Outdoor Hour Challenge #1

So we've decided to participate in the "Outdoor Hour Challenge" posted weekly at the Handbook of Nature Study blog. A friend in our 0-5ish Playgroup, Del, put us on to the blog, and the amazing book it uses as its "textbook," the Handbook of Nature Study, by Anna Botsford Comstock. It's a wonderful way for us to be a bit more schematic with our nature study, even though we're outdoors almost every day and the kids seem to need little motivation. However, the first challenge asked us to read the first 8 pages of the Comstock text, go outside and explore, and then discuss what we observed. Here's what we did:

• While gardening/weeding, the kids discovered some snails, tent caterpillars and various bugs living in and around the rotting stump of a dead tree. We watched them, picked some up, and talked about what we saw.
• The next day, I made two terraria (glass jar, moist soil, leaves, cheesecloth and rubber band) and sent the kids out to find a garden snail; I had already found a tent caterpillar that morning while filling up the bird feeder.
• After the kids collected a snail, I we put the snail and caterpillar into two different terraria and started watching our new "pets."

• We watched the tent caterpillar explore the terrarium, climbing on leaves and wall; I pulled out the Comstock and read to them about the different body parts and Sy identified his head, thorax and abdomen, counted his legs (3 pairs of “true legs,” 4 pairs of “prolegs,” 1 “propleg,” called the "anal proleg" below), observed his head w/mouth, watched him eat some of the leaf, observed his movement, and identified his coloring (black with red spots) and his hair. We looked for his spiracles (holes on the side of the body for breathing), but we couldn't find them.

• The snail soon dove down into the soil and didn't emerge for a couple of days, despite the fact that we've given him a nice chunk of sweet apple to nosh on. 
• After adding a bit more water to his terrarium, he resurfaced and we were able to check out his really long eye stalks, his feeler stalks, and look at his striped shell.

Free, Conscious Activity

"When productive work is suffused with the qualities of play--that is, with freedom, creativity, and imagination--we experience that work as play . . . In our culture today, those people who have the most freedom of choice and opportunity for creativity within their work are most likely to say they enjoy their work and regard it as play" (Peter Gray, "Play Makes Us Human I").

"Labor [is] life-activity, productive life itself . . . the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species - its species character - is contained in the character of its life activity; and free conscious activity is man's species character" (Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 75-76).

These two quotes have given me a bit to think about. As homeschooling parents, we are constantly searching for ways to engage our children's desire to productively play, to learn with freedom and imagination, without squashing that desire through any preconceived notions of intellectual or academic progress, the pitfalls of rewards and punishments,  or pressure from outside to "prove" they will be intelligent, well-rounded kids as a result of their not being schooled with others. I have to also consistently remind myself that play is necessary, psychologically, socially, humanly, and that the institutions we regularly engage often are not of the same opinion.

While I find the above quotes to be similarly enlightening, I often wonder why play and "free conscious activity" are thwarted so early on in children's lives. And yet, in the process of watching David Simon's HBO series, The Wire, in reading Linn's The Case for Make Believe, Louv's Last Child in the Woods and now John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down, I have to admit that I don't wonder why, rather I know why. The institutions we must engage cannot be disentangled from the global system for which they were designed, and a system that stands in clear opposition to "free conscious activity."

As homeschooling parents, we are able to make a small difference in our children's lives by extending the length of time they can resist these oppressive modes of thought, their estrangement from what Marx has called their "species being." In enabling their "free, conscious activity," we are hopefully giving them more time to understand that being before having to confront the myriad institutional obstacles to "life-engendering life."

Bugs, slugs and caterpillars

We spent the early morning observing bugs in the backyard. We discovered a tent caterpillar on the slide . . .

a snail on the deck . . .

and a small toad on the patio.

I just started Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods. I'm glad the woods are in our backyard.

An unschooling summer 1

Having some unstructured play in the sand - a perfect beginning to the summer! 

With the semester finally over, we have been enjoying the summer and our unfettered time with the kids. In addition to the usual dinosaur books, we've been reading lots of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers (Syler's favorite: Rotkäppchen - he's quite enamored of the wolf dressing up like grandma and devouring the heroine; Violet's favorite: Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten, which Uncle JD has expanded upon by gifting us the Lithuanian DVD of the Russian production from 1968, Bremeno Muzikantai/bremenskii musikanti - full of late 60s psychodelia, which the kids are loving.) The kids are busy playing in the backyard, making music, learning baseball basics, and digging in the dirt, while I'm delving into some pleasure reading venturing into more blogging time. Jason is still the domestic god, whipping up delicious dinners, mowing the lawn, and keeping the kids' creative juices flowing.

