Making Mondays magical

If you’ve never heard of A Magical Childhood, you’ve got to go visit the blog right away! It’s a fabulous place filled with magic and wonder. Don’t believe me? Read a few posts.

My favorite thing about the blog—which is probably the same thing a lot of people like about it—is the weekly Magical Mondays post. When you sign up to get e-mails from the blog, you’ll get a post most Mondays that’s called Magical Monday, and in it you’ll find 10 cool ideas to make the day magical. Spread them out over a week for fun every day!

This week, for example, there are travel ideas, mud play suggestions, how to make puffy paint, and several other fun things to do. I usually write them down and we’ll do them later in the week.

As unschoolers, we still have to keep a record of the activities we do. Technically it’s summer vacation right now, but a lot of the unschoolers and homeschoolers I know still consider it learning time year-round. Unschoolers, after all, never stop learning; that would mean that life stops! I like to keep a record of all the things Wood Sprite does just so she can look back on it all when she’s older, so I write them in a journal with little scraps and mementos for her. This past year, she has started to help me fill her journals. Soon she’ll be able to do her own completely, but I think I might still pitch in because I think it would be cool for her to read my notes when she’s older.

I also keep a standard teacher’s lesson book, but I don’t really plan anything in it other than things we plan together (field trips, her music and sports classes, library events, etc.), or craft ideas I think she’ll like. (9 out of 10 times she wants to do the art projects I find; the other time, I will white it out and we’ll do something else she wants to do.) Each day, I write down all of the things she does that apply to each subject. When you do this while you unschool, you’ll find that every box gets filled—probably even moreso than it would in a classroom setting. I think I might go beyond what other unschoolers do for documentation a bit, but that’s due more to my personality than anything else!

How do you document your day? Do you plan out fun things for your kids to do and see if they want to do them, or fly more by the seat of your pants? We kind of do both in our house.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia