Nook School

Because we travel frequently, move often, and have house guests several times each year, we've had to become mobile learners. It's a wonderful thing, something afforded to homeschoolers that probably doesn't come naturally to kids who are traditionally schooled. It's also handy for sick days (like above): plop a kid on a comfy love seat with her favorite blanket, in soft PJs. Add a German Shepherd for company and cuddles, and hand over the Nook. Above, Tuna is looking at Time Magazine for Kids. It's a really cool e-magazine that's totally interactive. 

Nook school. It's what we call app days. I have three screens full of fun, fresh magazine subscriptions, apps, and books on my Nook home screen that Tuna can peruse at her leisure, all the while learning new stuff. Here's a sampling of the apps and subscriptions we have on my Nook right now:

• Scholastic Science World magazine
• Smithsonian Magazine
• Time for Kids magazine
• National Geographic magazine

• Space Program app
• V&A Medieval & Renaissance Gallery app
• Museum of Science: Then & Now app
• CNN app
• Spanish Unlimited
• Italian Unlimited
• French Unlimited
• German Unlimited
• Art Museum Match 'Em Up 

• Ginger Pye ebook
• Bud Not Buddy ebook
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ebook

...and much, much more. Most of the apps I download are free apps. The magazine subscriptions run between $1 and $2 per month. The books vary. Public domain books are free. Other books cost anywhere from free to $15, depending on title. 

The Nook (I have the Touch) is a great way to get fun learning time in on the go or on the couch. 

What Have We Been Up To?

Oh, a little of this and a little of that. 

We've been spending quality time together. 

We've been finishing patio furniture. 

We've been playing in the rain. 

We've been finding worms and roly-polies and slugs, and creating temporary habitats for them so we can learn more about them. We've been learning about how carnivorous plants digest their meals. 

We've been skinning our knees. And our hands. And our shoulders. And our feet. And wrecking our pants. And we've been getting fillings on our front teeth, because some little crapturd neighbor kid cherry bombed us on the seesaw and chipped our tooth (a cherry bomb, for the rest of us, is when you jump off the seesaw while your friend is up in the air). 

We've been feeding ducks and swans and checking out the local wildlife. Today, we visited a lovely (and free!) "zoo" near Burglegenfeld, Germany which featured native animals in decent enclosures. We were able to buy food to feed them, which was pretty fun. We wish we could have spent longer there, but we had to hurry off to the dentist (see above description of incident). 

And we've been finishing up our school year. Our official last day is next Friday. Bay just tested out of her algebra program, and we got her enrolled in high school for the fall. Tuna and I are reading By the Shores of Silver Creek, and she is still loving the Little House series, so we plan to continue the rest of the series throughout the summer. She's still loving Life of Fred, but we will be wrapping that up soon. And she has absolutely loved Story of the World. 

I am so glad we made the decision to homeschool this year. I look forward to our fifth grade year and I hope Bay's year at high school goes well. Of course, if it doesn't, she can always come home and we'll have loads of fun. 

On the agenda for the rest of this week: a cook rice experiment, a can crushing experiment, a tree exploration, some cooking, and lots of snuggly reading. 

Hope you're all well. :)

Trust the Process

It can be difficult to unschool our thinking and trust the process that's happening when we let go and try unschooling. Won't they just watch TV all day? 

Tuna's Minecraft nest

(no)

Sometimes, I catch myself wondering, "Are we doing enough?" and that's where keeping a blog and taking pictures helps me. 

Tuna and I have begun watching Kitchen Nightmares and Gold Rush on Netflix. Believe it or not, we learn a lot from those "reality" shows! It opens up a lot of discussion. Plus, Gold Rush ties in nicely with her Minecraft obsession. 

