Unschooling Reversal

Elazar just dragged me to the computer and we spent almost an hour editing his story.  I so didn't want to do it.  I had a long day.  I didn't want to do "homework."  I wanted to cry and kick and scream and tantrum and be distracted. 

But I'm the grownup.  So we edited.  We laughed.  We added semicolons and capitalized where needed and punctuated properly.

This is the opposite of what happens in school.  Even in homeschool, a lot of times.  Usually the parent is telling the kid to learn.

In unschool, I'm the one dragging my feet and my kids are pulling me to teach them.

Gaming helps writing skillz

I sat Aharon down to supervise a thank you note and was absolutely floored at how quickly that first grader can type.  Apparently, playing Roblox so much of the day has helped.  While he plays, he also types messages to people in order to coordinate the multiplayer game that they are all involved in.

He doesn't type faster than most teens I know.  But he does type faster than many adults I know.

Spelling

My first grader just asked me to spell "unobtainable."
"U-N.."
"Yeah..."
"O-B.."
"Yeah..."
"T-A--"
"T-A-I-N," Aharon says.  (Whoa, I think.  He already knows how to spell most of it.) "I-B-L?" he asks.
"A-B-L-E," I say.
"You got it wrong, Mommy," he says, a moment later.  "It is I-B-L-E."
"What are you talking about?" I say.  I google it. "Come look at the dictionary.  Unobtainable." 
He comes to look.  "Well, that's not how they spell the code."

Unschooling spelling

3rd grader just asked 1st grader how to spell "simulator" and 1st grader spelled it out for him.

(Kids learn at their own rates.  5th grader couldn't read very much until age 8.  I just asked 5th grader if he could spell simulator and he can't yet.)

unschooling reading and writing

It's really amazing how it works.  Aharon (age 5) wants me to sit next to him pretty much all day long so that he can ask me how to spell things.  All so that he can either play games online (he loves Roblox) or look up things on google.  This morning he woke me up to get help writing "pizza."  It's months of him asking and asking and then, when he's independent (like Jack, age 7), he'll be able to write most of the words he wants to use and only ask me a few times a day, instead of every 5-10 minutes.

early morning wakeup

Aharon (5) woke me at 7am to ask me how to spell "design."  He is playing Roblox.  Usually he doesn't awaken me in the mornings (this is the first year that he's been going downstairs by himself without waking a parent, which feels like a huge milestone) but apparently this morning the desire to spell these words correctly so he could play this game was too much for him.  So now I'm sitting nearby, so that he can ask me how to spell words every five minutes. "Helmet" "sport" "country" etc.

Yet again I'm thinking how unschooling has him coming to me, chasing me down for spelling help, waking me up in the morning for spelling help.  As opposed to me trying to get them to sit down and work on things they aren't interested in.

I wonder how many more times it will take him to learn the word "design."

unschooling reading/writing

Aharon age 5 has been reading for over a year already.  He is playing a game called Roblox "design it" and you have to dress up and people vote for you.  They give you a category and then you search for clothes in that category and dress your character.  They give you five minutes to dress your character.  So roughly every five minutes for the past three hours, Aharon has asked me how to spell something.  (I believe he is searching for categories of clothing--he asked for "wings" three times and he probably knows how to spell it by now).  In the beginning he was pretty intense and kept shrieking that he only has 4 minutes left and I have to help him RIGHT NOW!!!! (Which I did.)  I just noticed that in the last half hour or so, his requests are growing more spaced.  He must be learning to spell the commonly used words he needs.

January update

Elazar and I finished the second Pippi Longstocking book, which he loved.  Last night I tried reading The Time Machine.  He found the beginning boring, which I remember from when I was a kid finding it overly technical.  So tonight I will skip forward a bit to the time travel and see if that helps.  Otherwise I'm not sure what to do next.

The boys have been doing a lot of math.  I wish I paid more attention because I'm sure a lot of people wonder how unschooling works with math.  Let me say that they spend lots of time pondering math concepts.  I mean weeks.  Aharon (5) will ask about google or what comes after google over and over once a week for a month.  Jack (7) asks questions like "Is 3 hours 213 minutes?"  And I'll say, "No, an hour is 60 minutes."  And about twenty minutes later he'll say, "120 minutes is two hours?"

