Unschool Rules

One of the most fun things I did last year was to sum up some cool parts of our family’s life as part of the iHomeschool Network’s 10 * in * 10 series, where we shared some top-10 lists each week in the spring.

I’m thrilled to be taking part again this year with some new topics and some changes in my own mindset and experiences to share!

This week, a bunch of us are talking about 10 toys that last in our homes.

Ashar’s now a teenager – so anything that’s lasted this long MUST be a winner!

1. Melissa & Doug 60-piece wood “blocks in a box” set

These blocks. Oh man.

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We bought them maybe 8 or 9 years ago because Ashar loves the feel of natural wood, and because she needed some larger blocks to build big structures.

She’s still loving them! She and Chris have built castles even in the last year with them.

This was definitely a case of knowing what we wanted before we purchased – something that was real wood and not cheap plastic or another imitation, something durable, something that was easy to store.

One of our friends actually suggested this Melissa & Doug 60-block set, and while I don’t remember who it was, I know I’m eternally grateful.

Super added bonus? One time, when Ashar was quite young, she drew all over them with pen. They’re natural wood – so I just sanded them and they were back to new! WIN.

2. LEGO bricks

Lovely people from the LEGO company, if you are reading this, I would give just about anything to be part of your blogging team.

See, as it is, I write about Ashar’s LEGO collection, oh, I don’t know, all the time? So I’m clearly a big promoter!

OK, enough groveling. These probably made 90 percent of the lists in today’s linkup, but I can’t leave them out. Ashar has had LEGO sets since she was born, literally, since she inherited many of mine, and in turn, I’d inherited some of mine from my (8-years-older-than-me) nephew!

And, in cool both-sides-of-the-family history, she also gets to play with some of the LEGOs from Chris’s childhood every time we go visit his mom, who saved them in a shoebox for the grandkids to play with!

Minifigures are probably our biggest specific LEGO love. This is just a small sampling of Ashar’s collection; there are tons and tons more out where she’s playing with them!

They’ve worked out great, because we can act out almost anything. Reading Percy Jackson and the Olympians’ The Lightning Thief? Need a Minotaur? WE HAVE A MINOTAUR. Suddenly need to replicate Godzilla’s takeover of Japan? WE HAVE GODZILLA. It’s pretty cool. And maybe just a little scary.

3. Imaginarium 200-piece wood block set

Yes, two sets of blocks on the list of a 13-year-old’s “toys.”

This Imaginarium 200-piece set is our smaller-sized companion to the set above, great for adding color and details – and building “homes” for smaller things! Right now, I don’t think Imaginarium, the maker, sells the 200-piece set we have, but there is a 150-piece one that’s close to the same size.

We love these for many of the same reasons we love the set above. They’re real wood, they spark a ton of creativity, and they’ve lasted for ages and ages; I think we bought this set maybe for Ashar’s 7th birthday! If you have even younger kids, the lid to their tub is a shape-sorter, so they can start to tell squares from triangles and so on.

Full disclosure, we STILL sometimes put them away through the shape sorter. So there.

4. Webkinz

Ah, Webkinz. Ashar has something like 40 of these combination stuffed-animal-meets-online-game friends.

She knows all of their names, plays with them, sorts them (this bin is all dogs, cats and “regular” house pets; another is zoo animals; another is mythical creatures…) and generally has a great time with them in real life, but she also plays with them online, giving them fancy bedrooms and clothes thanks to the codes that come included with each stuffed animal.

I have to admit, I didn’t think these would be such a lingering interest, but Ashar was just scoping out a new addition in the grocery store last week!

5. Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars

Ashar has a rather awe-inspiring collection of Matchbox and Hot Wheels toy cars that she plays with all the time.

In fact, this photo is from a display set up in our basement rec room right now – complete with handmade parking garage in the background. Ashar has “stories” made up for each of the cars, like how they’re in car school, how some like ice cream, how some are good leaders and more. And that’s not counting the fact that she knows what make and model each is “for real,” as well.

