A common educational idea in some unschooling circles is "strewing" or littering the child's path through the world with many things to spark their curiosity and engage them in learning. For example, Helena learned a lot of the states geography as well as letter recognition through puzzles I left sitting on end tables in the living room. 

It becomes more challenging to me to figure out how to strew mathematical opportunities throughout real life, especially now that she's kind of past the sorting, simple baking fractions, and abacus stage. 

I'm determined to keep math both fun and meaningful! Meaningful things are remembered. I hated math in school because it made no sense to me and I saw no relationship to my life - despite the fact that I got mostly A's in it. 

So here are two fun projects we've come up with to use math in real life along the lines of Helena's interests. 

First, she'll be running a lemonade and snack stand at our town wide garage sale in  September. 

Second, she's eager to design and build a model, to-scale, tiny house. This will cover a variety of geometry concepts and be one of the earliest preparations for building herself a real tiny house someday. 

How do you use math in real life for older students? 

Confession: I totally lose my hippie, earthy, values when it comes to shopping. I grew up hunting out good deals with my grandma who was master of bargain hunting after growing up during the Depression. Plus clothing and fashion = art for the body to me. Such fun! So we had a fun time mall-crawling today - as my Pop-Pop would have called it while he settled in somewhere with a good book so Grandma and I could wander.... 

Helena didn't need much for fall as most of her stuff still fits and she gets some pretty awesome hand-me-downs from my mom's neighbor, in addition to whatever I've already bought her. Still, we'd just gotten rid of almost every pair of jeans she owned (a blue polka dot and an orange pair still fit lol) along with a bag of other clothing. So a bit of shopping was in order!

And since life and learning are all mixed up together for us, it was a great way to practice percents and decimals and more. How much are these incredible Doc Martins at DSW? The Uggs - which she unfortunately couldn't fit her high arches into - were 70% off and only $27! The Docs, on the other hand, were only 30% off and still sporting a final price that was too high for mama to justify for growing feet. What about the shirt at Old Navy that was 40% off? And these sweats (all around $10) at Abercrombie? What's going to be the total if we get all of it? Some quick rounding and math in the head ensued. 

Now she's plotting and scheming how she can come up with enough to afford about half of the Docs if I pay the other half. I offered her the growing bottle return collection, courtesy of my kombucha addiction, so she's out adding up the price of their return. 

We also do about 2 math problems per day on paper. Today I asked her to compare prices of yoga classes and find out if a student discount, class card bulk purchase, or 10% discount off full price classes were a better deal. 

Life=learning=life! 

The further we go with homeschooling the more unschooling I become - because Helena learns so very much when following her own curiosities and passions! I strew her path with a zillion things to satisfy her curiosity and we explore some of them together and some she explores on her own. "School" neither starts nor stops for us. We're always learning! I recently heard a woman on a homeschool FB page say they used curriculum so that they could cover the "subjects" that NYS requires. That's one way to do it and it works for a lot of folks. Yet for those of us who avoid curriculum, worksheets, and tests - we still cover all of the required subjects through real life. For elementary school in NY I report on the following subjects, not all of which are even required. 

Math
English Language Arts
Social Studies
Science
Art & Music 
Health & PE
Spanish

Last night before bed we read more of the lovely Barefoot Book Arthur of Albion. Helena's really obsessed with the Arthurian legends after watching the television series Merlin last winter (So fun!). We read about some of the legends online after watching the series. Now we're revisiting it through this book her Aunt Katie gave her. It has beautiful illustrations and tells the stories in a really lovely, well-worded, adventurous way. I'm enjoying it as well. This counts as a bit of "literature" and "British legends" - which I would categorize under English Language Arts and maybe world history/culture for Social Studies. 

This morning Helena read an article in Ranger Rick on sloths. She told me about a scientist studying sloths to better facilitate rescue of babies and returning them to the wilds. This counts as science and language arts (reading). 

She practiced her piano this morning - music. 

Then we read and watched together some stuff on electricity for the Minecraft homeschool science class she's taking - more science. We talked about pulling out a circuit board, solar energy kit, and solar sun print papers we have sometime in the next few days. But first she took the Minecraft quiz (and got a 100%) so she can get started on building her Minecraft electricity project. She love, love, loves expressing her creativity and interest in building things through Minecraft! She is also really enjoying chatting with other players on the server - which gives her more real life reading and writing practice. 

At present she's doing her 2 math problems per day. In addition to reading a lot of fun math stories and riddles together and doing math continually in real life, she does 2 problems per day on paper. This was a decision we both made since we felt it important to know how to solve things on paper not just in her head and to remember the process and steps for solving longer problems. Two problems per day most days of the year along with a lot of real life "story problems" is sufficient for continual learning and much more fun than pages of worksheet problems which leave most kids detesting math! ((Edited later to add that we've since moved to reading Life of Fred stories and solving the "Your turn to play" at the end per her choice. All about being flexible... ))

For real life math we do a lot of "grocery shopping" math lately. She price compares looking at unit prices. She weighs bulk produce and figures out the price in her head, for example 1.5 lbs grapes at $3.99 per lb. Finally, she'll take the receipt and figure out the mean, median, and mode of items purchased. We'll talk about what each statistic means and the different kinds of information it gives us. We'll look for outliers that make the mean much higher than the median or mode. It's just sort of a fun game we play sometimes. The more we play it together, the more adept she gets at the information.

In truth, there's so much learning going on continually that it's impossible to categorize it all into subjects or even to report it all. I'd be at it endlessly since the learning is endless! I find more than enough to report to the school district each quarter. In addition to the above, in the last few days we've been reading a story called Swallows and Amazons, fiction about some children who sail on their boats to spend the summer camping on an lake island a mile from home. We've been learning all about sailing and boat terms and parts. These were made more "real life" with the documentary MaidenTrip about the youngest girl (ages 14-16) to ever sail around the world. It was a great movie!! Just be aware there's some "language" on it.... 

