Learning While Sick

Sami has a cold this week, and with the cold comes cold medicine. With cold medicine comes side effects. With side effects come less efficient learning. So what do we do? What ever we feel like! :)

One nice thing about homeschooling is that we don't have to keep to a rigid schedule and "keep up" with what other kids are doing. We can do just what we feel up to that day due to illness, and keep it very light and fun and interesting.

Unschooling happens all the time anyway, sick or not. It makes it a lot easier to adjust to the environment and life events and "go with the flow."

Added 3 OCT 08: Megan got it too!

Busy Week!

We've all had those kinds of weeks, and this was definitely one of them. Despite being so busy, I think we all learned a lot. Between appointments, parties, lessons, music, gymnastics, play dates, errands...there was something going all the time.

The high light was seeing Joshua Bell play his Stradivarius. Bell is a Bloomington, Indiana native who attended Indiana University and is now a lecturer there. The music was FANTASTIC. He played part of the Red Violin score (written by Corigliano) among other pieces. I am not an expert on music, but I sure loved every minute of it.

Sami slept through part of it, but Megan sat in my lap with her eyes closed and patted me through it and peeked at me occasionally. They were not complaining that they were bored one bit...I think the music relaxed them so much that they had a hard time keeping their eyes open. They've been up that late before, but at parties. This was their first time being up late hearing classical music.

The girls have been learning about China for a couple of weeks now. At our HS Fun Club, they got to make Chinese stamps, play Chinese jump rope, and eat ramen noodles with chop sticks. They had a lot of fun with that!

Tomato Worms

Looks like the Newlin household is getting an impromptu lesson on Horned Tomato Worms.

When I went to check our tomato garden, I noticed all sorts of "frasse" (that's caterpillar talk for "poop"). Through diligent detective work, I deduced that there must be a worm...then I noticed the stripped stalks. Boy am I brilliant! :) kidding!!! I ended up finding 17 of the buggers, so I guess I wasn't so brilliant after all...

15 of them had wasp larvae on them. Several web sites state that it's good to leave those worms in your garden, as the wasp larvae will hatch, creating more wasps, which will attack more tomato worms. I went ahead and picked them off and set them on the ground. I couldn't stand to look at them on my plants.

The two that didn't have worms are now in my house, living in luxury in a butterfly habitat and getting regular meals of tomato stalks. They are free of wasp terror, but they will probably suffer at the hands of my family, as we will get them out all the time to learn about them as they will form cocoons and turn into hummingbird moths. ***Please note, ASPCA members: WE WILL NOT HARM THESE CATERPILLARS! CALM DOWN! I WAS KIDDING ABOUT THEM SUFFERING!

Joshua Bell

Thanks to my sister-in-law alerting me, I was able to score four free tickets to see Joshua Bell perform in Bloomington next week. Tickets went on sale at 10 AM, I got four at ticketmaster.com right at 10AM, and I guess that they sold out immediately. These tickets are normally very expensive, but because he is now an Indiana University faculty member, he was performing for free this time.

I was rather embarrassed when she called, because I wasn't really sure who Joshua Bell was. After she told me about Bell, I also did a little research on the Internet. Then my 2 DD's and I listened to him perform on Youtube, and he was darned good!

He played the violin so beautifully, so we are really looking forward to hearing him perform next Wednesday. We love music of all kinds, but I guess I'm just not worldly when it comes to specific performers. Time to expand our horizons! The girls are taking piano and voice lessons already, so now maybe they'll pick up the violin...

Primarily Unschooling

My family primarily Unschools. I say primarily, because sometimes I lead the learning. Most of the time we learn about what is interesting at that time.

For example, I'll print off some math worksheets and we'll sit and learn/practice math skills for a few minutes. Sometimes I'll print off some print practice worksheets to practice printing skills (so I can actually READ what they intended to write). I'll sit with Sami and practice her reading skills. I try to keep the worksheets to a minimum, because I don't want it to turn into twaddle time. They wiggle WAY too much to sit still for worksheets anyway! I'm sure teachers would want to medicate them in a PS to keep them still.

Just about everything else is life learning. I love doing "Stealth Learning" with them, where I'll bring up a subject that they just happen ask questions about. The questions lead to interest, and then we dive right in and learn all we can about that subject. There might be a lapbook involved, but that is FUN, so it's not really work, is it? :) There might be books read, but that is FUN, not boring when it's something we want to read about. We might watch a video on that subject, but that's FUN, isn't it?

I guess the reason we unschool is because we want the kids' educational experience to be fun. I am not implying that doing workbooks or sitting still ISN'T fun, but doing that makes my children miserable, which in turn makes me miserable.

We don't let the kids run wild. We don't watch TV all day. I track what they've learned every day, and we manage to hit all the goals I've set, even without a written schedule.

Unschooling works for us! Home's cool!