It's an amazing thing watching them play around with numbers and think deeply about it.  And all three of them are able to do basic arithmetic and real life word problems, that come up all the time, most days.

I've been paying attention to the kinds of words they ask me to spell for them during the day.


ELAZAR (9):
passage, what, suddenly, down (thought it was "a"), turn (thought it was e), stone (wasn't sure if has an "e" at the end), was (thought maybe "whas"? No, that's what), now (a?), new, spaghetti, pizzeria, dragEn? would.
What is after "h" in "hours"? I said "ou" and Jack said "r"
What's after "b" in "burger"
Wanted confirmation of spelling of outer star
ocean, kraken, cheetah, cowboy outfit (Aharon and Jack both helped him), somebody, roll, extreme, garden, vortex (we argued over whether or not there is a "T" at the end), missile

JACK (7):
Jack actually doesn't need a lot of spelling help and can mostly spell what he wants to write.
nation, version, count (I said "cou" and then Elazar took over), want, allowed

AHARON (5):
Is this how you spell "I'm recording"
How do you spell "do it"? I said "d-o. space. What do you think?" Elazar took over
"we are the goblins", lego universe (found it when I was up to r), treehouse tycoon (found it after treeh), get eaten
eaten
eaten a 3rd time and I said,  "You know how," and he did, "come in,"
"youtube tycoon.  I know how to spell tycoon"

So you can see that they spend a lot of time helping each other out and that I don't go to them to practice but they are finding that they want to know things because they are searching for games or videos.

unschooling writing

This morning, all 3 boys were awake and I sang parts of Hallel out loud.  I'm not super consistent about davening out loud in the mornings but I have been making an effort and I think it makes a difference.

It's certainly gotten me thinking about some of the words and ideas in Hallel and I'm singing them to myself as the day goes on.  (The gratitude and joy lasted all through the morning giggles and fizzled out a bit as the two youngest started bickering, teasing each other, physically fighting and I eventually separated them.  I was wondering about the juxtaposition of "This is the day that Gd made, we will rejoice and be happy on it" with "Please, Hashem, save me!" but I think I got my own personal interpretation. And things eventually chilled out again.)

Elazar opened up his story that he works on sporadically.  Today he corrected all of his spelling using a combination of the right click option and asking me how to spell a lot of different words.  He focused on capitalizing proper names and beginning of sentences.  He also stopped frequently to move around and then went back.

I don't know if one of those giant balls that classrooms are incorporating to sit on would do the job

Unschooling is pretty cool because there is a huge difference in his spelling and grasp of sentence structure in just a few months.  He corrected all of his "creative spelling" to standard spelling and Jack was reading his story over his shoulder.  My job in all this was to be around and answer his questions, and to enjoy his story.  I know I always marvel about how effortless unschooling seems.  In truth, it probably has a similar amount of parental involvement.  I do feel like I frequently answer questions about how to spell things, and he physically pulled me over to the computer so I could check his work.  I much prefer him yanking me to do his work as opposed to me trying to get him to do it.

Aseres Yemei Teshuva ramblings

I cracked and finally asked Chana when we are going to resume bio.  Only because it seems like every couple of days something comes up in conversation and if we had done Bio, then she would know it or understand it, and I found myself saying a couple of times, "That's in Bio."  Finally, last time it came up, I said, "That's also in Bio.  When do you want to start again?"  She was hesitant, I think mainly (as I mentioned) because she's feeling burnt out schedule-wise.  I suggested just once a week and she was pretty enthusiastic about that.  She chose Mondays and then changed it to Sundays.  So this Sunday I'll ask her if she wants to and we'll see.  I asked her to read with me last night and she declined.

