Handwriting, Naturally

A couple of years ago I was trying to explain the philosophy of unschooling to my very traditional MIL and SIL. They were having a hard time believing that kids would just willingly, and of their own accord, learn all the things they “needed” to learn. Oh sure, they could understand wanting to do craft projects, playing soccer, and maybe even doing some fun science experiments. But MIL felt that there were certain things no child would want to do, and the example she gave was handwriting. “How many children would sit there and practice their handwriting if they weren’t made to do it?”, she asked, recalling evenings spent with her eldest grandchild supervising the filling of worksheet pages for homework.

I can’t blame MIL for thinking this way because several years ago I likely would have thought the same as her. The same as most people in our society. There’s this belief that certain subjects just plain “aren’t any fun”, but are necessary for a proper education, and therefore children must be coerced into doing them. The first problem with this paradigm is so few people have ever seen Natural Learning take place that it’s unbelievable to them that kids can remain curious, driven, and inquisitive about the world around them long after the toddler years. The second problem is the notion that forced, fact-based learning is the optimal, if not the only, way for children to learn.

If you stop and think about it, it’s pretty difficult to get far in this world without writing, even if you are a small child. At the very least, children tend to be possessive; writing one’s name on a project, placemat, or book is often one of the first times kids encounter the benefits of having such a skill. But more than that, we live in a world of words. Kids encounter them everywhere and are naturally drawn (when they are developmentally ready) to acquire the skills of reading and writing, in the same way (I presume) that a human child living 20,000 years ago would naturally be driven to acquire the hunting and gathering skills that he witnessed every day. I’ve yet to hear of a child who, if left to his/her own devices, does not at some point become interested in picking up a pencil and writing letters.

And so it was with Daughter. She started writing letters when she was about 3 years old and is now able to write whole sentences. Nobody has ever “taught” her how, nor did she ever ask. It came about Naturally. She loves to draw, make up stories, and create games and all these things are enhanced by the use of the printed word. Here are some recent examples of her work:

Last week she picked up a blank greeting card and did the following:

Later that week, she decided to prepare a surprise for me when I came home from work. She made eight little cards out of cardstock by cutting out rectangles and folding them in half. She then wrote “clues” on them, which I followed around the house, picking up the next card and clue, until I came to the “treasure” at the end: her, hiding in the closet! She had no help with this activity, in fact nobody knew she was doing it until she got her brother and father to give it a test run.

You can clearly see in this first card that she is taking care as she works; she crossed out the line that had too many errors for her liking and started it again. Here are some more cards in the series:

Finally, a while back she found a toy catalog inserted into our regional paper. She was concerned that she wouldn’t remember to ask for certain favorites by the time it was Christmas, so she decided she should write her letter to Santa early:

This sort of thing has been going on for years, and every year her writing gets neater, the letters more even in size, her spelling more accurate. Practice makes perfect, so they say, but who says practice has to mean writing “Jill and Jack ran with Spot” over and over again at a time when one would much rather be outside enjoying a sunny day? I can think of a million fun and spontaneous ways that a child can get to practice their handwriting without the need for worksheets (unless they like that sort of thing), homework, and forced assignments.

Having hopefully given a small demonstration of how Natural Learning applies to handwriting, an important issue I’d like to mention is that of correcting a child’s work.

How well I can still visualize my lined note book from elementary school, filled with short stories and sentences we’d been instructed to write, marred by bright red slash marks. The teacher would correct my work by rewriting my words with the proper spelling in the same bright red marker. I remember looking at my writing in terms of how many mistakes I’d made, not what I’d written, nor how well I’d progressed, but by the number of red slashes on the page. The exercise seemed pointless to me, other than a way to be tallied up and compared against the rest of the class (fortunately I was good at writing, so my self-esteem didn’t suffer). Some might think the role of teacher and the process of learning necessarily includes making those red marks and comments all over a page. But now I look at it in a whole new way, and it truly saddens me.

Life in the Free Learning world is so much different. You’ll notice in the examples above there are several mistakes. Some letters are written backwards, words are misspelled, and the grammar isn’t always perfect either. Some might think it prudent to point out these mistakes to Daughter. “How else will she learn the right way?” they might ask.

