A day in the life of radical unschoolers

Earlier this month, I’ve shared our “un-curriculum” for the coming year and a look at our learning spaces as part of the iHomeschool Network’s Not Back to School Blog Hop. This week, it’s Day-In-The-Life Week, where we’re supposed to show what a typical day looks like in our family’s particular style.

I don’t think we have a typical. Or a style. Unless haphazard and wonderful is a typical style. In that case, yes, yes we do, and you’re welcome to take a peek.

Our radical unschooling days

Last week, on the first day of classes for our neighborhood public school, Ashar got out of bed at 1:15 p.m. When I told her, “Happy first day!,” she laughed and said, “Or afternoon?”

Generally, Chris (and my mom) are up earliest – sometime between 8 and 9:30 a.m. I’m NOT a morning person – so while I’m often awake at 9-ish, I like to lounge, talk with Chris (if he’s writing at his desk in our room), play on my iPad, check Facebook and email, and do all of that good stuff before getting out of bed.

By about 10:30 or 11 a.m., I’m downstairs answering emails and doing work tasks that I couldn’t do as easily from my phone or tablet; Chris is usually writing, puttering around the house or getting ready for work; and my mom, an earlier riser, is looking for lunch.

Ashar gets up any time between about 9:30 and 1:30 – often she’s “up” and hanging out in her room before she comes downstairs, sometimes for hours. (Us introverts need our quiet time – especially when we’re sleepy!)

Once Ashar’s up, she’ll come down, check her phone for Kik and Skype and text messages, and make herself something to eat. If we’ve got any errands to run, generally we’ll see if she wants to come along and we’ll head out pretty quickly, because by about 2 p.m. at the latest, we’re dropping Chris off at work.

During the summer, or when homework isn’t heavy, the neighborhood public-school contingent shows up around 4 and sits in my living room to play video games, or Ashar goes with them to skateboard around the neighborhood or walk to the convenience store or generally “hang out” by sitting in our driveway, often perching on the trunk of my car.

Other than that, our afternoons are filled with work (me), gaming and Netflix-watching (Sarah) and doing stuff around the house, like laundry and dishes. Around 4:30 or 5 p.m., Mom, Ashar and I start working together on dinner – whatever’s on the menu, plus substitutions for personal preferences.

During this time, Ashar and I usually get a couple of emails from Chris. He sends us links to interesting things he finds online, random facts about things we’ve seen or talked about, photos of cats and monkeys, whatever. These are often good for a fun rabbit-trail conversation.

In the evenings, Ashar and Mom hang out (often watching NCIS or Star Trek) and I head to tae kwon do (most nights). When I get back, I do one last round of online tasks, including blogging, and by about 9:30 p.m., Mom heads to bed. At that point, things are usually quiet, so Ashar gets some uninterrupted World of Warcraft time while I sit next to her and write.

If I’m in the middle of an online course (right now, I’m juggling two – Virology and Animal Behaviorism), I’ll sit and watch the video lectures, and Ashar will often stop what she’s doing and lean over my shoulder. We snack a bit, tidy up, and when we start to wind down (any time between 10:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m.) we head upstairs.

Our radical unschooling nights

This is our time. We are night owls – oh, so much so. If you watched us from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., you’d maybe be tempted to think, “OK, that’s neat, when do they start doing things?”

First, let me say that I very much believe that we’re all learning a ton through all of those things above, even though none of them look a bit like school.

Second, I wish someone could be a fly on the wall as we sit on the bed in our master bedroom, either Ashar and I if we’re waiting for Chris to finish work, or all three of us on the awesome days when he’s off.

Sometimes, we watch movies or TV shows on Netflix, sitting in bed (Ashar in the middle, laptop on her lap, Chris and I on either side).

Sometimes, we read aloud together – right now, rotating between Life of Fred: Pre-Algebra 1 with Biology and The Titan’s Curse in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. (As a note, while Life of Fred is described as a Christian series, we are a secular homeschooling family and haven’t had any problems using the fairly few spiritual references we’ve found as talking points about what different people believe, which we like to do anyway.)