She's been wiggling two loose teeth for three months now. Stubborn, these teeth. The last three months, she's tried various experiments to help get those teeth out. There was the basket she tied to some yarn, which she tied around her tooth, and she stood up on the sofa arm and dropped the basket, hoping to yank out her tooth. There was the door slam experiment. She asked Daddy to try his pliers (it was not loose enough). Then, she left it alone for a few months. Last night, it started bothering her again, so she wiggled and wiggled and decided to try an apple. She ate the whole apple and still had a loose tooth (hanging by a thread). So she twisted it around and around and every time she felt a pop, she told me about it, until out it came, and she put it in a cup of warm water to keep it "safe."  Success. :)

Today, Tuna and I finished On the Banks of Plum Creek. I've come to peace with the Little House series. Tuna loves the books so much. Her enthusiasm is contagious. So I read on. She really gets into the story and brings up scenes from the books at various points in everyday life. We have even had a few experiments and activities based on things we've read in the books. Tomorrow, we're going to start By the Shores of Silver Lake, the next in the series. 



We set aside math and Story of the World. Tuna likes them. We just needed a break. We get plenty of living math each day. We are going to pick it back up tomorrow, though, because Tuna is asking me to. 

Bay's plugging along working on testing out of her math program so she can enroll in Geometry next year. She spend a lot of time writing and drawing and reading. 

As a family, we're working on the renovation of my grandmother's wrought-iron patio furniture set. It's proving to be an educational, long, and expensive endeavor, and an endeavor of love and sentiment. I can't wait to finish the project. 

Cheech helps by supervising us from the comfort of the doormat. 

Tuna did mention something today that I hadn't even thought of: Bees are attracted to the color red. And guess what color we're painting the furniture. 

You guessed it. Red. 

Good thing we're putting mosquito netting around the sitting area. 

Keep the faith. Unschooling works. Every member of the unschooling unit learns together, learns richly, and learns to think independently. There is no room for hive mind here. 

Unless you're on my new patio, I suppose. I do wish that would have occurred to us sooner. Oh well. I do so love the color red. 

Our Hike in Pictures

We spent the afternoon hiking today and we all had a great time. We learned a little, too!

Screen-Free Week? Not Here!

All I've been hearing lately is about this "screen-free week" and all the "research" about how watching too much TV, playing too many games, and being in front of too many screens is bad for child development. Parents are encouraged to restrict screen time for kids, encouraging them to seek their information fun elsewhere. 

Now, I am all for learning from a wide variety of sources, but I can't imagine restricting screen time with my kids. They use the Internet and television every, single day, and I encourage it. They learn so much from the Internet, from Netflix, from You Tube, from Minecraft, and from Google, that to take away screens would be to take away learning. 

I have seen what kids do when they are screen-restricted. They use the little time they do have on fun games, and they don't bother with anything even remotely educational. If I restricted screens with my kids, they would only watch their favorite shows, not branch out and watch documentaries, because that would eat up their "fun time." They would be electronically stunted. Some may say that's okay. I disagree, especially in the age of information our kids are going to inherit. If I limited their screen time, they'd be on Facebook, not looking up the stability of bedrock. They'd be glued to the Sims, or Candy Crush, or whatever game they were playing, not playing with Scratch to build websites. ALL of those are okay, and that's actually my point: Why limit it? It's ALL okay, and ALL good, and ALL purposeful!

In the past twenty-four hours, here are some of the many ways screens have been used in our home:

• Bay's taking a math course online (I don't even think this "counts" as it's SCHOOLish, and I don't think that even the staunchest supporters of screen-free week would take math away from a child). Still, there it is. 
• Bay's recently discovered new music love, Hoodie Allen. Bay spent some time reading lyrics, watching videos, learning his music. FOLLOWING HER PASSION. Hoodie Allen is NOT available in any book. If I kept her off the Internet, she never would have found him. She has since turned her friends on to Hoodie Allen. 
• Tuna's Minecraft account. She just loves Minecraft. She studies it. I mean really, really studies it. She watches tutorial videos and learns new techniques just about every day. She really does learn things from Minecraft. The other day, we were walking through the concrete and stone section of the local nursery and she asked me if bedrock was unbreakable. I mean, I have no idea! So I told her I don't know (I don't know are three of the best words I can use with my kids. It tells them I am not all-knowing and I am in it to learn with them) and encouraged her to Google it and let me know. When we got home, she Googled it. The answer: Bedrock is unbreakable! P.S. Stay tuned! Tuna is getting ready to start her own Minecraft Tutorial You Tube acocunt!
• Tuna and I watched some really cool documentaries on Netflix. It's kind of out nightly "thing" we do together. Last night, we watched Ultimate Predator and Feeding Frenzy. We learn SO MUCH science and history through the documentaries we watch. I can't imagine getting rid of them. It's fascinating stuff and we both enjoy it. 
• Today, Bay and I watched the documentary, "Secrets of the Body Farm" on You Tube because she's fascinated with forensic science. We learned a lot about human decomposition, blow flies, coffin flies, cadaver dogs, and the investigatory processes involved in finding a homicide victim and figuring out time and cause of death. 
• We plan to go on a hike tomorrow, so we're looking up how to do geocaching, because we've never done it. We figure it's worth a shot. The Internet is teaching us how to do it AND connecting us to geocache clues. 
• Later, Tuna and I will watch more documentaries. Bay will probably memorize more lyrics. Tuna will play Minecraft. I will be online. 