She has a VERY specific set of favorites. Her biggest joy comes from lining up the cars in the “right” order, with her favorites leading the line. (I’m also supposed to tell you that she likes Hot Wheels better than Matchbox, because there are “more options,” but she’s got plenty of both.)

Ashar even has two car-collector’s history guides – Matchbox Cars: The First 50 Years, and Hot Wheels Forty Years. She’s been through both cover-to-cover, and knows which of her cars appear where in each book.

While I didn’t put today’s list in any particular order, these might be the No. 1 favorite. It’s close between them and LEGOs!

6. American Girl dolls

This probably marks Ashar’s “oldest” toy in a way – because one of her American Girl dolls is actually mine from when I was about 12 or 13 years old!

The best thing about these dolls has been their versatility. They’re keepsakes – so they’re “nice” material – but they’re also durable enough to be actually played with, not just sat on a shelf.

We also love the book series featuring each of the dolls – that’s been a neat springboard into history for Sarah. The neatest example was the one pictured above. That was from Ashar’s 11th birthday in 2011, when my mom, who grew up in the late 1930s and early 1940s and remembers World War II well, bought Ashar “Molly,” the American Girl doll who grows up during the same time.

Talk about bringing the stories home for Sarah!

7. Build-a-Bear, Build-A-Leopard, Build-a-Whatever

These are just a handful of Ashar’s Build-a-Bear collection. She’s been making these things for at least a decade; I think she got her first one right around when she turned 3.

We’ve done Build-a-Monkey, Build-a-Leopard, Build-a-Cat and Build-About-8-Dozen-Bears-Or-So-It-Seems. And they’ve all got outfits… and skateboards, or sunglasses, or hats…

But Ashar loves them! She still enjoys the experience of creating them, too; she just built Percy, at the far left, who’s an Amur Leopard, earlier this year! (If you care, also pictured are, from left after Percy, Nicky, Sammy, Lucky and Stripes.)

8. Dollhouses and miniatures

Ashar is the proud owner of two fairly large dollhouses.

The first, the one you see at left, was handmade for her by an “honorary grandma” – the mother of one of our longtime family friends who was Ashar’s babysitter through much of her early childhood.

It is truly one-of-a-kind – and it’s fascinating, from its tiny birds’ nests to its real-rock flagstone path to its tiny handmade curtains. This is something I hope Ashar will pass down to her own children one day!

The dollhouse at right is the “expansion home.” It’s from the Calico Critters series (it’s their “townhome”), and Ashar has not only the house, but several of the little Calico Critters animal families that live between the two homes.

I have to admit, I thought the Calico Critters stuff was a bit pricey when Ashar first asked for it – but it has been well worth the cost, as it’s really lasting-quality, plus lasting-interest-value!

9. Razor scooters

Ashar got her first Razor scooter in 2009 – which is when these photos are from.

She used that scooter hard! I mean, this became a major mode of transportation, probably much moreso than it was ever intended.

And this past Christmas, when Ashar was 12, she actually asked for a replacement for her much-loved but kind of beat-up Razor.

So now she owns a blue one (“for good”) and this red one as a spare, or for when friends come to visit.

10. Footballs, soccer balls, baseballs and more

I can’t finish off this list without including some of the approximately half-ton of sporting equipment that’s a fixture in our home.

We almost always have a football, a soccer ball, a tennis racket and a baseball bat, among many others. Lately, the soccer ball has been a big win, as has Ashar’s new basketball.

Her current “wish list” requests are a multi-purpose net, and a basketball hoop, both of which we’re diligently saving for but are a little out of reach right now.

That said, I FULLY expect both of those to be long-lasting favorites once we can finally spring for them!

We’re also linking up today to Top Ten Tuesday at Many Little Blessings. Whether you’re sharing your Top 10 questions people ask you, or a Top Ten list on any other topic, I’d love for you to link up and to check out the other blogs that have, too!

And don’t forget to check out my previous Top Ten Tuesday posts, if you’ve missed them.

Imperfect homeschooling: Dirty stove knobs and all

Sometimes, homeschool blogging can make it look like our family – or any family – has it “all together.”

Pssh. Not so much.

