Playing With Legos

maeven is very into emailing people these days. i use zoobuh for her because its very cheap (i think it ends up being $1/month, but you pay a year in advance) and very kid friendly and safe. another plus is that you can configure it to send an email to the parent anytime the child receives or sends an email. way cool.

so i just got a copy of this that she sent out today:

Hi thea! my mom just got The Double Daring Book For Girls in the mail! if you have not read  it yet, you should! i got The Pocket Daring Book For Girls for christmas and i started reading, it and i loved it and now i have The Double Daring Book For Girls and i know i’ll love it too! maeven. 

how cute is that? i got this book in the mail and she’s so excited about it she goes and writes one of her best friends about it. i love it!   i believe the only word she asked for help spelling in that was christmas. she’s coming along nicely,  i think.

just furthers my belief that anything initiated entirely by the child and driven by their own desires is MOUNTAINS more valuable than any forced learning.

this is a child that just months ago had a very difficult time spelling just about anything. and less than a year ago wasn’t even reading all that well. fast forward past many hours of playing computer games and reading/writing emails and reading/writing her own stories and chapter books and letters to family members and keeping a journal (occasionally) and we have a child that has really grown in her reading and writing abilities exponentially all of her own volition!

proud mama? you bet!

Good heavens but this child is making this stuff easy! Who needs copywork? My child is CONSTANTLY writing!

Why in the world would I force her to write stuff she doesn’t want to when she is writing us letters and writing her own stories and journal entries and even writing her own books! Like nearly every day!! I’m not kidding!

Not only that but she’s taken quite naturally to typing. I credit Toontown for this.  She’s obsessed with this game…and she has lots of friends on there now that she talks to daily. So she has to–get this–read, and write and TYPE!!

Even her spelling’s improving because if she spells something wrong, it turns red and won’t let her type it. Plus she’s asking me all the time how to spell things, so she’s getting a lot of practice.

All by her own initiative.

This just is making me think harder about unschooling. Especially since  the past 2 Thursdays, I have been listening to some excellent radio shows on unschooling. Gena Kirby has a wonderful radio show called “Progressive Parenting” (click on “about” and choose “radio show” from the popup menu)  that covers all sorts of parenting topics that are often outside the mainstream. I’ve been in contact with Gena since a friend of mine met her when she was planning to open her store “Mommy Matters” (it’s since been closed and is now only online). We have remained in contact over the years and connected in a variety of ways via our mutual interests and groups and such.

Gena emailed me a couple weeks ago because her guest that was lined up to talk about unschooling fell through and she wanted to know if I had any recommendations. I told her to see if Dayna Martin or Sandra Dodd could do it…figuring Dayna would be available, but Sandra as a backup choice. Dayna is a friend of mine that I met after she appeared on the Dr. Phil show, talking about unschooling…this was back when I was doing weekly chats with Mothering Magazine and they booked Dayna after her Dr. Phil appearance to do an unschooling chat with us. We did the chat and then Dayna and I stayed in touch on the phone and I think she’s just an amazing person. Listening to her recent radio shows with Gena, I am reminded of this and am very eager to reconnect and learn more about unschooling.

I’ve got a strong interest right now in unschooling because of listening to these past 2 week’s radio shows…I even sat down and took notes on one of them today. (I taped them both). It’s really inspiring to me!

I might type up some of what I really liked that they said later…right now it’s getting late.

All this is to say that my daughter is learning so much of her own volition! I LOVE it!

Oh and one last thing…I asked her yesterday what she thinks of learning. She said something like “oh, its ok…but mostly its boring.” I was a bit shocked and then asked her what was boring and she said something like “oh when someone tells me to do this and this…”

I got it. She doesn’t like forced learning anymore than the rest of us do. I got the impression from her that she was referring to my “assignments” that I’ve been trying to enforce with her lately…her “schoolwork” that I have been making her do (although not totally consistantly). This was a strong message for me at just the right time. Having the topic of unschooling fresh on my mind…and a firm idea in my mind of what I strongly want for her…the love of learning…I’m determined to figure out a way to make learning fun for her again. Or maybe its just a matter of getting the terminology explained better because she really is learning all the time and she truly does enjoy it for the most part (I can see it in her eyes)…what she has got in her head right now is that learning and schoolwork are what Mommy makes her do that she doesn’t want to. And that’s not what I want for her.