My daughter wrote those things without having any idea that she was “practicing her handwriting”. Nobody sat her down and said “now we’re going to practice our writing”. Nobody told her that the point of her creative efforts was to be grammatically correct. Instead, my daughter had an idea to do something that she thought would be fun for her (the dino card), a special way to say how much she appreciates her family (the card treasure hunt), and a practical way to ensure desired toys don’t get forgotten before Christmas (the list). Writing was simply a tool to accomplish all those things, it was not the point of the exercise.

Now imagine your child presenting you with a card hunt when you come home from work. How would you feel if someone had come before you and crossed out her mistakes with an angry red marker? Or written those words for her with the correct spelling and punctuation? How would YOU feel if you were her and someone did that to your work? If your child was sensitive, they might end up feeling inadequate, stupid, their confidence might drop. If they were stubborn they might feel angry at having their hard work ruined by someone else’s doodling. But I’m quite certain they would not give their thanks and appreciation for “helping them to learn the right way”. Chances are they would think twice before venturing to be so creative and spontaneous again.

So what to do with the mistakes? Mostly, I do nothing. My daughter knows what an “S” looks like, she just happens to write it backwards sometimes. If I asked her to take a close look at it, she would recognize her mistake right away. So what would be the point of correcting her, other than to steal away her pride, her confidence, and to entirely miss the point of what she was doing? If I saw a consistent error (she almost always draws her 4’s backwards) I might ask her to look closely. I would guage her reaction – for Daughter, she usually laughs and says “oops, I wrote it backwards” – before going any further. If she got upset or frustrated I would ask if she’d like some help and together we could come up with ways for her to practice getting it right. Since she’s not upset, and obviously knows what a 4 is supposed to look like, I see no problem. As for spelling and grammar, I’m also confident that she will figure out the right way as she goes along, and will either correct herself or ask for help if and when she decides its a problem.

Due Diligence

We’re continuing with the house/land hunt but its all moving very slowly. The place we liked best, and still keep coming back to, is a small acreage in a great neighbourhood with a tiny old house. The list of issues with this place is a mile long and accordingly the owners are asking too much. We put in a low-ball offer which they refused to look at (their realtor said it was “insulting”) but it was without any subjects. Now we’re preparing to put in a much higher offer but this time we want some candy!

So yesterday we took our architect (wow, doesn’t that sound swanky?) out to the place for a consultation. The tiny house isn’t on a foundation (problem #1; it’s built on blocks) and he pointed out that, because of this, we have no idea what the ground is like underneath. Apparently you can’t just pour concrete on the ground and call it a day (who knew?). So we’ll need a geotechnical survey. This we will have to pay for ourselves but we’ll include a favourable result as a subject in our offer. As for the house, it was no surprise to us that he deemed it a tear-down. Frankly, I’m a bit relieved. I’d sworn to Husband that if we could buy this place I’d be happy to live in the “quaint little cottage” until we could save up cash for an expansion/new house. However, the more I saw of it, the more my promise was coming back to haunt me in my dreams. From the exposed freestanding wood-burning stove beside the little staircase without rails (can’t you just see a child falling on there and getting a permanent stovetop-shaped scar across his torso and face?) to the bathtub (hand made from wood and coated with some kind of clear fibreglass coating, ewwww!), this place puts the idea of rustic living well beyond this city-girl’s limits! I can be happy living in a shoebox for a while, but much better if it is a shiny new shoebox (with proper plumbing)!

Speaking of which, we knew the place didn’t have a well (they were drawing water direct from the stream with the strangest set of do-it-yourself hoses, plastic carbuoys, and pumps I’ve ever seen) so that is now going in with our offer as something we’d like the owners to do. Ditto with the septic which, as it turns out, isn’t even the far-below-code homemade job we thought it was, but is apparently a cesspool (that’s actually a real word; such a learning experience this is!). Let the owners dig out their underground pool of sewage, thanks!

We also need a site survey for reasons that cover the remaining issues. One, the stream running through the property is protected by an environmental setback that encompasses 2/3 of the acreage. This doesn’t matter to us so much, since we aren’t interested in turning the lovely natural setting into a landscaped monstrosity of lawns, retaining walls, and beds that need a hired gardener to maintain. Nor do we wish to build a 5000 sq ft starter mansion. However, it does limit where one can build a house, even a small one. The only benefit to be gained from the existing cottage, and it’s a big benefit, is that most of it sits within the setback area. The city said we’d be allowed to keep that footprint for a new/renovated home (though any additions or expansions will be restricted to the direction that lies away from that area). So, the site survey will tell us the exact location of the setback. It will also confirm the existence of a shed on the property, also within the setback area. It’s funny because, in the words of the architect, the shed “doesn’t exist” until it’s on the site survey (“but I’m looking right at it! can’t we just bring the city dude here and point it out to him?”). Then we will hopefully be allowed to use its footprint for a new outbuilding (read: Husband’s drumming studio, male hangout, and guest house all rolled into one).