Spiritually, she came for Rosh Hashana shofar and sat around outside shul the rest of the time.  On the second day, after I finished my personal musaf Amida, I went outside to discuss some of it with her.  I'm sorry how that turned out.  I chose the part that was really speaking to me this year.  And she happens to be extremely sensitive to repetition (her mind apparently works very quickly and grasps quickly and it drives her bonkers when I repeat myself, which she's mentioned to me repeatedly, because apparently repetitiveness, redundancy, and saying the same thing in slightly different ways doesn't really irk me :-P).  So what I thought was nuanced and new (to me) was pretty similar to what she remembered from previous years and she ended up being bored and slightly irritated from the repetition.  And I felt bad because she was so sweet to sit there and give me ten minutes to talk about a subject that I care so much about and is so important to me and I wasn't able to make it interesting to her.  There were other passages in the machzor that probably would have worked better but I didn't choose them and I felt sad that I didn't make the most of that opportunity.  I keep telling myself that this is not the end of the road and if the liturgy is appealing and has a lot of depth then maybe one day it will draw her in to explore it.  Trust the inherent fascination of the topic.  Trust the human mind.  Trust curiosity.  Trust the learning process.

I don't know if I mentioned it on this blog (haha, I probably did, but I tend to repeat myself, as my teen tells me constantly), but I think I made a mistake which is probably a common parenting mistake.  Some of the points of Torah that I found SO illuminating, life changing, eye opening, fascinating, are points that I tried to convey to her.  And perhaps that was short sighted.  Perhaps she had to dig for them herself.  Perhaps I make those points so often that she rolls her eyes at them (yeah, yeah, Torah is about self control and moderation.  Yeah, yeah, remembering you're not the center of the universe.  Blah blah blah this time of year thinking about mortality, whatever).  (And she is very thoughtful and respectful and doesn't say this to me--I just suspect from her facial expressions.)

She's been going to my chumash class where we did the Yom Kippur avoda inside the chumash, and then I ran through it in the musaf.  So we did the pesukim, then the shemona esrei, then I photocopied a page from the Yom Kippur Pictorial Avodah book that gives all the steps.  By that point, Chana was bonkers with the repetition.  I had originally planned for her to be in shul to experience it but I think that would just be unnecessarily painful to her.
So maybe mincha.  Maybe just Yonah.  That has the benefit of not being tefila (since she has communicated clearly that she is not interested in tefila at this time).  It has the downside of being something she's read before and might find repetitive.  I guess I'll ask her.

Which reminds me, I wanted to see if she will learn the Akeida with me.  I think this is actually the perfect age for an in-depth discussion of the difficult theological issues and lessons it presents.

The boys and I haven't been doing much, scholastically, but every single day all three of them have been asking me to spell words and checking if they are writing certain words correctly.  So unschooling reading and writing through unlimited media is alive and working beautifully.  I have thought to myself that to try to make sure all three of them were working on their reading and writing (typing ;) would have been too much to manage during this chag-heavy time; but with unschooling, they come to me instead of the other way around, and it's super efficient and pleasant for all.

I've been thinking a couple of things about unschooling that I was planning to write about, but this is long enough so I'll just make it a separate post.

Review of Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

Timberdoodle is a great catalog.  They have high quality materials and it's always fun to browse.  So when they sent a call asking for people to review their products, I immediately took a look at what items they were offering that my kids might be interested in.

The first was the book Wordsmithy:

My 10th grader is a natural writer so I thought she might find it useful and/or interesting.  The reading level is 9th grade+, and it is recommended on the site as part of their 11th grade curriculum kit.

Since we unschool, I handed her the book and said, "If you read this, then you can give me your opinion.  If you don't read it, I'll have to read it because I said I'd review it."

That was the first test of the book.  Is it interesting enough for an unschooled teenager to pick up and read?

She did read through it.  She was even interested enough to also look up the author and see what kind of writing he does, since he was dispensing advice.  (Note: he is a devout Christian, and mentions God as part of his guidance.)

As she was going through the book, she felt that he was giving advice more about the technical aspects and less on simply writing for pure pleasure.  She wondered if he writes fiction or nonfiction (which led to her googling him) and was unsurprised that he mainly writes nonfiction.  She did feel that his suggestions are useful for those who want to improve in mechanics and proficiency of writing.

