Learning through play

National guidelines in Australia support the importance of play in learning. 

"The guidelines recognise the importance of play, particularly in the way it develops creativity, teaches sociability, negotiating and linguistic skills, and stresses that learning is not limited to a time or place." Guidelines Recognize The Importance of Play, The Melbourne Age

Something we unschoolers knew all along. 

Creativity - our cooking, our free arts and crafts, our Lego, our dress ups, our imaginary play, our forts and cubbies and cars and dolls and music and...

Sociability - getting along with each other day after day, park days, play dates, church, parihs activities....

Negotiating skills - whose turn is it to sit in the front of the car or to have a go at the Playstation or...

Linguistic skills  - we talk, we read, we watch movies, we talk some more, we write,we journal, we are on facebook and blogs and twitter, we learn prayers and poems and languages, we sing, we play games...

Learning is not limited to a time - stories and looking up links on Google at bedtime and watching just-anther-episode  - oh, it's midnight already?

Learning is not limited to a place - writing journals while having ice creams at McDonalds and mum feeds the baby, working on a Maths sheet or reading a religion book in the car on the way to skating, sitting on the sofa to read and use the laptop or lying in the grass outside with that book and play cards and throw balls and everything else....

Learning through play.

The world has become my teacher and I can never accept a go-between again

Quotes from The Day I Became an Autodidact by Kendall Hailey. One of the best books on self learning, for teens and adults, that I have ever read. A delightful, personal glimpse into the life of an autodidact.

"The world has become my teacher and I can never accept a go-between again."  p. 129

"What I hope to Do:  Love so much today I don't need tomorrow."  p. 133

"When I was in school, my life was what was due next week, and that's not enough of a life."  p. 142

"I got the most heartbreaking letter from a college friend today.  Ever since I had known her she wanted to be an actress, and so after graduation, when I was afraid I would not see her again, I wrote to tell her what a wonderful actress I thought she was.

      "She wrote today that she did not get into the acting school she wanted to, so she is giving up her dream of being an actress.  It takes so little to destroy a dream.

      "I sometimes look at adult people and wonder how they could have ended up so sad, and yet here I am at the formation of what may be some very sad lives.  We are changed people once we let go of what we hope for.

      "Most of my dreams are pretty silly, but I will not let go of one of them, no matter how much of what is laughingly referred to as 'real life' gets in the way. As Ruth Gordon said, the key to success is:  Don't Face Facts."  p. 144 

Learning All the Time

Here are some of my favorite quotes from John Holt's Learning All the Time:

Real learning is a process of discovery, and if we want it to happen, we must create the kinds of conditions in which discoveries are made. We know what these are. They include time, leisure, freedom, and lack of pressure.  

...what often happens to kids in school is that they are required to repeat, as sense, what makes no sense to them, to the point where they give up trying to reconcile what people say about the world with what they really feel about it. They accept as true whatever authority says is true. They do not try to check or test it. They soon forget even how to test it.

What children want and need from us is thoughtful attention. They want us to notice them and pay some kind of attention to what they do, to take them seriously, to trust and respect them as human beings. They want courtesy and politeness, but they don't need much praise.

...organized education operates on the assumption that children learn only when and only what and only because we teach them. This is not true. It is very close to one hundred percent false.

The idea, the very idea, that we can teach small children how to learn has come to me to seem utterly absurd.

Sharing with family

A question that often gets asked on our Unschooling Catholics email list is...what do I tell grandparents? Cousins? Relatives? How do I explain this to my parish priest when Father asks? What do we share about unschooling at family gatherings, especially if everyone seems a bit anti?


I have found that the best approach is just to share all the marvellous things we do...and then gradually ask questions about the other's life and the topic is safely steered. If someone is particularly interested, I will share our learning is life, life is learning approach.

Ultimately, I think the proof is in the pudding.


In the meantime, Julie from Bravewriter has shared  tips in her post on /When they don't get it ....

Homeschooling as Life

" My primary discovery in my relationship with Dotty was that homeschool is a LIFE lived—richly, fully, with crafts, activities, face paint, the arts, books, and lots of cozy eating times with the people you love."

So says Julie, from Bravewriter.

And so say I.

Homeschooling is living a rich life, wherever and however we live. As someone who has lived in small and large spaces, rural and city, and often on a limited time and money budget…this rich life is the one constant.

Go and read Julie's blog post.