With all these issues it’s no wonder the place has been for sale forever. But despite all that, with the proper due diligence it shouldn’t be anything we can’t work through. However, I’m learning, as a first timer in all this, that our biggest obstacle is one we have no control over: the mindset of the owners.

They are an old couple who built the house and lived there for years. Signs of their loving care are still visible under all the overgrown weeds and bramble bushes: huge rhododendrons and fruit-laden apple trees dot the property, as well as other mature trees and flowering shrubs. All it needs is a good brush mower and some serious pruning to make it look pretty again. But the owners have a great deal of emotional attachment to the place, which apparently translates into: they think it’s worth a lot more than it is. After all, they managed for decades without a well or septic so they don’t seem to get what an issue it is for a potential buyer. And who needs electricity other than to run a few light bulbs? (the cord jungles in our computer-laden home could single-handedly short out the entire neighbourhood with the hack wiring job in that place). They may also not be in need of the money, which means despite all our interest and due diligence we may eventually be thwarted by the fact that they simply don’t want to part with it for less than an unreasonable sum of money and are happy to wait another 10 years.

That our ability to actually make this dream a reality rests on the foibles of human nature disturbs and frustrates me a great deal. You may ask why not move on? Well first, I haven’t found anything else I like. It’s all either too expensive and/or too far out of town, or just plain ugly (I’d end up maxing out our budget on a house I hate and then can’t afford to change). The issues with this place (specifically the setback area) put it off most peoples’ wish list and reduce the price significantly. It seems made for us – small house loving, natural setting enjoying us!

So, when a few more details have been gathered we will put together another offer (hopefully by next week) and I’ll be praying that we aren’t greeted with the same response as the first one. For Pete’s sake, just give us a counter-offer at least!

Job Description for the Unschooling Parent

The article below was copied from a post in the Unschooling forum on the Mothering.com discussion board. It is credited to Anne Ohman of the Shine With Unschooling group.

We have always unschooled. Unschooling came easily to me and my family, because I learned early on to trust my heart and my children. But for those for whom unschooling does not come easily, I try to give them the guidelines you may be asking for here. If your question is “Please define my role as an unschooling parent,” here’s what I’ve come up with this morning:
I believe that your role as an unschooling parent is to show your children as much of the world as you can, and let them choose from it what they love and want to further explore. You accomplish this by expanding their worlds with interesting objects and places and people and events and tools and books and magazines and television shows and…(this list could go on for quite awhile).
It is your job to answer their questions, without shame or sarcasm, because all questions are valuable. If you don’t know an answer, it is your job to say, “I don’t know,” and offer to look it up with your child (I tend to say, “Hmmm…I *think* it’s this…but I’ll check to make sure…).
It is your job to be interested in the world. It is your job to ask your own questions about the world. I believe it’s an unschooling parent’s job to be excited themselves about learning the incredibly cool stuff there is to learn about the world. Learn from your own children how to be curious, aware and interested.
It is your job to pursue your own passions in life. This has numerous benefits, not only to yourSelf and your Spirit, but to your child as well.
It is your job to know your children and get to know them again and again as they grow and change. Get to know what it is they love, what it is that interests them. A big part of my job involves spending time looking for various resources in the area of my children’s passions – books, tools, people, events, classes, gatherings, websites, lists – and offer them up to my children. This is how I encourage my children to pursue what they love in life, by feeding them things that they may be interested in until they’re not interested in it anymore. (They are also quite capable of *feeding* themselves in the areas of their passions, or anything else that may be new and interesting to them…but right now we re just talking about the unschooling parent’s job…).
It is your job to learn about how children learn, by reading about unschooling, by un-learning everything you once believed to be true about forced learning.
It’s your job to sometimes think out loud, to initiate interesting conversations, and to be open for discussion where you may have just shut the door before. It’s your job to realize that your child will have different opinions and thoughts than you do, and to respect that and perhaps even broaden your own world from it.
It is your job to Trust the Children. Trust that they Love to Learn, and when they have a need and or desire for information, they will get it. Trust that learning isn’t separated into subjects as school would have us believe.
It’s your job to see the world through your child’s eyes. Understand where they’re coming from, and when conflict arises, it’s your job to stop and really think about if the resolve lies within the child, or within yourself. It’s usually within ourselves.
It’s your job to see Learning in places that you’re not used to seeing learning. I was even able to find it in Ed, Edd & Eddy cartoons…it’s there if you look. It’s everywhere if you look. And once you start seeing it, the world will open up to you and your child.
It’s your job to Love your child, and to Learn from your child. It’s your job to go into each day with an open mind and heart, trusting in the fact that you may not know where the day will end up, but that you began it from that magnificent place that is a child’s curiosity.

