Unschool Rules

When my brother and nephew came to visit from Arizona last week, we took the opportunity to do a little “touristy” sight-seeing at some local historic sites. You know – places that are within a couple hours’ drive from home, but that we really don’t go to on our own? First up was Philadelphia, where we spent a rainy Monday.

Historic Philadelphia learning guide for homeschoolers and unschoolers

We have relatives on all sides of the city – but we rarely go in except for occasional trips to the zoo and, recently, the art museum.

So we jumped at the chance to do some sightseeing at the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, as well as some other historic sites, and all without spending much money, thanks in large part to some amazing programs that I just learned about from the National Park Service.

So here’s a look at what we saw – and a list of resources available for you if your family would like to learn more about Philadelphia, PA, many of which will work even if you can’t visit in person!

As a side note, parking is readily available in an underground garage that opens directly into the Independence Visitor Center in the historic area, and I highly recommend it. It’s worth the cost to be central to all the historic sites! (More detailed parking information and directions to historic Philadelphia are available here!)

The Liberty Bell

It’s free to see the Liberty Bell, and you don’t need tickets – just show up and get in line! Once you go through security, most people head straight for the bell, but there was a rather raucous field trip ahead of us, so we were even more motivated to slow down and check out the exhibits about its history.

This turned into Ashar’s favorite part – and completely unexpectedly.

We were reading about people who visited the bell in pursuit of other kinds of freedom. (Side note: Did you know the bell wasn’t called the Liberty Bell until much after the Revolutionary War?) Anyway, Ashar came upon this photo of a Native American man with the bell on one of its tours to San Francisco.

Little Bear information at the Liberty Bell

His name? Chief Little Bear, the same name as one of the main characters in the “Indian in the Cupboard” book series Ashar is loving so much right now!

Here’s more detail:

Little Bear information at the Liberty Bell

I have to admit, seeing the bell itself CAN be a little underwhelming. It’s not very big – don’t forget that it used to hang in a tower, so it wasn’t built to be a showpiece on its own! That said, if you’ve read the history and looked at the photos of its symbolism through the centuries, you really become a lot more impressed.

Independence Hall

Independence Hall in Philadelphia

Tickets to tour Independence Hall are required but are also free, and sometimes you can reserve them in advance online.

I say sometimes because we tried reserving some online and were told they were full; when we stopped by the desk in the Independence Visitor Center on the day of our visit, though, we were able to get a set! Moral of the story: It’s worth it to ask, even if you haven’t been able to register ahead.

Our Independence Hall tour was interesting – though we arrived a bit early. We whiled away some of the time in line, where Ashar (wearing her Starry Night hoodie) impressed the older couple in front of us with her Vincent Van Gogh knowledge!

And while waiting, Ashar was introduced to The. Greatest. Thing. Ever.

Seriously.

One of the rangers, seeing we were with a family group instead of a school tour, came over and handed Ashar the start of the set of Independence Trading Cards.

Apparently, all the national historic sites have these, but Independence National Historical Park was the first. The cards cover everything from the bald eagle to the Syng Inkstand to the Rising Sun Chair to Martha Washington to William Penn. To get a card, kids go talk to a ranger at any of various spots on the site, and the ranger asks them a question. The great thing for Ashar was that even the questions she didn’t know, she listened intently as the ranger explained!

This does a couple things, I think. First of all, Ashar got a handful BEFORE the tour, and during it, she paid more attention when the ranger was talking about something she had a trading card for. So that was great by itself!

But it also encourages the kids to interact with the rangers. In a tour group of 30 to 50 people, certainly little kids aren’t asking questions in front of the group (or even Ashar, who’s 12!) But after the tour, Ashar was able to go up to our guide and not only get a trading card but ask him an unanswered question she had, one-on-one.

In addition to the trading cards, the park service also has what it calls the Junior Ranger Program. Each site has a booklet of activities for visitors, and by completing a certain number, kids earn a badge. We actually weren’t aware of this while we were in Philly – we found out the next day, when we went to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia!

The good news is, you can download the Independence Junior Ranger booklet here – and many of the activities can be done from home!

More of our trip and resource guides

This post is part of an occasional series of “Family Field Trip” posts, combining our own adventures with resources we’ve found helpful. Many of these will work even if you can’t visit in person!

We’ve also shared resources to help you learn about and make the most of a visit to Assateague, Md., and Chincoteague, Va. We also took a family field trip to Jim Thorpe, PA, and shared our favorite resources for that!

I’ve also been doing a loose series of posts good for unit studies. Earlier posts in that series shared our favorite Phantom of the Opera learning resources and some great ideas for studying the solar system!

This post is also part of the iHomeschool Network’s Best Homeschool Field Trips linkup. Click the image at right to read more!

More great history resources

This post is part of the iHomeschool Network Massive Guide to Homeschooling History.

Make sure to check it out for tons of other great history resources, including links to a dozen more Unschool Rules posts!

This week, as part of the iHomeschoolNetwork’s 10 * in * 10 series, I’m joining a group of awesome homeschoolers to talk about the reasons our kids love being homeschooled.

I asked Ashar for her list, and I tried as hard as I’ve ever tried not to “lead” her, especially when I realized she didn’t want to take it in the same direction I would have tried to. Her comments are in bold, and my own thoughts follow each item.