I’m not saying that every single thing she ever learns has to be super fun…but there’s got to be a better way. I am determined to give my children the gift of that passion for learning that I have attained now, as an adult (long after the schools nearly killed it, but I was able to find it again on my own).

I think that maybe I can learn a lot from Dayna in the coming months. I’m excited to talk more to her about it!

lately we’ve been doing pretty good with lists…since i am horrid at keeping any sort of a real routine, i just make new lists for maeven and i each day so we have something to refer to…and maeven has really seemed to respond well to this…and i’m finally obsessing on something really productive around here…getting MY list checked off each day. no, we don’t often get every single thing checked off…but since i am focusing on baby steps, i’m just glad that we are getting at least a few things off our lists done every day!

actually maeven got her entire list done yesterday! and she was very proud of herself for that!

anyway, despite my trying to inject more educational stuff into her days…i am continuing to lean more towards unschooling…we seem to be a pretty good blend of unschooling and some more focused curriculum…well curriculum isn’t the right word…maybe planned activities? anyway, its just amazing to see how much maeven, just on her own, does each day! nearly every day she is doing something quite educational completely on her own.

she really likes to create things. today its a binder for her “silly poems.” she just started this with a really cute, silly poem she wrote a couple days ago:

I Love You

I love you
I love you more than my home.
I love you more than my toys.
I love you more than my books.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
I love you, ice cream.

LOL! she’s hysterical!

and today’s poem she added to her binder:

I Love My Feet

I love my feet. I love my feet. I love my feet.
I love my feet because they have little faces on each toe.

and she is constantly creating her own books and building cardboard houses for her stuffed animals/toys…today she made a map of where our home is and everything around it. pretty accurate too!

i’m so proud of her! she is just amazing!

and she is reading like crazy! she read not one but TWO books in one day this week. and one of those was much thicker one than she usually reads.

she was reading aloud to her Nana yesterday and Nana was quite impressed with her reading aloud skills. yup, that’s my girl.

yeah i’ve not really focused strongly on spelling and math, and i know we need to do that more…but wow its amazing to me how much she IS doing and able to do.

so i am starting to feel more and more like the things that she is naturally drawn to do on her own–writing, creating, reading, etc…are really the sort of things that i want her to be happy and most comfortable doing anyway…so its all working out. there’s still time for her to learn things like long division and multiplication. we’ll get to it.

honestly, i tend to feel that once they have reading down pat 9which she does), then the most important subjects to me are things like art, literature, geography, history, science…the really meaty subjects. the ones that really cause you to become a more well-rounded individual. i do feel math is important too, don’t get me wrong…but there’s still plenty of time, and she’s got the basics so far.   for now i’m focusing on getting her practice with whatmath skills she already knows. (she freaks out whenever there’s a timed math game…she can’t handle the pressure…so i’m thinking that she just needs to get to the point that adding is pretty much second nature and doesn’t take as much work for her to process. that will take practice.  i’m finding computer games to be a great way to get her to practice.

so i’m starting to not stress so much when i don’t get her on track with things i’d like to see her doing…if she’s still doing something on her own. something i view valuable.

don’t get me wrong…i’m still working on those lists. in fact, i need to go work on hers right now…we had a homeschool field trip to the art museum today so half the day was gone from that and lunch. now we have to refocus to get back on track. i just wanted to blog my current thoughts. and how proud i am of my daughter!

oh and tyren had a blast practicing cutting today. i drew a star for him (per his request) to cut out and then helped him by holding his hands as he cut…to guide him around the star edges. he giggled the whole time! so cute! guess he really enjoyed that…mental note made to do more things like that with him.

ok i’m off to work on maeven’s list…she’s so good about doing the stuff on the list, i cannot break the cycle!