piano and could play using all ten of his fingers, reading note names from a book. Now in October he is he reading music on the grand staff and playing two handed piano and is quite the accomplished sight reader—Im sure a video will be coming soon.

So how does this fit into our unschooling "method"? A common misconception is that unschooling is synonymous with unlearning, or that it means completely avoiding the process of learning by specific method. In fact, some unschoolers might agree with you, but for the most part unschooling just means letting the learner lead the way and fitting the process to the student instead of the other way around. Calvin has shown a remarkable interest in learning the piano. He enjoys practicing and doing the workbook exercises, and he is always hungry for more. In fact, while the original method is spread over a several month period, Calvin showed such eagerness to learn that he swept through it in half the time, something we did not slow down or discourage. That meant that he moved into the next book much sooner than expected, graduated into the next book just as ridiculously fast, and is now on his fourth. Since he is mastering the skills before he moves on we are remaining true to our student instead of to the lesson plan. That has meant being a little inventive along the way, but thankfully his teacher, Jon's boss, has been very flexible in working with him (and just as eager to teach him as he has been to learn from her, which makes the pairing work). It is his eagerness and his work that has made this a success, and that is what unschooling is all about.

Journaling

I haven't blogged about our general activities in a while, but that's not to say that we haven't been busy. I am dedicated to a life of routine, though equally as dedicated to breaking out of it. It's both comforting and pacing to have at least a few landmarks along our daily road; there isn't a day of the week that we don't read and play the piano, for instance. And there are other things that I am careful to squeeze in at least a  minimum of times over any given week, and this month we've added journaling to that list.

Honestly I've never been very good at keeping a journal. I love to write and am continually thinking in terms of journaling, but rarely do my thoughts ever make it onto paper. I believe that writing is an empowering activity, though, and it has always been our plan to involve Calvin in the blog as soon as he grasps the art of reading and writing. With the advent of school for everyone else, and months of cold, indoor days upon us, I decided to get us started on actually keeping journals.

The rule is that we write at least three days a week. I am keeping a reading journal, writing about the books I am reading, and Calvin is keeping more of a daily activity journal recorded in a combination of writing and drawing/coloring. I think he's pretty excited about the endeavor and his writing (both the actual writing and his ability to sound out words) is already maturing with the increased practice. And maybe, just maybe, as a team we'll be able to stick to this writing resolution. It's something I've always wanted to do.

Vacuuming around life

Reggio Emilia. It's a small town in Italy that had a tough go of it during the second world war. It's also the eponymous home of a unique philosophy on child rearing and early childhood education. About three years ago, before we had done much research on homeschooling, we were spending a lot of time in our local library reading up on all the different thoughts on how properly to educate a child during the pre-school years. After reading several books, and after drawing on my own brief stint in early childhood education, I became enamoured of the method, which embraces child and experience driven learning to the nth degree. The key word in Reggio is really respect, and I don't mean the respect a teacher demands of a student, but the respect they give to that student, and to the student's naturally derived desire to learn. Trust would be another good key word because the Reggio way requires a teacher to trust in a child's impulses to lead them (teacher and child). Reggio is also very much about using all the senses and having access to physical materials—not so much toys, but materials—and freedom to explore. Reggio relies heavily on a relationship developed between child and teacher, one that is developed through careful observation. A Reggio teacher spends hours observing the children and taking notes on their activities and inclinations so as to better guide the learning experience in the future—guide, not direct, and all based on the child's own interest. From my own interpretation Reggio is really the precursor to a life of unschooling. The early formation of an autodidact.

Reggio, as a method, is not easy to grasp or to understand, in part because it does not fit well into our own cultural beliefs about child rearing and education. For that reason a real Reggio school is hard to find here. Jon and I searched the area and found that there were no official Reggio preschools with teacher who had been trained the Reggio way, or at least none that were affordable, so we decided to learn what we could about the approach and adopt it as much as possible at home, and I've been pretty pleased with the results as a whole. Calvin is a very independent learner so far, sometimes to the point of wishing me away when he is busy in his own world. In fact, the hardest point I think is going to be gauging when he does need assistance, and teaching him how to accept it. Or maybe that's my own interpretation of the situation? But until now, actually, the hardest part has been letting go of the house keeping, because Reggio demands that a child is given as much time as necessary to explore the worlds they choose.

If there is a log community in process on the floor on vacuuming day, one just has to vacuum around it.