Why our daughter loves being unschooled

1. I get to be home all day (and with my pets).

This was originally two things – “I get to be home all day,” and “I get to be home with my pets all day,” but we decided to combine them.

2. I like doing my schoolwork at home. I don’t have to move from class to class. I don’t have to wait for the teacher’s permission to do something, like to start working on something.

To Ashar, this was all one item – and basically it sums up the thing I still haven’t written about yet, Part 3 of our educational journey, the decision to take Ashar out of public school. All of these things put together make up a skill called “executive functioning,” and it’s a struggle for many kids, but especially those with Asperger’s. Moving from class to class, understanding that different teachers work in different ways, dealing with 30 people in one room and a different 30 in the next room, takes a kind of planning and mental energy that is, for lack of a better word, draining to Sarah. But at the same time, when Ashar is engaged and wants to learn about something, she absolutely hates being told, “No, don’t go read that yet. First we’re going to talk about XYZ, then we’re going to talk about HOW we’re going to do the reading, then we’re going to talk about what we’re going to write after the reading…” That drives her nuts. So not having to wait for permission to engage in learning…. that’s key.

3. Being able to go on family trips like to Harpers Ferry.

We just took that trip Tuesday, and the day before, we’d been in Philadelphia. But we just as often take family “trips” to the local antique store or used book store or park. The bottom line, though, is that we can go places together. (And Ashar really enjoyed the historic sites we visited this week, so much so that they’ll be topics for the next couple of days’ posts!)

4. Being able to tell my friends about it.

So this is a twofold thing. First, Ashar is kind of a homeschooling evangelist now. She thinks it will solve all her friends’ problems; she even tells them, “You should sit down with your mom and your dad and talk about if homeschooling would be good for you.” (Sorry, Ashar’s friends’ parents. I never set out to start, you know, a movement, but crap happens.) The other part of this one is that Ashar is a conversation-planner. No one has taught her this skill – but it is a great mechanism for kids with any kind of social or communication challenge! Most of us do this – but we’re not conscious of it. Ashar is. Basically, before she interacts with people, she makes a list in her head of things they might talk about. In a great example, she once changed clothes before going to a friend’s house up the road to see if he could hang out – so that if they didn’t have something to talk about, she could mention her new hoodie and the trip to the art museum, where we got it. This was actually hard for her when she went to the same school as all her friends, because she couldn’t very well say, “Guess what I did at lunch today?” – since they were there too! So, homeschooling win.

5. I get to do more crafts.

Not a shocker. I was actually surprised this didn’t rank higher. She spent most of today immersed in a project to build “custom bedrooms” for a bunch of Beanie Baby bears, based on their “theme.”

6. I get to sleep!

I typed this with a period at the end, and Ashar goes, “No, that’s an EXCLAMATION MARK.” I laughed when she finally said this, because I expected it to be the first item. Her sleep schedule in homeschooling is entirely different – going to bed at midnight, getting up at 10 a.m. Before, she went to bed around 9 p.m. and got up around 6 a.m. – ugh for our whole family, which veers more toward night-owlishness. The new system is a little unusual, but better.

7. I have my whole backyard and lots of books to read that give me ideas that I can do right in my own house, not from books I can’t take home.

I had to kind of work through what this one meant too. Basically, it boiled down to a few factors: First, she likes being able to learn from the books she chooses (unschooling, yeah!) and in her own space. But second, she likes learning at her own time. The books-you-can’t-take-home thing was that Ashar was once doing an experiment in some science class out of the teacher’s manual, and she liked it, but she wanted to do it again with some different material we had around the house. I don’t know what experiment this might have been, but basically, she wanted to be able to take the book with the instructions with her. No dice, and of course as soon as she found that out, she lost interest in the classroom version of the experiment. We highly believe in seize-the-moment learning, and this is why.

8. I like not being graded. I don’t like having to be graded because it seemed like if you were doing bad or you needed to get your grade up, it felt like it was giving me a panic, like, “I’m going to fail this class,” almost.

Ah, yeah, Ashar the worrier. Being compared with anyone is almost always a bad thing for her – even if it’s a favorable comparison. And being put in remedial classes and taking adapted tests, while good for both Ashar’s grades and her teachers’ ability to see what did and didn’t work for her, did a number on Ashar’s self-confidence, because she was old enough to realize that was “different” but not quite mature enough to realize that it didn’t mean she was “dumb,” sadly. Now, no grades means many fewer stresses, and she is ironically more willing than before to “show what she knows,” to borrow a phrase from her former school principal, who I really like.

9. I have more free time.

I assumed Ashar just meant “after school” – no homework – but she meant during the day and to interact with friends. “Some days, we just had five minutes at our lockers and that’s all we’d see each other,” she said. “And if somebody on another team had homework, even if I didn’t, then we couldn’t hang out.” Now, she sees her friends slightly less frequently, but her impression is that she sees more OF them – in many-hour increments, often! And she gets more time to play video games – which she likes.

10. Being able to hang out with family.

Ashar liked that she didn’t “miss anything” earlier this week while we had family visiting from out of state. She was here all day, not, as she put it, “having to come home from school and then hurry up and talk to them.”

Today’s post is also part of Top Ten {Tuesday} at Many Little Blessings. Whether you’re sharing your Top 10 reasons why you or your kids love homeschooling, 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 last week’s post, if you missed it, on our 10 unschooling and homeschooling must-haves.

Family field trip to Philadelphia: Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell and free learning resources