Anyway, also during our evenings, we often play iPad games; logic puzzles like Rush Hour and all sorts of trivia apps are our current favorites.

On occasion, we draw or color – maybe something like fractal art I’ve printed from a website, maybe just a drawing on blank paper to accompany one of our favorite stories.

And we talk. We talk about what we read, weird facts from trivia questions, ideas for projects we want to work on together, news from the day. We pull up Wikipedia articles on how animals are classified and talk about the garden toad we found. We go down a rabbit trail about biology, classification, being a carnivore and speaking Latin.

By about 2 to 3 a.m., when Chris gets home from work (if he’s not there already), we’ve usually spent 4 hours or more just being together, talking, exploring, creating, and, yes, learning.

The extra-special stuff

Once or twice a week, we head to the alpaca farm for a few hours of work with Ashar’s show animal, Gia.

Most weekends, Mom, Ashar and I (and sometimes a collection of friends) can be found making art on our dining-room table. You’ve actually been seeing some of our art in recent posts – and the graphic with today’s post comes from a work of Ashar’s that won a pretty special award this weekend! (Yes, more to come about that!)

When Chris is off, we often all “skip out” for the day and road-trip – to state parks, to antique stores, to the used bookstore, to a town baseball game, to the mall, to a new restaurant in a neighboring town for lunch, to museums (the latest being the International Spy Museum, which was perfect for James Bond fan Sarah!)

On the way, we do exactly what we do in the evenings – play together, chat together, ask questions together, and generally enjoy being what we call “The Us.”

People sometimes think it’s funny that we do mundane stuff together, but even grocery-shopping becomes special when it’s family time. We do that every other week, and believe it or not, it’s a LOT more fun as a team.

Sometimes, an episode of MythBusters or a book we’re reading will spark an idea for a science experiment, and the dining-room table will be transformed.

Sundays, we might attend an event like a martial-arts tournament for me or visit Chris’s mom or – honestly – sleep in (when he works until 3 a.m., it’s occasionally a problem to get up)!

We visit friends. We go to art galleries. We go to farmers’ markets.

And all along the way, we make it a point to seek out interesting people and experiences, not just for Ashar but for all of us.

Our teachers are all the people we meet, day in and day out. The coworker friend of mine at the baseball game who talked to Ashar about her job, getting ready to move, her recalcitrant cat and her favorite brands of clothing. The bookstore owner who sets aside a newspaper replica because he knows Ashar might like it. The husband of my best friend, who fixes his motorcycle in our driveway and shows Ashar the parts of it as he’s disassembling them. The artist and gallery-owner who takes the time to show a new work to us because it fits our style.

That’s what unschooling looks like for us. It’s funny in a way to write this post – we rarely look at the individual days. We don’t need or choose to “do math” or “do school” for a particular amount of time, nor do we “have to” accomplish much in particular in a learning sense, and sometimes, weeks go by where we’re all so caught up in our personal interests that we don’t have time for much else.

But over time, as the days build into weeks and months and years, we grow. It’s like watching a tree grow – maybe you don’t see the change each day. But when you step back, suddenly you think: This is so much bigger than it used to be.

That’s how we feel about our life. Our free approach, rather than limiting what we learn, has made it so, so much bigger.

And we love it.

Join the NOT Back-to-School Party!

Want to see the typical or not-so-typical days of my fellow iHomeschool Network bloggers?

Check out the rest of Day-In-The-Life Week at the Not-Back-To-School Blog Hop here (and you can link up your posts, too!)

04 Aug

The unschooled version of an eighth-grade-ish curriculum plan for 2013-14

So last year, I joked that the unschooled version of a seventh-grade-ish curriculum plan for 2012-13 was the worst title for a blog post ever.

But, uh, it worked! I heard from people literally around the world who loved our un-plan and our approach.

