Learning everywhere

Tonight my family and I went to the Women’s Basketball Championship semifinals game at the St. Charles Family Arena tonight with the Girl Scouts and we had such a wonderful time! I saw different families of every kind in various ranges of emotions—angry dads telling girls to keep their feet off the seats, excited basketball fans explaining the game to their daughters—and I couldn’t help but notice—as I tend to do—how much Wood Sprite was learning.

Sure, we had a really cool clinic after the game during which the players taught all of the girls some really cool moves and drills, but she learned so much more. We read how to find our seats, how to read the sections, how to read the scores and stats. We navigated, we counted money to pay for our food and her souvenir basketball, we used our manners. We talked about everything from how to be good sports to respecting the other team, how you become a basketball player, and all of the different roles on the court. My daughter is constantly asking questions and learning all of the time, and I love—I just love!—sharing it with her.

This is what homeschooling—what unschooling—is all about. It’s about sharing in your child’s joy as he or she navigates the world with your help, when asked. It’s about enabling your child to learn on his or her own terms about the subjects that interest your child most. It’s about freedom, ultimate learning from the heart, pure joy and family.

Right now I’m reading The Unschooling Unmanual and I ran across this quote right away that I’d like to leave you with:

“We trust our children to know when they are ready to learn and what they are interested in learning. We trust them to know how to go about learning. Parents commonly take this view of learning during the child’s first two years, when he is learning to stand, walk, talk, and to perform many other important and difficult things with little help from anyone. No one worries that a baby will be too lazy, uncooperative, or unmotivated to learn these things; it is simply assumed that every baby is born warning to learn the things he needs to know in order to understand and to participate in the world around him.”

Photo courtesy of Sara S. Our diluted calico, Sky, had to photobomb my picture!