We love screens. They teach us a tremendous amount of things. Being screen-free would feel, to us, like intellectual prison, limiting our personal growth and boxing us into a world that has limits. We prefer to live with none. 

Imagine life without screens. You wouldn't be here, reading this. And that would be a bummer. ;)

Feral Children

(No, not my own.)

Let me show you an example of how child-led learning happens. 

Tuna's favorite section at the library is the weird true stories section. She brings home several different books each week on the topic. Last week, she brought home Spooky Mysteries You Wouldn't Want to Know About (Top Ten Worst), and has kept it in the car to read while we drive around. 

Today, she read the section about the Wild Child, and asked me if I'd ever heard about him. I told her that I recall some vague details, so I must have heard about him at some point. She read me the section about the Wild Child of Aveyron, Victor, and we decided we'd google him when we got home. 

So, we did. 

We found information about Victor on Wikipedia, and more information about a movie about Victor, and that led us to search for the movie. It's from 1970, and it's in French. Tuna is hunting for a version with English subtitles, but here's the one we found:

We found information on another feral child, called Genie, and found a Nova film about her. 

Tuna told me she learned that Victor was abandoned by his parents because of mental retardation and that they left him for dead. This opened up a conversation about how parenting has changed over time, and what we thought of that situation. We also talked about how he learned to adapt and survive. 

It was a fascinating experience for us both. We both learned a lot and had a great time, together, doing it. 

All of this happened naturally, no worksheets, no textbooks, nothing forced. I simply provided her the search engine and we explored the rest ourselves, until we were done. We have not finished. We plan to reconnect later tonight and look at some more footage. 

I love learning this way with my girls!

'Learn Free' (an unschooling documentary)

Monday, Monday

It was back to normal for us as Charles returned to work after a week off. Little Tuna had a hard time getting out of bed this morning. We read a lot today: Tuna and I read The Story of the World and Cupid and Psyche (a great love story, beautiful illustrations, highly recommend it), and Life of Fred. We played with the sticker album and stickers we collect: It's a Germany sticker album, and we get a new pack of stickers for every 5 Euro I spend at the grocery store called Rewe. We're working on collecting them all and translating the captions.

Bay and I took Sylvia Plath outside to soak up the sunshine. Today's the warmest day yet, with the bluest sky I've seen in Germany in the six months we've lived here.

We also went and applied for our tourtist passports this afternoon, so in a month or two, our "field trips" are going to start being places like The Louvre, Royal Albert Music Hall, and the streets of Greece!

Everywhere we went today, people were outside raking, tilling, pulling weeds, planting things, riding bikes, walking, and enjoying the weather. 

still messy in front, but our herb garden is planted. In the pots: dahlias. Around the outside: lavender, mint, rosemary, and thyme. 

Yesterday, we put in our front yard garden. The kids helped. Whenever we unearthed a worm, they rehomed him into one of our pots, to help keep the soil fertile. 


Bay helped me hang my boot gaden and Tuna helped plant the herb garden. 

I like the way the boot garden turned out. 

We still have our veggies to plant: peas, carrots, parsnips, salad greens, and Brussels sprouts. The Brussels sprouts, I'm told, are difficult to grow. But I like a challenge. 

What's in your garden this year? Do your kids help?