So, why mess with a good thing? This year, under an awfully similar title, I’m chronicling what might be our life, unschooling 8th grade-ish style, with tons of input from Ashar and a generous helping of new resources, as part of the iHomeschool Network’s Not Back to School Blog Hop!

Unschooling 8th grade on Unschool Rules

Most days, we have no idea what we’re going to learn about until it happens. We make plans – of sorts – but the best opportunities always seem to be those that just arise naturally.

But I see great value in joining the “curriculum week” blog hop, mostly because I want to show other not-exactly-planning, not-exactly-at-a-grade-level, not-exactly-textbook people – and I know you’re out there – that you CAN make this homeschooling thing work!

If you haven’t already, I also invite you to check out our later ideas, the unschooled version of a 12th-grade-ish curriculum plan (2017-18), the unschooled version of an 11th-grade-ish curriculum plan (2016-17), the unschooled version of a 10th-grade-ish curriculum plan (2015-16) and the unschooled version of an ninth-grade-ish curriculum plan (2014-15). There are also earlier ideas at the unschooled version of a seventh-grade-ish curriculum plan (2012-13).

So with that, here is…

The Conciliotto family’s unschooling 8th grade-ish curriculum

We like books.

Disclosure: This post has some affiliate links. I only link to things we legitimately use and recommend, so if you see such a link, it's because we really do believe in the book or item!

We like alpacas.

We like video games.

We like taking trips – to well-known destinations and, uh, some crazy out-of-the-way ones, too.

We don’t like quizzes, tests, requirements and reports.

We love going with the flow.

So how does this turn into “curriculum” – and what else will we be mixing in?

As well as I can, I’m going to try to do a subject-by-subject look; that’s NOT how we learn, and most of what we do is what would in my state documentation be called cross-curricular, but this way, if you’re using a planned curriculum in some subjects and want to mix in something we’re using in another, you can see how it might fit.

History, social studies and geography

History and geography? Really not a problem for us.

They’re some of the areas Ashar is most passionate about, and we plan to continue doing what we’ve been doing – reading fiction and nonfiction, watching movies, taking trips, and generally doing everything we can to immerse ourselves in whatever periods and places he’s most fascinated with at the time.

Oh, and did I mention, we own a rather large map? With that beside Ashar each night, there’s almost an unwritten rule in our house that we need to leave time to peer at it daily.

Specifically this year, there are a few time periods that I know we’ll especially focus on.

Ancient Greece. This interest started last year and shows no signs of waning. We’re working our way through the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (we’re a little over halfway through the third book out of five, and we cannot wait to see the new movie opening this week!) Along with it, we’re checking out our favorite Greek fictional characters in a book we recently picked up called 30-Second Mythology.
The history of chemistry. We’ve been on that kick for a while too, but as I’ll talk about more in our science plans, we expect to keep delving into this topic.
The Revolutionary War. You’ll never guess what drew Ashar’s interest in this… Assassin’s Creed 3! Not the video game everyone would choose for their 13-year-old, I know, but we’ve been really into it. (The only thing we’ve found objectionable has been some brief language, and trust me when I say it’s nothing he hadn’t heard on the middle-school bus.) Anyway, it’s gotten us talking about some huge facets of the time around the Revolution, and in fact, I’ve got a whole post planned on what the Assassins Creed series has brought up in our conversations!

As unschoolers, we tend to have VERY focused books on our shelves pertaining to whatever topic Ashar is most passionate about at the time, whether that’s ancient Greece or the Civil War. Where we’re sometimes lacking is in resources to answer the “in between” questions that come up, or to give more of an overview. And while I hear great things about Story of the World, Mystery of History and other “large-scale” history programs, even as reference materials if not for focused study, they’re a little – often a lot – more than we normally are looking for.

So underpinning all of these things and more this year, Ashar and I are going to be looking for some fun ways to get a quick glimpse at the breadth of history, such as using history coloring books and timelines.

Math

Let me be very clear about math: We don’t require any “book work” for math. We are huge fans of how math appears in the real world, and we firmly believe that learning through math-in-life is how Ashar will succeed.