So when I heard that my fellow iHomeschool Network bloggers were joining together today to share stories of our imperfect homeschool, I was definitely in!

This is a post that looks at the many days full of pajamas, arguments, glazed eyeballs and too much cat hair.

Welcome to our hot mess.

Here it is, unedited, unfiltered, unpretty – a collection of some of the head-smacking moments of our past couple years.

I’m sharing this in the hope that you’ll read it and see your own family in the way we see ours – NOT as a picture-perfect unattainable snapshot, but as a collection of imperfection all bound together with grace and each other into something more than the sum of its parts!

When the unschooling isn’t so hot

Ah, here’s one for you. In Pennsylvania, we are required to have a year-end meeting with an evaluator who decides if Ashar has made “sustained progress” throughout the year.

Ashar hates talking to people about herself, hates answering direct questions, and basically hates “weird” situations.

So for both of our evaluations, she has been almost silent the entire time (though thankfully speaking up JUST enough to get a “pass”), and at the recent one, she literally hid her whole body inside her hoodie and would not speak or show her face. She did manage to basically gnaw the zipper of her hoodie into oblivion, though.

Then there’s the part where Ashar (who is literal) tells the evaluator that she doesn’t know the last book she read because she doesn’t read books.

At which point I have to jump in and explain that we read as a family through read-alouds, and we all take turns reading (including Sarah), but that means that in her very literal sense, she did not read the book, WE did. ::headsmack::

The sad part is that since I feel like, as the legal supervisor of our home-education program, I’m the one on the spot if Ashar doesn’t reflect continued progress, these sorts of things tend to embarrass me, which leads to me getting grouchy, which makes things worse, until we’re ALL going home almost in tears or with stress headaches!

Guess you know we don’t have pictures of THOSE homeschool moments!

When the house and its people are a wreck

What, you work from home, homeschool, and keep a great house? You’re either sleep-deprived or lying. 🙂

There are days almost every single week where I ask myself, “When was the last time Ashar took a shower? For that matter, when did I?”

There are PLENTY of days where I stay in my pajamas all day, no makeup, hair unbrushed. Ashar actually does a better job of getting dressed daily than I do.

And then there’s the natural casualty of living in a home with a large dog, five cats and a hamster.

Yes, I’m referring to our disgusting floors.

When I show photos of our home in posts, they often look like this:

What you CAN’T see in these photos are the corners, the tucked-away places, the hidden hairball zones. THOSE don’t look like the photo
above. They look more like this:

Imperfect homeschool: Dust bunnies and more

Then there’s my general forgetful nature. That means we have scenes like this:

Imperfect homeschool: Rotten bananas and forgotten pills

Yes, that banana should have left before it started drawing gnats. Yes, those are the antibiotics we were supposed to give the dog after his tooth-cleaning two weeks ago, which we remembered for about four days before slacking off. (And yet, there they still sit.)

My house, like my homeschool experience, is far from from perfect!

When the family is disconnected

Sometimes, the problem is really one of disconnection. These are the times when Ashar is SUPER-interested in learning something and we basically fall short as facilitators or coaches.

We went through a phase where Ashar was super-into everything space-related. Chris had ideas for dozens of things to watch and places to visit in keeping with that theme, and every evening, around 11 p.m., Ashar would ask if we could watch one of the movies we’d talked about, and that she was interested in.

By that point, we were tired. We didn’t feel like sitting through two hours of astronaut documentaries, so we’d put her off. And put her off. And put her off again.

She wanted to do a science experiment at 2 a.m. We put her off.

She wanted to go tour a local factory. I had to work on the tour’s only open day.

All of these things are bound to happen. But our worst days and weeks are the ones where we have more “misses” than connections. We’re roommates, but not a family. We ignore each other.

But there is so much good here!

We’re nothing close to perfect. But we’re trying. And I humbly submit that pajamas, hairballs and moldy food in the fridge, while certainly not super-wonderful, are not what we’re most concerned with.

We love each other. And that happens even when the bananas are rotten and we’re arguing and Ashar doesn’t know what 25 times 2 is.

Thank goodness! 🙂