A peek into school today...

Right now, we are unschooling. For us this means we explore what we can and sometimes that's an obvious lesson and other times it is not. Daily, we read a lot. Mr Man builds a lot (legos, blocks, random pieces of trash re-conned into some fantastic weapon). We sing, usually silly songs. Today we traced letters and talked about how things are spelled. We made two kinds of dough, practiced measuring, talked about yeast and what it does in dough and why we have to knead the dough. We also made chocolate pudding and watched the magic of corn starch reacting to heat. We talked about the differences between chocolate powder and chocolate chips and why we had to add fat when replacing one with the other. We looked up Emperor Penguins to figure out why they have small red things on their beaks (and if that is a real thing or just a stuffed penguin thing). So, in just the obvious stuff today we have learned reading, writing, math, chemistry, & biology. A full day for a four year old!

This organic way of learning is really important to me. I feel pretty strongly that children should have as much unstructured free play as they can possibly have, especially before they attain "age of reason" (between 5 & 7). I also feel that it's really important to be responsive to what the child is exploring and asking about. Maybe one day, a more structured curriculum will be right for us, but for now, we're letting things flow and following where that goes. And a lot of times that is just simply playing!