Any resources we use above and beyond that are only if Ashar is interested, and not anything we do “formally.”

That said, there’s one curriculum-ish thing I’ve talked about a lot as it relates to math, and you might not be surprised to see it back this year: The Life of Fred series.

Last year, we bought the entire 10-book elementary series of Life of Fred, which starts at “Apples” and ends at “Jellybeans.” We read them for fun, when Ashar wanted to, and got midway through Ice Cream, the next-to-last book in the series, before his interest waned.

This year, I started thinking differently about Ashar’s math skills. Working through the elementary Fred books, it became pretty clear that Ashar has now caught on to the concepts behind arithmetic – adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, plus dealing with fractions and so on – in a way that had eluded him in public school.

I won’t claim that he knows every math fact cold. He knows a lot – and can generally tell you plenty of them if he’s not rushed to do so quickly. But sometimes, yeah, 7 times 9 doesn’t exactly remind him of 63.

So IF I was going to continue to have Fred on hand for our reading enjoyment, I had a choice to make: Keep rehashing at the lower levels, going through fractions, decimals and percents, or say, “You know what? Ashar’s arithmetic is what is it; he knows how to figure things out (by hand and with a calculator), and he’s capable of understanding more complex concepts, so why not get on with them?”

Bet you can guess which I did. 🙂

Ashar and I sat down and talked about what he might be interested in reading more about. He said he missed Fred, but was getting tired of the “boring parts.” So after looking at our options, we ordered Life of Fred Pre-Algebra 1 with Biology. Ashar said he picked this one because “I hope to learn a lot about biology!” Math and science together – win!

I want to be clear about Life of Fred: While it is described as a Christian series, we are a secular homeschooling family and haven’t had any problems using the fairly few spiritual references we’ve found as talking points about what different people believe, which we like to do anyway.

In addition to our heavy focus on real-world math, and Fred as Ashar’s interested throughout the year, we also agreed to review a middle- and high-school video/animation-based tutoring series for math and science called Uzinggo. You’ll hear more about that later, but at an early glance, Ashar and I think it’s pretty cool!

Science

Well, obviously, one of our key focuses this year will be the biology we pick up from Life of Fred!

We also expect to spend much of our time working with Ashar’s 4-H alpaca club. The hours he devotes to that would likely be enough for a science “credit” on their own, between practices, shows, meetings and project work.

But because science is one of Ashar’s favorite things, another key focus will continue to be chemistry. We’ve spent a significant amount of time already learning about this topic mostly through its history – researching the early alchemists, talking about the periodic table, visiting the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s museum, and so on.

Lately, Ashar has been on a quest to learn more about atoms and elements and how they really work. He is fascinated by the fact that there are bazillions of molecules in a raindrop and routinely brings that up in dinner conversations.

At a recent used book sale we went to, Ashar asked if I could “get him a book of chemistry to learn.” We found a college chemistry text, and a REALLY BORING high school one, but… eww. Not what he was looking for. Heavy on chemical equations, light on real-world applications, and NO PICTURES. So, we’ll have to see what we can dig up instead!

Mixed in with this, I’m reading a really cool book called The Disappearing Spoon about some of the bizarre history of the elements and the periodic table, and while it’s fairly dense reading, I’ve been sharing neat stories from it with Ashar as I go. We’re also going to add as many other periodic table resources as we can find, including those videos from Uzinggo that I mentioned when we were talking about math. (We’ve watch the introduction to chemistry already and are loving it!)

Chemistry and alpacas and biology – what a mix!

Language arts

In some ways, this is both the hardest and easiest subject to explain.

We’ll read books – lots. We’ll talk about them. We’ll encourage Ashar’s writing, spelling and comprehension abilities as they come up naturally. In large part, the biggest key to strengthening his spelling and writing has been his passion for online multi-player games like Minecraft and World of Warcraft!

As with our other subjects, we don’t create assignments in this area. But between 4-H projects, things Ashar does for fun and his own day-to-day use of language, I’m sure we’ll have more than enough to satisfy our state’s portfolio requirements for writing!

