unschooling

I have a friend (Megan) who does such an excellent job of keeping her kids busy doing all sorts of enriching summertime activities that I swear her kids don't know the meaning of the words "brain cobwebs." I really really wanted to do something similar with my kids, but had a hard time getting started. I found a resource that I really like (teachervision.com), and so I decided to come up with a little lesson plan for today.

The verdict:  I will never, ever homeschool my kids. Period.

At least not in the sit down and do projects and activities in any sort of organized way, way.

For example, Alex has wanted some venous fly traps for a long time now, and we found some at Harmons yesterday, so we've been looking up stuff about them, and I decided to move forward on that thread and do some homeschooling activities involving plants. Alex was cool with that (lily was busy elsewhere), so I asked him to go get a paper and pencil, and he FLIPPED! The minute I ask him to do anything it's like this major power struggle, which I should have seen coming, but I figured he'd be OK with this because the homeschool thing was kind of his idea. So we didn't get very far with my plans, but when I watched them and followed their lead, what they really wanted to do was hang out by the tadpoles that were turning into frogs that Amy gave Lily for her birthday.

My kids are like that. I guess they're going to be natural leaders, because they sure don't want to be led.

Here are some pictures of our morning.

This is the product of the failed sunflower project that was supposed to be so cool.

His body language pretty much says it all. Like, "ok fine, here's your dumb sunflower." I'm glad he's not like this with he teachers at school (yet).

We have a sunflower outside. He was supposed to answer these questions and then come in and draw it from his answers. Not sure this is too accurate.

This is where Lily wanted to be the whole time. I was cool with that.

Here's the venous fly trap. They are really fun, and will forever remind me of my friend Cindy who's mom always had one in her kitchen. We loved sticking things in it to make them close.

They are pretty dang cool. Although I kept thinking we had tons of little flies, but since we've brought this home I haven't seen any. Hopefully it will get enough nourishment in my window,

So the moral of the story is that traditional homeschooling is not a good fit for my kids. Maybe I'm not giving it enough of a chance, maybe I truly don't want to bother with it, but either way I'm going to say we tried and not stress about it anymore. But if I keep cool things around the house, I might actually trick them into a little summertime enrichment. As long as they don't show up to school this fall mumbling and drooling, I'm going to call summer school a success. Just trying to keep that bar low enough to be attainable.