The kids have really gotten into observational and creative drawing, in the driveway, after hikes and on chilly days.

Driveway art

Pine cones found along the trail.

We've also discovered the joy of Ed Emberley's drawing books . . .

which show us how to use basic shapes in creating elaborate animals and entire worlds. Thanks, Ed.

We've been talking a lot about tall tales after reading Rebecca and Ed Emberley's version of The Story of Paul Bunyan. Sy is now ready to counter any exaggeration with "hey, I think that's a tall tale." Today we were entertained by a live circus performance, complete with feats of gymnastic agility and frolicking dances. Yesterday was the puppet magic show: the magician couldn't keep the purple egg from prematurely producing characters that couldn't breathe underwater. It was a comedy of errors. Today, Jason and the kids baked a pie and built Lego garages for the Hot Wheels. Violet will most likely read The Runaway Bunny to Mickey for the 40th time, and I will try to finish Susan Linn's The Case for Make Believe.

Will they learn all they need to know?

The biggest challenge (and joy) in growing without schooling is learning to trust our children, to respect their desires and to allow them to take the lead. Sometimes it is difficult to say, “it’s fine that Sy doesn’t want to write this week,” or “24 hours of just make believe play is learning!” Yet, both of these statements are true. The problem is simply that we’ve all grown up in an educational system that removes us from the world we are supposed to understand, where only certain forms of knowledge are valid, and those are compartmentalized and stripped of all contexts. Sy and Violet are learning and they are learning a lot. Certainly, they are both amassing what one might consider “book” knowledge: Violet is already counting to 10 and saying her ABCs;  Sy can read words with various consonant blends and vowel combinations, count to 100, and tell you the difference between carnivorous and herbivorous dinosaurs. Yet, what is most interesting to me are the ways in which they have come to understand things and to do so in great depth. Sy knows more than I ever did about dinosaurs because he wants to know. No amount of coaxing, rewards, direction or punishment could move him to delve into a topic for so many hours per day the way his desire to know and learn can. This is how we came, today, to do research on amoebae. Before the nap, we read The Biggest Thing in the Ocean, about a giant squid that thinks it’s the largest thing in the ocean, but ends up being eaten by a whale. At the end of the book, a small fish on the copyright page says, “I’m bigger than plankton,” to which Sy responded, “Plankton’s not bigger than anything.” I responded by saying, “Well, a plankton is bigger than an amoeba,” which was enough for him to decide that we needed to look it up after the nap. We spent about 20 minutes on the internet looking at drawings and photos of amoebae, learning about how this single-celled organism can eat without a mouth, stomach or digestive system (using pseudopods and a food vacuole), learning about where they live (fresh water, salt water, in the soil, in other organisms - “like us!” Sy said). While it seems ludicrous that an almost 4 year old can assimilate such knowledge, I know he’s learning because it interests him, because he relates what he learns to experience, because he returns to the things he likes over and over again, and because those interests lead to other related interests (the discussion of amoebae actually led to research on hammerhead sharks - there is a shark in the book - which led to an attempt to identify all of the sea creatures on the final page of the book - eels, rays, sharks, squids, octopi, various fish, etc.)

Here’s just a brief glimpse of the things we worked on this week:

Music: Violet and Sy have both been singing A Rum-Sum-Sum and High and Low in music class this week (tapping out the macro and micro beats, changing words to fit various actions/scenarios, incorporating the names of friends into the revised songs); Sy has been playing Twinkle A-D, Honeybee, Hänschen Klein and Cuckoo on the piano, he’s supposed to start Mary Had a Little Lamb this week.

Art: “Flag of India” - at Indian buffet on Monday night, Sy saw the flag of India and decided to look it up online, he then made his own version; observational drawing (bananas, pencil can, lollipop drum, cardboard box); painting: batik (dripping wax onto paper, painting over, ironing off wax); window ornaments: tracing, cutting (star, heart, oval, circle from batik painting)

Storytelling: weaving parts of The Curious Demise of a Contrary Cat, Hänsel & Gretel, Rotkäppchen and various dinosaur facts, Sy is beginning to create “jokes” and “stories.”

Science: dinosaur, amoeba and shark research

Math: Uno (counting, matching, sequencing), Sy’s game of “I love you 160 million degrees” (we try to increase the number and form of measurement to the best of our ability)

Reading: “Word Card Game” (reading and matching words ending in  -an, -at, -ay, -e, -ee, -ick, -in, –ish, –it, -on, -op; consonant blends ch-, cl-, cr-, dr-, fl-, kn-, pl-, sh-, sl-, spl-, st-, th-, thr- )