When she was in the middle of the book, she often commented to me about things he said that were or would be useful.  She just as frequently commented that she disagreed with this or that.  (When I say "commented," I mean mainly on chat, lest you think we actually speak, except for the time we went on a short walk together and she spent a good portion of it talking about the book.)

The impression that I got is that her mind was engaged in the book; she was taking him seriously and giving him the respect of looking at her own experience with writing and seeing if what he was saying fit in to that and if she thought it would be useful and true, or she didn't think a particular piece of advice would be helpful.

I have the feeling that a lot of what he said in Wordsmithy is going to be in the back of her mind as she writes, whether she agrees with him or not.  His style of writing is straight, talking directly to the reader.  It is compact and readable; each tip is not longer than two pages and has a takeaway point.  It's the kind of information that sneaks in and settles in to your world view of how to write.

If I could sum up her opinion in one sentence (and this is an exact quote): "He has good tips."

more unschooling and multimedia

Today I want to talk about Agar.io.

Agar.io is a silly little game where you are a circle and you go around eating other circles.  If you touch a circle smaller than you, you eat it.  If you touch a circle larger than you, it eats you.  Some circles are just dots.  Some are other players.

Aside from the debates I often hear and read about multimedia time, I also hear debates about multimedia content.

I can understand parents limiting screen time and being cautious about content.

I have tried to interest my children in "educational games."  I found, unfortunately, that educational games are not as interesting as other games (except minecraft, which is mind-bogglingly educational and endlessly absorbing).  Radical Unschooling, I discovered later, theorizes that if the child is fascinated by something, the child is learning something.  And it is in pursuit of that fascination that learning other things occur.  The classic example given in the unschooling world is the child who, let's say, is fascinated by airplanes, and who eventually at age 9 learns to read when he discovers that reading unlocks the world of knowledge that he is interested in.  This happened with Elazar when he realized that reading taught him coding.

Unschoolers are pragmatically brutal: the knowledge must be intensely useful or fun, or else they don't pursue it.  Elazar and Jack are currently both at a level of reading that is satisfactory to them, and they independently read many things in the course of their day.  When they eventually get frustrated with their level of reading because they want to know more things, they will naturally and efficiently improve their reading levels.

Chana spent many preschool hours watching, pausing, and rewinding cartoons, a classically "pointless" activity--which later gave her the ability to have nuance in facial expressions as an animator.  I also bought her fancy animation software which she taught herself at age 10 or so.

So back to Agar.io.  I would have thought it's a purposeless game.  You name your circle and you go.  But the naming of the circle has brought about all sorts of surprising outcomes.

1) There are something called "skins."  When you name your circle, if you name it "CIA" then you get a little circle with cliched sunglasses.  If you name it "Sir" then you get a circle with a mustache and a monocle.  There is a world of adorable skins, and discovering them and making them yours is a delight.

2) You can't communicate with other circles.  Or can you?  Jack has been naming his "Please help me" (he spells it "ples") and all sorts of other communication phrases.  This lets him build teams, something that Elazar discovered.

But the most shocking (to me) aside from Elazar and Jack writing and sounding out words, is Aharon.  Aharon is only 4 and in playing this game, he asks me how to write things dozens of times a day.  He often writes things down on paper so that he can refer back to them.  He wants to write things like "All of you in Agar.io are all garbage" (he's trash talking the other circles).  This does not fit in the allotted space, but he has tremendous patience as he yells across the room to me "..L.  What's next?"  Jack learned proficiency with the keyboard when he was 5 and wanted to write "candy crush" all the time until in desperation I created a google account for him so that google would remember his searches.  I am shocked by how much Aharon is immersing himself in typing so that he can write what he wants.  He is so patient (and he usually has quite a temper) and spends so much time working on the letters as he writes his messages and skins.

When Elazar got his tablet and realized how easy it is to use a microphone to google search I was afraid that he wouldn't learn to write as much because he can just say what he wants.  But I'm beginning to see that fear was unfounded.  Unlocking the door to more knowledge, to easier access to information, is better than I could have dreamed.  We live in an astonishing time in history, when my small children have instant access to knowing whatever they want about anything they can think of.  All they have to do is ask.  The efficiency and delight is staggering.