No curriculum

A great read. On why you don't need a curriculum.

You don't, you know..

From Linda Dobson:

A curriculum is a course of study. It might help if you think of it as a highly planned tour through learning. If, in your exploration of do-it-yourself education reform, you feel more comfortable using such a tour guide, then by all means use a tour guide! There are many sources of lists and general outlines of what someone somewhere has deemed that children should know and in what order they should learn these things. You can use the information to see where your child is and where your child will go.

Traveling the Learning Path Independently

But what if, in your learning journey, you begin with no particular place to go? What if, instead of being a professionally planned excursion complete with an itinerary some travel agency thought would be worthwhile, your family’s trip becomes more like a jaunt on a beautiful spring afternoon, taken not to get anywhere in particular but only to enjoy being free to enjoy? Instead of getting on a bus with forty strangers, you might decide to walk, or ride a bike, horse, or four-wheeler, or drive around in circles stopping at inviting places along the way. You may not see every classic site that those on the guided tour witness, but if they are among the places that interest you, you will visit some. You will also have under your belt experiences of value to you personally. For example, let’s say you’ve tried fly fishing a time or two and enjoyed it, so for you, a visit to that funky little fly fishing museum is in order. While there you pick up ideas for new flies to make, talk with the proprietor about a few streams to try, and take home a couple of specialty books you’ve never seen elsewhere in order to learn even more at home. Had you traveled with that professional tour, you might not even know the museum exists because it wasn’t on the itinerary.

Learning Happens Within

You see, learning happens whether or not it is directed from without. I would say that more learning (and remembering) occurs when you follow your interest to a meaningful destination than happens among those strangers who take the much more traveled route. This is why curriculum is not the necessity that the educational bureaucracy makes it out to be. John Gatto said, “You can be trained from outside, but only educated from within; one is a habit of memory and reaction, the other a matter of seizing the initiative.” (emphasis added).

You don’t necessarily require a curriculum at home, because you’re addressing education instead of training.

I can’t prove it at this point, because it hasn’t yet been done, but I would bet that children who are guided by education mind, whose “learning time” was filled with activities like those in The Ultimate Book of Homeschooling Ideas: 500+ Fun and Creative Learning Activities, as well as the subsequent explorations these activities would engender because their time is their own, would wind up as educated people.

Adapted from The Ultimate Book of Homeschooling Ideas: 500+ Fun and Creative Learning Activities by Linda Dobson

Do unschoolers set goals?

Do unschoolers set goals? I think sometimes we do and sometimes we just fly without goals.

And sometimes our dreams become our goals.

Big Hairy Audacious Goals in fact.

"Enter the B-HAG into our family. Suddenly I'm on a radical learning curve led by my kids. It dawned on me that instead of micro-managing their experiences, I could throw myself into their big dreams by offering the kind of support that an adult can give to a young person - I can drive, I can look stuff up in the phone book, on the Internet and in the community papers, I can fix hair to look like Lizzie Bennett."

And sometimes, too, are goals are by products of the time and discussions and life we live along the way. For unschooling is both quality and quantity time.

We lean on a truck and learn alongside.

"Women talk face to face, they say, but men lean side by side on a truck. Another version of leaning on a truck is fishing: facing the same way, doing the same thing. Traditionally these days parents and children move in different spheres and do different things, but unschooling families mix ages and activities."

The Saints

The saints are often an inspiration for unschooling.

Recently, we had the feast day of St Philip Neri. Teacher of St John Bosco.

Both saints worked with boys and young men. Both saints had a lot to say about the care and education of the young.

And so both saints have been good mentors for me when it comes to unschooling.

Two quotes.

St. Philip Neri’s words: “Do as you wish, I do not care so long as you do not sin.”

"Run, jump, make noise, But do not sin…”-St. John Bosco

So...sometimes..let kids be kids.

And..sometimes..don't sweat the small stuff. Pick your battles. And keep the eternal in mind.

Very helpful for my Catholic unschooling.

 

G K Chesterton

From Orthodoxy by G K Chesterton – and this newness, this vitality, this appetite is something that attracted me to unschooling in the first place...learning through living and loving...


A child kicks its legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and
free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, Do it
again; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For
grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is
strong enough... It is possible that God says every morning, Do it again, to the
sun; and every evening, Do it again, to the moon. It may not be automatic
necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy
separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the
eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is
younger than we.