Not quite so Unconventional

Things have gotten decidedly less unconventional around here with respect to the adults’ work schedules, but the changes appear to be working for our family and we’re going to stick with it for now. I’ve decided to give my header a new look to reaffirm the focus of this blog: living the unschooling life.

Those of you who have followed this blog for a while know that just over a year ago, my husband was laid off from his job as an engineer and spent a few months at home until new opportunities arose. These were as an independent contractor, working largely from home. We used this as a chance to rework our life such that both of us could share in the child-rearing, housekeeping, and paycheck-earning. It seemed ideal for us to share in these duties, and for a while I thought it was all going quite well. But with the end of camping season and a new learning year beginning (Son has started in our homeschooling program this year) , I have begun to feel dissatisfied with my daily life.

Working half-days (in the home office) and child-caring half days didn’t seem to allow me to get fully involved in planning the kids’ day. More often than not I found myself using the child-caring time to catch up on housework and other domestic duties that Husband, despite his efforts and good intentions, just didn’t seem to get done. Knowing the other parent was going to have the kids in a few short hours made it easier to rely on that parent to “do something” with the kids. The fact that they are highly self-directed and play independently made it easier to fall into this habit. I felt that I was missing out on connecting deeply with my kids during the day, and I felt some repercussions for that.

I also used the extra time I had to take on more volunteer work, which soon led to over-committing myself and feeling burned out. When I also agreed to add an extra day working outside the home it didn’t take long for me to feel that it was just too much time away from the children.

And so recently I came to the conclusion that job-sharing sounds great on the surface, but choosing the best person for the job may be a better way to go. Husband excels at being the “fun Dad”, who does special things with the kids that, while fun, may not be the sort of activity one would want to engage in as part of the regular weekly routine. He also does not have a sense of what needs to be done to keep a home at the level I am comfortable with (which may be that my standards are unreasonable, of course) meaning I was still doing the majority of that work but on far less time. He is, however, an excellent and highly skilled engineer. I began to suspect that if he could work outside the home more regularly it might be better for our marriage and my sanity (an orderly home brings me peace!).

While wondering how I was going to bridge this topic with Husband without insulting him, fortune smiled upon me and fixed the problem. Husband has been made partner of the contracting firm with whom he has been working this past year, giving him a steady salary, benefits, and a commitment to making more client visits (i.e. working outside the home) both for getting new contracts and managing current ones. He also got offered a permanent, but part time, project management position with another firm that requires regular site visits. Having taken on these jobs he is really not able to commit to even one full day of child care per week.

And so it was with relief that, last week, I re-assumed my duties as full-time mother, housewife, and unschooling parent to my kids. I was supremely fortunate that my one consulting client who requires on-site visits has arranged for me to do extra work from home, meaning I now must only go out to work 1 day per week, and not every week at that. On those days we do a combination of on-call Nanny and Grandma. Both engage the children well while keeping my house tidy!

Our first week of this new schedule was last week, and I loved it! I’d spent the weekend getting the house in order, and so each day there was just minimal upkeep work to be done. Our day flowed smoothly as I focused on keeping the house tidy, doing one or two small chores, and then taking time in-between for sit-down activities with each child. I also planned an outing every day. I’ve embarked on a quest to get the kids more physically active and we’ve discovered the fun of swimming at our local pool, started up ice skating again, and are continuing our regular Nature Walks. By late afternoon the kids are ready for some down time at home, watching movies or playing on the computer, which gives me time to make a healthy, home-cooked dinner.