(Sidepoint--I have a rule that all screens stay on the main floor so that I can sort of keep an eye/ear on what they are searching/watching.  No unsupervised screens in bedrooms.  Both Sarah and Chana had those rules (with ipod and ipad) until they were at an age where they brought up that they thought they were mature enough to police their own content and decide for themselves what was appropriate or not for themselves.  I don't know what my rules will be with the boys.  I tend to veer towards open information and towards training to practice self-regulation.  But we will see what emerges.)

crazy unschooling

Aharon, age 4, just came over to me and asked me how to write "shoes."  I said s-h-o-e and he interrupted me and told me he wants to write it down.  I figured he was going to type it.  But no, he got a marker and apparently went to write it down on a piece of paper.

"Okay, go!" he said, marker ready.

"S," I said.

"Yeah?" He is writing.

"H," I said.  "Chana, he doesn't know how to write, does he?"

Chana shrugs.  Neither of us have seen him write.  I'm pretty sure he knows his letters (I'm not sure how, probably from TV shows or the computer.  They don't really like "educational" games but they all learned their letters without me teaching them).

"He knows his letters," Chana said.

But I didn't think he could write letters.  Just because he recognizes letters doesn't mean he can write them, does it?

Two really frightening gaps in unschooling education

Last night, Jack (almost 6) mentioned to me that he figured out a lot of ways to make 10.  6 and 4, 3 and 7, 8 and 2, 9 and 1.  He explained to me how he took both the fives, and then took some of the five and gave it to the other five, so that he got different combinations.  I just loved how he was playing with numbers, the way I've read about.  And I know that leaving Chana alone about math had no long term negative effects and, in fact, was only wonderful.  She asked for a year's break after Algebra but recently told me that she thinks she will be ready to start Geometry in January.

Elazar is in 3rd grade.  I thought that he would eventually wonder how to borrow and regroup.  But he is still plodding through addition the long way, adding one by one in his head.  When I want to show him to juggle numbers around, he doesn't listen.  He likes doing it the way he is thinking about it.  I wonder if, with calculators all around, he may never study the nuances of borrowing and regrouping or long division.  I don't teach square roots anymore, even though I learned how to do it in elementary school (thought it was cool, and promptly forgot it).

I wonder if he will learn his multiplication tables.  I've already seen in the past decade that most students don't know them.  I drilled the girls.  Will I drill the boys?  I believe it is good to know them at your fingertips.  But do I believe it enough to prioritize it?  I'm not sure.

But the craziest thing that the boys are skipping is writing.  They type.  They know their letters.  They are learning to read and can communicate in writing (if by writing we are referring to email and text and storywriting on the computer).  But they don't physically write.  I wrote a (physical) letter to my friend a few months ago.  It was excruciating trying to keep my handwriting legible as I can't write as quickly as I can think (or type).  My hand ached.

Unschoolers learn what is useful and what is enjoyable.  It's a little scary.

learning to write using the internet

I got Jack an gmail account.  Why?  Because google wasn't remembering his previous searches.  So many times a day I'm painstakingly spelling out c-a-n-d-y_c-r-u-s-h.  Oops, he wrote a "b" and not a "d."  Just use the arrow key, don't dele---!  Okay, start over.  And r-h-i-n-o_r-u-s-h.  We finally got to the point that he remembers that c-a is the beginning of candy crush.  He is getting faster at typing and remembering more.

But now that he has gmail, google remembers his searches.  He clicks one or two letters and his previous searches pop up.  Now he can choose what he's looking for.  His word recognition grows.  I have to dictate less.

****

I have noticed before that Elazar's google searches have to be more specific than the "creative spelling" that the girls learned to write with.  He called me over yesterday and said, "Can you read this?"  I read out loud: "How to make tutorial in minecraft."  He frowned.  He said, "If you can read it, why isn't google finding it?"