Gardening

One of the main homeschooling tenets is that learning occurs any time, any place. The idea that learning is intended to occur in a classroom, surrounded by a plethera of kids of approximately your age and knowledge, between the hours of 9 and 3, monday through friday, during only certain months of the year, is disconcerting to us, to say the least. Sure it's true that going to school does not limit the learning opportunities to be found elsewhere or when you are not in the classroom, but after a number of years of counting down the hours until you no longer have to sit at that uncomfortable desk next to that kid with the snotty nose who likes to kick your chair when he's bored, you just might forget that learning (since learning and school and the desk and the snotty kid are all synonymous to your child mind) is also outside in the trees, in the museums, or in a book read for pleasure.

We always maintained that, if we found homeschooling to be undesirable in any way, we could change our minds and take advantage of the well respected local school system. I don't think, however, that we'll be taking that option. With every new experience that we share I find myself awed by the many things to be learned, and even more so by our son's strong desire to learn them. Everything—and I mean everything—is a learning experience simply because he sees the world that way, and he sees it that way with intense joy.

We gardened last week. We gardened a lot last week: five cubic yards of dirt and one and a half tons of boulders is a lot of gardening. We worked pretty much for three days straight, with Calvin and I getting started on Friday and the three of us, with help from my parents, continuing work right up through dinner time on Sunday. We were pretty darn busy with a lot of adult oriented activities. I expected boredom, I expected acting out, I expected discontent. What I didn't expect, but should have if past experience was any indication, was the determined four year old assistant we had all weeked. There were very few times that Calvin was not involved. He could not, for instance, move 18 inch boulders, but he did use the wheel barrow to transfer dirt from the driveway, two shovels at a time, to the back yard; he did help lay out the black tarping and shovel dirt over it; he did help relocate smaller rocks to more appropiate locations; he did work up a sweat. When we finished the majority job on Sunday just before dinner, we celebrated by getting out the hose with the intention of cleaning off the driveway (where the five cubic yards of dirt had once been), and I think we actually used some of the water for that job after all.

There isn't a logical thread to follow in this post. I'm not actually going to list all the wonderful things Calvin was learning while carting dirt from the front yard to the back, or moving rocks, or planting plants. I'm not going to list those wonderful things he learned because I'm not even sure what they were, but I trust, in fact I know, that he was learnng. Over the next few weeks in the course of our conversation and daily activities he will clue me into what those things were by talking about them. He may not remember how many 18 inch boulders add up to one and a half tons, or how many square feet of garden five cubic yards of dirt can create, but there's plenty to learn about that cache of bugs he found under a large rock, or the funny look of the root ball on one of the plants we put in. Then, once he's clued me in to the things he found interesting, I can follow those threads and take him even further down those roads. See, he actually does most of the work for me.

Worksheets

I thought about titling this post "the best laid plans" and still think it is probably the more likely title. When we embarked on our homeschooling journey about a year ago, it was with the particular purpose of not schooling at all in the strict sense of the word; we consider ourselves unschoolers. A large part of homeschooling, however, specifically of home unschooling, is the ability to be flexible and to let the child lead the way.

After reading several books by David Elkind, and my favorite education book, Emile, I felt very at ease with the idea of reading and writing could and should wait. I had no qualms about Calvin eventually becoming a reader—he is surrounded by books, people who loves books, and people who love reading to him, not to mention that he, himself absolutely loves to be read to and to "read" to himself and his friends and toys. We'll get there eventually, I figured, and until then, no pressure.

So what happens when the kid starts pressuring you? When he first wrote his name by himself over a week ago it was really just the start down a slippery slope of sorts. I dragged my feet. Sure he could write his name, but I didn't think that meant open season the the first two of the three Rs. It was the very next day, though, that he started asking me to help him learn how to make other letters by writing them out so he could trace them. I grudgingly complied. Then I started to write my letters out in dots and dashes so he could truly trace over them, and then, as he was asking for more and more letters while I was trying to make lunch, I gave in fully and found a few preschool letter worksheets online and printed them. He seemed to find them almost as exciting as his train, and I had to convince him to put them aside to eat lunch.

It was then that I had to remind myself of my original goal: to let the kid lead the way. Well, here he was, leading the way while pulling me along behind him, my feet dragging all the while. Sure I'd set out to save him from rigid educational structures and from being a slave to worksheets such as these, but enjoying them wholeheartedly at his own pace was far from being enslaved. You could say that I'd missed the forest for the trees, or perhaps the learning for the worksheet, but I'm back on track...for now.