Living Joyfully with Unschooling

valuable resources to learn more about unschooling and parenting

  • Deschooling
  • Unschooling
  • Parenting
  • Start Here!
  • Books
  • Book Clubs
  • Podcast
    • Q&A Episodes
    • Ten Questions Episodes
    • Interviews I’ve done …
    • TUC Talks
  • Blog
    • Monthly Topics
  • Articles
    • Spanish Translations
  • Resources
  • Summit
  • About
  • Contact
You are here: Home / Living / “What Will I Do Today?”

“What Will I Do Today?”

March 30, 2013 By Pam Laricchia Leave a Comment

This month I’ve been writing about unschooling days. I talked about some of the goals that guide unschooling parents as we choose our day-to-day interactions with our children: being available to talk, willing to help, and supportive of their goals. I also looked at ways some typical activities and conversations can look rather unconventional in an unschooling family, both at home and out and about (you can find them here).

This week, let’s switch up our perspective. What about our children? What drives their unschooling days?

One of the refreshing traits of unschooling children is their enthusiasm for life. From the youngest age, all children are driven to explore the world around them and learn how it works. Parents marvel at their single-minded determination: their obvious joy when they finally figure out how to communicate that they want something; the countless times they’ll try to pick up that Cheerio; the tenacity with which they practice standing up and taking those first couple of steps.

That insatiable curiosity does not fade with age unless the adults in the child’s life work pretty hard to temper it. But that they often do—apparently there’s a UCLA study that found the average toddler hears the word “no” over 400 times a day. Damn, the average toddler is determined!

Why do many parents want to discourage their child’s exploration? It’s time-consuming (even one typically adorned room can keep them busy for hours—needing supervision all the while). It’s boring (what’s in the cupboard, what’s behind the curtain, what does this toy taste like—the parent already knows the answer so they’d rather just tell the kid than wait for them). It’s dangerous (they don’t want to spend their time standing by the stairs spotting their toddler, or catching them at the bottom of the slide over and over and over, or watching closely to make sure they don’t find the chemicals stored on the bottom shelf of the closet). An emphatic “no” will suffice in all those cases.

Then, once a child reaches school age and enters the educational system, teachers attempt to channel that curiosity down the curriculum path. Good teachers try valiantly to catch their students attention and spark learning by relating it to their real lives, with character-driven worksheets (Spongebob math worksheets, anyone?) and field trips and mock activities (pretend money, pre-determined experiments, mock trials, model UN). But that fundamental separation of learning and life is a significant disadvantage that the educational system cannot overcome while children are isolated in buildings filled with classrooms.

The curriculum path also restricts teachers’ freedom to dive more deeply into topics their students are actually curious about: “you’ll cover that next year.” Or to stray very far beyond the course outline: “you can look that up at home.” Yet a students’ definition of learning quickly becomes inextricably linked with school hours: “you have to go to school to learn.” With this narrow and rigid definition of learning hammered home, many students become loathe to learning outside of school. Their curiosity has become a faded echo of their toddler years.

But what if a child’s curiosity isn’t constantly stifled?

Humans are driven to explore their environment and if adults aren’t constantly trying to dampen or redirect their enthusiasm, that curiosity can drive their learning over a lifetime. In an unschooling family it’s that curiosity that drives learning, instead of a curriculum. But what does life with inquisitive children look like?

It often looks busy, even on days when you don’t leave the house, or even the family room!

It can look like large cardboard boxes lined up, enough for everyone, with the child up front wearing a train conductor’s cap as they travel from imaginary place to imaginary place, you lifting the littlest one in and out, in and out. A tower of blocks stands in the corner as a destination, a pile of stuffed animals tag along as traveling companions, and the couch is an island to keep us dry each time it floods.

It can look like a huge Lego town, days or weeks spent building a contemporary community with stores and parks and homes and citizens, or a futuristic base with a control room and sleeping quarters and spaceships and aliens, or a medieval castle with an armory and a mill and dragons and townsfolk.

It can look like one child concentrating hard on playing a video game, while you read the guide for tips and tricks in between playing a board game with the others, everyone taking a moment to cheer when a boss is beat, or someone rolls a six or lands on the longest ladder.