He had written: "Haw to make ti tryal in minecraft."  Google had no trouble with the "haw" being "how" but it could not figure out tutorial.  I explained that the two words were confusing it, and how to spell it properly.  I'm pretty sure he'll remember how to spell it.

chazak chazak

We started Bamidbar today.  Three fairly simple rashis.  I wanted Chana to write an essay summarizing Vayikra.  She had no idea what an essay entailed.  I looked it up to get a clear way to explain it, and I realized that an essay has a thesis with well reasoned or provable points.  So we decided on a non-fiction piece of writing.

As I suspected, Chana's Hebrew writing is pretty abysmal.  Tonight we worked on form--that it be legible and well spaced, and correctly spelled, so that a reader can read it and understand it.

Chana pretty much asked me how to say everything.  When I told her, she pretty much asked me how to spell everything.  She did a careful job of writing it in a legible way.

I know that writing Hebrew is pretty low on my list of homeschool priorities.  But I do hope to work on it this year.  Hopefully once a week, we will sit down together and work on writing, and hopefully she'll get more able to write independently.  The real question is will I stick to this.  Ivrit is one of the subjects I haphazardly try things with and don't end up really following through.  I remember different workbooks and other things I've done here and there.  The same thing happened with Sarah (though I had her do Rosetta Stone, which she disliked so much that I didn't bother with Chana) and her skills were the poor side of average.  But I think Sarah and Chana would both be able to acquit themselves adequately in Israel if they needed to communicate.  And maybe I'll stick to this.  The boys are older this year, so maybe maybe I'll have some more time to work with Chana.  We shall see...

Unschooling Writing

Elazar has been unschooled for first grade.  That means we left him alone to do whatever he wants.  He can play on the computer ad infinitum, or gameboy, or gamecube, or play outside.  If he has ideas, we help him bring them to fruition.  If he wants me to read things to him, I do.  He will be 7 this week.  He recently started sounding out words.

This past Sunday, he decided to write a book.  It has 7 pages.  He mostly sounded it out himself.  He had some trouble with some of the vowels (he gets confused with "a" and "e" or things like that) and some phonemes (like "th") but he mostly wrote it himself.  It took him a couple of hours.  He illustrated it.

HOW|TO|MAKE|A|VLCANO

FRST|YOU|NEED|A|CUP

IFYOU|ALSO|NEED|CLAY

ALSO|YOU|NEED|RED|PAINT

NOW|YOU|HAVE|ALL|AVRYTH

FR3ST YOU PUT THE CLAY AROUND THE CUP

(he put squiggly lines under the phonemes "ou" and "th")
(and Sarah showed him how to use his thumb to make a space, just like I taught her.  When I told him to make spaces, he said lines between words were fine.)

IF YOU WANT UYOUR VLCANO TO ERAUPT PUT WATR AN D BACKINGSODA AND VINAGR

It's really rather amazing to see unschooling work so nicely.  The conceptual milestone fell into place, he is motivated, and he does it.  I was okay with the possibility that he wouldn't read or write at all until age 9 or 11.  It's nice to see that he can write when he wants to.  He still doesn't have a great handle on lowercase letters, but he is beginning to get frustrated when he asks me what something says and I ask him to read off the letters and he doesn't know all the lowercase ones.  So I'm sure that will eventually fall into place.

unschooling aleph beis writing

Elazar (age 6) came over to me with a blank piece of paper and a pen and said he wanted to write.  He asked for aleph beis, not the alphabet.  He said he didn't want "lowercase" (that's what he calls script).  I said in Hebrew we only write script, we don't write print in Hebrew.  So he agreed.

What was new about this activity is that I didn't write a whole row of "follow the dotted line."  Up until now, I gave him dotted lines for every letter.  This time, I just wrote the first letter dotted.  He chose to copy the rest freehand.  He didn't have that capacity the last time he sat down to write.

He did really nicely except he got a little confused in the middle of the gimels.  (And as he was writing them incorrectly, he was saying, "I'm sooooo good at these gimels!"  But alas).  I told him it's a line and a C, and he did the next one correctly.

He was tickled that a Vav is just a straight line.