Specifically this year, some of the things that I think will come up:

Talking about movie adaptations of books.
Figuring out how to learn about a subject from different types of texts (first-person, fiction, nonfiction, reference, blog and more).
Continuing our exploration of series fiction via the Alchemyst and Percy Jackson series, as well as some others like The Sisters Grimm and the Pseudonymous Bosch books.
Digging more deeply into higher-level texts, like National Geographic magazine and some high-school and college reference books.

We’ve got shelves and shelves full of things we’re reading, and I’ll be sure to share those as we go in our reading roundup posts, but you can see some of our favorites here!

Music, art, technology, home economics, faith, physical education and other good stuff

It’s funny: I’m devoting the least space to this, but this is probably the largest part of our learning, because it’s everything that happens in the real world that doesn’t fit neatly into a “subject” box, and that’s, uh, most of it!

I’ll try to list a few highlights here.

Music: We’re attending a Celtic Thunder concert in October, hitting a couple of local marching-band shows at other times in the fall, attending our area high schools’ spring musicals if possible in the spring, and listening to all sorts of music any time we can.
Art: Lots of our art is digital. Photography, website design and graphics work are some of the biggest things we do together. We also paint, scrapbook, collage and generally do all sorts of other crafty things together. Ashar’s newest interest has been in putting together hobby models, which definitely requires an eye for artistic detail!
Technology: This is Ashar’s passion. He has his own cell phone, tons of social-media accounts, gaming access and more. We don’t restrict him in this area because we, as adults, make our living by being online almost every waking hour, and we see Ashar’s skills leading him into a similar path. He has great typing skills (over 70 words per minute), and we’re going to continue to get him exposed to as many kinds of technology as possible, both at home and through things like the Bricks 4 Kidz junior robotics camps.
Home economics: We cook, we clean, we shop. In our family, those things aren’t “chores,” they’re just ways we interact together as a family, and we’ll keep doing that. Personal finance is another part we lump into this (and it’s also heavily mathematical)!
Physical education: We go on lots of hikes. Ashar loves to ride his scooter. And our biggest source of exercise is actually part of our science “curriculum” – walking alpacas, maneuvering them through obstacles and otherwise putting in the hard work required on a farm!
Travel: This is a big one. We’re planning a major family road trip to St. Louis, Missouri, in October, because I’m speaking at the Financial Blogger Conference. Chris and Ashar will be doing a lot of sight-seeing while I’m working! We’ve also planned a whole bunch of smaller trips – to area ghost-town Centralia, to local factories offering tours, to visits to state parks in remote corners of Pennsylvania.

So how and when do we “do” all this stuff?

I’ve mentioned before that the one thing we can count on almost every day is our family time before bed. For night owls like us, this time might start anywhere from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. and go for a few hours!

This is our time to be together and be even more intentional than we try to be the rest of the day about doing stuff as a family.

We read aloud together almost every night. We watch movies and TV shows on Netflix. We play board games and draw pictures and talk and laugh and pet cats.

It’s funny, because our days are often filled with work (for my husband and I) and online gaming (for Sarah). We see a lot of benefits to that too, but people who only know us during the daylight hours probably think we don’t do much together! We’re proud of our approach, though – because we spend our “prime time,” the hours we’re most alert, together!

Meanwhile, we also love to travel, and that’s a big part of our lifestyle. I mentioned some of our upcoming trips earlier in today’s post, and we have dozens more that we’d like to fit in. Chris and I both have somewhat flexible work schedules, and that makes a huge difference. One of our favorite things to do is take Wednesdays off and day-trip as a family!

Join the NOT Back-to-School Party!

Want to see what my fellow iHomeschool Network bloggers are learning this year?

Check out the rest of Curriculum Week at the Not-Back-To-School Blog Hop here (and you can link up your posts, too!)

This post is also part of the How to Teach Without a Curriculum linkup through the iHomeschool Network. Click the image below to read more posts on teaching without formal curriculum!