It can look like a puppet show, put on from behind the couch, full of dialog and sound effects and giggles, with you recording it to watch immediately after; and as you end up watching the other videos on the memory card an impromptu dance party breaks out.

It can look like a weekday afternoon at the park, winding the tire swing up countless times, with its passengers laughing maniacally as you release it, eventually their boundless energy spurring them to explore the play structure and escape down the tunnel slide.

It can look like each child in their room, one reading and writing on an online forum, one setting up props for a photoshoot, one playing a computer game. Each wandering out once in a while to chat and grab a snack, you calling down the hallway to ask if anyone would like a cup of the tea you’re brewing.

In each of those little vignettes, can you envision what is happening beneath the surface? The learning is rampant in each. Because the child is following their own curiosity, they dive into their interests as deeply as they want—maybe the Lego town lasts a day, or a week, or a month; maybe they take 100 photos, or they play with perspective and take 200 more, or they rearrange the set and take another 300. Because their time is their own, they let their questions roam as far and wide as their inquisitiveness takes them—maybe the train becomes a bus, then becomes a plane, then becomes an ocean liner; maybe the forum thread leads to a video, which leads to a website, which leads to a new forum: another piece of the world to explore filled with people as keen to discuss their passions as they are.

The days themselves can look very different but the curiosity driving them is the same: What do they love? What questions do they ask? What would they like to try? Who do they want to become?

Unschooling is about helping them find answers to the questions that drive them, and helping them discover both the person they are and the one they strive to be, no matter their age—I have questions that drive me, experiences to process, and a vision of the person I want to be. Living and learning each and every day. For life.

 

Filed Under: Living, Parenting, Relationships, Unschooling Tagged With: learning, Mar 2013, relationships

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

My new book is out!

The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide

You are the HERO of your story.

free intro to unschooling ebook

Click the book cover to get the book from your favourite online retailer, or click the link below to join my mailing list and download the book directly!

What is Unschooling? A book about living and learning without school.

Exploring Unschooling podcast

click to listen to the archive of all Exploring Unschooling podcast episodes

Choosing to live and learn without school isn’t as intimidating as you might imagine!

Support my work

The Living Joyfully website and Exploring Unschooling podcast remain free (and ad-free) and take me many hours and hundreds of dollars a month to sustain.

If you’ve found my work helpful on your unschooling journey, please consider becoming a monthly patron through Patreon—with helpful and fun rewards from me at the various patronage levels—or gifting a one-time donation through Paypal.

Together, let's scatter the seeds of unschooling in the world.

support the podcast on Patreon

ONE-TIME DONATION

Have you read my books?

Free-to-Learn-Cover Free-to-Live-Cover Life-Through-the-Lens-of-Unschooling-Cover Living-Joyfully-with-Unschooling-Box-Set-Cover The Unschooling Journey Libre d'Apprendre cover Libre para Aprender cover Szabadon Tanulni cover

Journey with us to a new way of seeing your child

icon-logo

Join Anne Ohman, Anna Brown, and I in our online Summit where we share the experiences, insights, and tools that we found most helpful on our unschooling journeys. We will walk with you from where you are now, to where you want to be.

Looking for something?

I've been exploring unschooling for many years now and there's a lot of content here! I've been working to tag things to help you more easily find information about the questions you're curious about right now. I'll continue to work on this.

Click a topic to explore:

college

dads

deschooling

food

grown unschoolers

learning

life

math

reading

relationships

relatives

technology

teens

work

Connect with Pam

    Glyph_Logo_png 

Welcome to Living Joyfully

Pam ... an online resource for parents wanting to live joyfully with their children through unschooling. If you're passionate about exploring the world with your children, this site is for you. I'm Pam Laricchia, the author and owner of this site. Thanks for inviting me along on your unschooling journey!

MEET A NEW UNSCHOOLING PARENT EVERY WEEK!

Pam Check out the Exploring Unschooling podcast, with more than 150 episodes in the archive.

SEARCH LIVING JOYFULLY

Living Joyfully participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and the iTunes Affiliate Program. This allows me to earn a small commission, at no cost to you. I appreciate your support!

Read my Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.

Copyright © 2019 · Living Joyfully Enterprises

I use cookies to ensure that I give you the best experience on this website. If you continue to use this site, I will assume that you are happy with this. Thank you. OK READ MORE