I swear I notice a difference in the children. There is less time to devolve from play to conflict as we move from one activity to the next. I feel so much less stressed, putting work and other commitments out of my mind, and simply trying to be present. The kids are thrilled when I say “I’d like to do something with you, what would you like?”. I’m learning that having some flow to our day seems to bring more peace to everybody.

And I notice a difference in me. I’m feeling far less stressed, I’m getting more done with the kids, and still maintaining a tidy home. I’m feeling more present during the day, and more connected to the children. I’m also having fun! On the work-from-home front, I now have two evenings “off” during the weekdays where I can get some uninterrupted work time while Husband deals with bedtime. I’m also working 3 hours each weekend morning. We have lazy, relaxing weekends so it doesn’t cut into family time much at all. I don’t feel like I’m being taken away from the kids or the housework, and yet I’m working enough to generate a significant added income. This has become more important as we embark on a search for a Home to call our own, one that will likely require some major renovation work.

I feel these changes are good for our family and I’m feeling happy about our new schedule. But you know, if we decide it’s not working for us we can always change it (and we often do!).

It’s Mushroom time again!

Daughter has been a fan of mushrooms for a few seasons now and we are always excited when Fall comes around and brings out the mushrooms. I confess I greatly share her excitement at collecting and identifying our Forest Fungi ! Here is a description of a recent hunt, excerpted from this week’s Learning Report:

We collected mushrooms on our hike and spent the next morning identifying them. We had found a large specimen of Short-Stemmed Russula, (Russula brevipes) which we learned were some of the earliest mushrooms of the season. Daughter was particularly excited to identify this because we were able to most certainly check off every description on the list (sometimes we are not sure about a feature or two). Usually I read out each description in the list (using our wonderful book All that the Rain Promises and More) and Daughter says “yes” or “no” while she examines the specimen.

She has come to know that Russulas and Milkcaps have stems that break like chalk; they are also very common in our forests and by far represent the majority of our finds. We don’t find as many milk caps, however, and she finds the fact that they exude a milky substance when broken to be particularly “cool” so she’s hoping to find one (we did once last year). We also found a great many Russulas with pinkish caps, and were interested to find out that they were Emetic Russulas (Russula emetica; also called the Sickener Mushroom and pictured in the above photo), which as the name implies causes vomiting if ingested. We knew these were not Rosy Russulas, which look similar, because ours had white stalks and the Rosy’s have reddish stalks. Here is a photo of one specimen we did not pick as a Banana Slug was enjoying it as lunch. Daughter commented that apparently slugs “did not mind” the poisons!

Note: in trying to find a link to the Rosy Russula I came across this page. It seems our specimen may, in fact, be Russula silvicola since we were most definitely not in a sphagnum habitat! Such are the problems of identification. We really should use the Internet more but it’s not handy to have a computer next to a bunch of dirty, insect-laden mushrooms! Plus we both enjoy looking through the books. We’ll have to keep our eyes open for more Mushroom Manuals (one that comes recommended by our “all the rain promises” author is Mushrooms Demystified, which I think will be on an upcoming Amazon order!).

We also found a lovely specimen that was tall, all pale grey, with a distinct volva (Daughter always giggles when she hears this word, thinking it is interesting that it is so close to the word “vulva” when it has such a different function!). At first we thought we’d found a Death Cap (Amanita phalloides) but upon reading further we realized our specimen was most likely a Grisette. It definitely fit the description of “exceedingly handsome”, and apparently they are edible, so much more benign than the Death Cap. We compared the descriptions for two Grisettes, Amanita constricta and Amanita vaginata and Daughter decided ours was the former, the more rare of the two species. It was hard to tell because our mushroom’s volva had been damaged in transit and the distinguishing feature is whether the volva is pinched at the base. Daughter was certain it was when we found it, but I think she liked the idea of having the less common species!

Given our findings of poisonous (and almost poisonous, in the case of the Death Cap) we were pleased to recall that, at the Ecology Centre, we’d been told that even poisonous mushrooms need to have their fibres broken down to release the toxins, so merely touching them cannot transmit the poisons.

We planned to make spore prints but unfortunately they were full of maggots (which Daughter found adorable and fascinating but I insisted absolutely could NOT be kept in the house – I like insects, but maggots creep me out!) so we put them outside and then promptly forgot about them. It rained heavily the next day turning them into mush. However, I collected some more today so next week we’ll report on what we found and the spore prints we made!