Wednesday, February 15, 2012

letting them be

Give kids space, and they will achieve beyond what you expect.

On Friday we were finally getting attic squirrels evicted. 7 yo watched for a while and then said that since we're taking away their home, he will make them one. He took a cereal box, lined it with grass, stuck pine cones inside and perched it in a pine tree, since squirrels supposedly like pine sap. Afterwards, he got an idea to make our entire house into wildlife rescue center. He took some paper and drew up plans. Our living room was to be a rain forest. My bedroom--tundra. The basement was turning into wetlands. Then he told me he will need misters for rain forest. He got his animal book and sorted which animals could live in which habitat, all the while making lists. All of this took couple of hours. I wanted to do parsha, but his heart obviously was involved in something else. ( we did do parsha and he read and copied short version of 10 commandments too).

Today, my 5 yo got two sheets of stickers. As we are driving, he was demonstrating how he can convert them into different mathematical notations: cross them over for +, take one away for -, hold them parallel for =, turn cross on its side for multiplication, then hold them at one end for "greater than" and reverse for "less than". I would never be able to get him to write all of those down for no reason.

I think I am warming up more and more to unschooling...

No comments:

Post a Comment