I know unschooling isn’t supposed to have any rules, but we do have a few. They’re called Our Rules for Having Fabulous Learning Adventures. When my kids were younger, whenever we headed out the door to explore the bigger world, we chose to follow these seven rules:
♡ Adventure with exploring eyes and curious minds
♡ Talk about what we discover but don’t interrogate or lecture
♡ No worksheets allowed. If we have our eyes on a piece of paper, we won’t see what’s around us
♡ Adventures are all about being free to try new things and experiences – or not – without any pressure. Kids don’t have to get involved with all parts of an adventure
♡ No follow-up assignments are allowed. Required work kills curiosity. It spoils an adventurous day.
♡ But it’s okay to strew things later to extend the adventure as long as kids are free to accept or reject what we have to offer.
♡ Focus on the enjoyment of the experience and being with each other. That’s the best and most important part of an adventure.
Imogen and I had plenty of adventures while we were on our recent beach holiday. We wandered around Kiama with exploring eyes and curious minds, asking questions about this coastal town, pondering possible answers, discussing and researching, taking photos, and making short videos for our family at home.
Amongst other things we learnt that the harbour at Kiama is man-made, the distinctive black rocks are volcanic basalt, the trees silhouetted on the horizon are Norfolk Island pines, the volume of water shooting out of the blowhole every few seconds isn’t affected by the tide, and the average temperature, regardless of the time of year, is higher than that at home.
We experienced the warmth of the ocean waves, the golden sand under our feet, and the autumn sun soaking into our skin. We chatted with one another, licked new flavours of ice cream, compared cups of coffee from multiple cafes, laughed, ran on the sand, inhaled the smell of the salty sea, felt free. We had fun being a mother and a daughter out on an adventure together.
On the last day of our holiday, I woke to the sound of rain pelting on the roof of our cottage. It wasn’t a good morning for sitting on the sand watching the lighthouse flashing while waiting for the sun to rise. So I made a mug of tea, grabbed my journal and returned to bed to make some notes about all the holiday things Imogen and I had experienced that I wanted to remember forever.
While I was writing, it occurred to me that if we were still registered homeschoolers, we’d have loads of notes to add to our record books. Here are a few things I could have written about:
Maths
estimating populations, checking our numbers, comparing
money, shopping, holiday budgets, cost of different types of accomodation
temperatures on the coast compared to home
daylight hours, sunrise and sunset times, seasons
house prices
Geography
the liveability index
coastal habitat compared to the one where we live
using tools such as maps, weather charts
Science
coastal fauna and fauna
waves, tides, the blowholes, volcanic rocks, sea glass, erosion
Creative Arts
photography
videos
English
conversations
listening, discussions
reading novels
researching via Google
communicating via video messages
movies
Personal Health and Development
care of our skin in the sun
exercise – walking, running, swimming
cooking
rest and relaxation
I’d have added
dozens of photos,
a few videos
links to all the websites we explored while googling information
maps
screenshots of such things as weather information
summaries of our conversations
images of our book covers and movies…
My Strewing Notebook
I’d have added some suggestions for resources that might have extended our adventure once we returned home.
I’m sure I could think of many more things to add to a homeschool records book if I were doing this for real. I just listed these ones off the top of my head as an example of how I’d turn a holiday into notes.
It seems rather sad to think of a holiday as dozens of homeschool record notes, doesn’t it? A holiday is supposed to be a break from record keeping. We go away to distance ourselves from the everyday tasks, the ones that we sometimes wish we didn’t have to do so that we can relax and come back reenergised. Will we risk spoiling our adventure by associating it with work that we are required to do?
Despite the risk, when we were registered homeschoolers, I still made lots of notes about all the holidays we took together as a family. I wanted to take advantage of the record keeping moments that presented themselves naturally. They were such rich learning experiences. I knew if I didn’t record everything we’d experienced, I would have to look elsewhere for notes to fill my book. An empty record book can cause stress!
Record keeping needn’t intrude into the fun of a holiday. We can put our record books to one side while we’re away and not mention them at all. And then when we return home, we can get them out, and sip a cup of coffee while jotting down all the things we can remember. Each time I did this, I relived the adventure.
Perhaps turning an adventure into homeschool records notes isn’t that bad after all.
So, Imogen and I went to the beach for a holiday. We came back bursting with new knowledge without breaking any of our learning adventure rules. Most importantly, we had a fabulous time with each other.
Something Extra
Our rules for fabulous learning adventures can also be found in Younger Unschoolers: Our Learning Adventure Rules.In this blog post, I told the story of another harbour adventure that we had when I had lots of curious little kids..
Here’s part of it:
When my kids were younger, they loved exploring new places and experiencing new things. (They still do!) They were ready at any moment to head out the door on an adventure. But sometimes I wasn’t ready. Other things claimed my attention. Time would pass without us doing anything. I realised we needed to do a bit of planning. So I suggested that we turn every Wednesday into an adventure day. My kids liked this idea. Each week, we’d brainstorm ideas. Where would we go? What would we do? Did we need a picnic?
One day, many years ago, we decided to go to a nearby harbour for our Wednesday adventure. This was a place that we’d driven past lots of times but not explored on foot.
”Put on your exploring eyes,” I instructed as my young, curious kids piled out of the car. “I bet we discover lots of interesting things.”
And we did. Hidden in the rock pools along the shore were lots of fascinating creatures including barnacles. We even saw a few sea horses that had been washed up on the beach. In the distance, we saw a lighthouse. And then we spied the fish markets.
Soon we were trailing around a very fishy smelling building. We watched apron-clad men and women with loud voices slapping fish onto scales before wrapping them in some paper, and then handing them to the customers.
We pretended to be customers. What would we choose if we wanted to eat fish for dinner? Normally, we’d eat fish in batter, served with chips, of course. But that day we were curious adventurers who’d buy something they’d never had before.
And then we became real customers, not pretend ones. When we returned home, one of my children was clutching a bag of mixed seafood which included baby octopus and squid.
Of course, the next step of our adventure was cooking our seafood. I don’t remember how we did that. Did we add everything to a pan of boiling water? I do, however, remember my kids helping me. They all wanted to be involved. This meal was going to be special because we were going to eat adventure food.
I also remember how a couple of my kids didn’t want to try the baby octopus. I didn’t either, but I did! I discovered it was rubbery and hard to chew. (Perhaps we didn’t cook it properly.) I didn’t really like it. Nobody did. But we’d tried something new. We could now say, “We’ve eaten octopus!”
After our day out at the harbour, we had a few questions. Where had the sea horses come from? What exactly are barnacles? When we buy fish and chips for dinner, what kind of fish is inside the batter? Our adventure continued as we read books and discussed all kinds of fishy things.
So, have you been on an adventure recently? Or is it time to pack a picnic, put on your shoes, and head out the door with a curious mind and exploring eyes?