She's also learned to make Stop Motion animation with Legos this summer and learned some iMovie skills; asked for a tool kit for her birthday and used it; taken pottery lessons; practiced yoga in adult yoga classes; gardened, made herbal medicines, and contributed to herbal videos; read all about pirates and marked the places on world maps that they lived and pillaged; read stories about the United Kingdom and then colored and labeled a map of the UK when she discovered our world map didn't label the individual nations in it; and done two drama camps performing in a skit and a play. What category would these amazing real life experiences go in? I won't include any of them in her quarterly reports because they were all summer learning experiences, but they could be categorized as art, home-ec or practical life skills, more art, PE, botany and/or practical life skills, social studies, and art again! In truth we've covered at least a full semester of learning this summer - though none of it "counts" for school. Additionally, NYS doesn't require any "practical life skills" or home ec until middle school. 

This is what "unschooling" looks like. Because learning is not compulsory or mandated or forced a child never loses their curiosity, that innate drive to know. The drive that fuels the "why" of toddlerhood never ends. Learning is fun!

All in a day's natural, organic, unschooling.... 

What does learning - or homeschooling - or unschooling have to do with nature or nature's healing? We're so programmed to think that learning is an activity that occurs only in a specific place - school - and in a specific way - through lecture instruction, text books, worksheets, and testing. This is one way to learn and for a select few kids it works great. I liked school as a kid - though looking back I realize that I liked it only because I liked learning; I realize I was bored much of my time at school and could have learned far more outside of school had I not had it fixed in my head that learning = school. Organic learning is learning in the way nature intended, the way we're evolutionarily hardwired to learn. It's hand's on. It's passion driven. It's trusting of the child's drive and ability to learn. It's respectful of the child's abilities and interests. It's inseparable from everyday life. It's immersed in everyday life. It's endlessly fun! We love it!


Let's think about it..... we as human beings are hard-wired to learn. A baby's keen observations and drive to explore everything in sight with all 5 senses; a toddler's incessant "why" and a preschooler's questions about everything are all evidence of an ingrained drive to learn. In 5 short years children learn to crawl, walk, master a language, learn to navigate the world around them, learn to name almost everything in sight, learn to dress themselves, learn to feed themselves, learn to navigate a wide variety of social situations, learn to tie their shoes, maybe even learn to climb trees, ride bikes, swim, and more! And the vast majority of this learning occurs with no formal instruction, no textbooks, no tests - just immersion in life. 

Most children begin school excited to continue learning. Yet somewhere in those first few years of school, many children lose their curiosity. This is not because we have bad teachers. I highly respect the many wonderful teachers working in what I consider a broken system to deliver the best possible education to our nation's children. But yes, I do see the system as broken. In a few short years most of those once excited kindergartener's see "learning" as negative, equate it with a school activity, and - if given the choice - would rather stay home than go to school. I saw this in one of my recent PPA sessions where the kids all started talking about how they wished they didn't have to go to school "but you have to because it's the only way to go to college and get a job." I don't for a second agree with this. But no worries. I'll write my blog about homeschooling, but I won't indoctrinate your children on it ;) I kept my mouth shut.... 

Developmental psychology and educational research both show us that the single most important activity for young children is PLAY - not early academics. It shows that early academics are detrimental to long-term learning and scholastic success. It shows that children learn best not by textbooks and worksheets but by immersion in REAL LIFE EXPERIENCES. It shows that children learn best not when following a compulsory curriculum of what they "should" know at certain ages but following their own innately curious passions. It also shows few children have time - or energy - to follow their passions fully when immersed in an artificial learning environment that takes up 6 hours per day - plus commute time plus homework time. It shows that testing is not an accurate measurement or the best measurement of what children know. Combine all of this with the fact that our current educational system operates in a manner that is conducive primarily to just one learning style - the kid who excels at reading and writing - while there are in fact MANY learning styles and ways of learning. John Gardner, Harvard educational psychologist, lists many of these and I'll write more about them later. 

So this is why I'm passionate about organic learning - learning that is driven by a child's inborn curiosity and passions. 

So in our house learning never stops. We don't really have first day of school and last day of school. Learning=life=learning. And it's all very natural and very exciting! 

Some folks worry about how traditional subjects can be covered in this manner, so I'll be posting some "All in a day's organic learning" posts so people can see just how much learning we cover through everyday life. This life=learning is also called "unschooling" by many. I don't qualify as a true unschooler in some books because I do keep track of "subjects" partly for my own academic interest, party because NY requires it. 

So just today.... And as you can see, in "organic learning" subject lines are super intertwined!

English Lang Arts - reading a 2nd book about pirates; spelling names of clouds; classic lit story Mutiny on the Bounty

Science - Minecraft homeschool science camp reading and quiz on magnetism; made 4 main types of clouds on construction paper with cotton balls and put them in her room so she could see them and remember them; listened to 1.5 herb fairy audio books learning all about lemon balm and chamomile

Social Studies - I started reading Mutiny on the Bounty to her; she's reading a historical fiction book about pirates

Math - continual adding/subtracting figuring out what - if anything - she wanted to purchase with her $15

Health - excitedly reading/learning about making raw Asian inspired cuisine with me; listening to her body to choose lunch (gluten free quiche)

Life skills - shopped for her lunch; ordered takeout herself; took my debit card and went and paid for it; returned my card to me as I finished shopping and went to the store cafe to eat and wait for me