Closer to Unschooling Baby

I have been letting Baby call the shots on her schooling. I am trying to trust her to make the right choice about what she really needs at this point in her life. She has been great so far. She goes to school about three or four days a week. I do have her decide the night before so that on the three early school days she is not just staying home because she would rather sleep.

Yesterday when we were walking home from school she mentioned that she did not have very many friends at school. I asked her how many she has. She counted three on her fingers and said the other kids don't really play with her.

She has had to contend with racism in a big way, as well as the language barrier. Her Spanish is pretty good, but the older the kids get the more they want someone with better Spanish they can converse with.

There is also a new girl in her class that she is really afraid of. She has not had any run ins with her, but I think she is afraid the little girl is going to come after her next. This little girl sounds like a piece of work. Screams and eats in the classroom and takes other people's stuff.

Today baby got the infamous stomach ache that she had last year. I suggested that maybe we should not go to school today, and miracle of miracles she was healed. She also announced that she thought she should stay home tomorrow and sleep late. This afternoon her teacher called to tell us there is no school tomorrow.

Here if the teacher has an appointment or something they cancel class for the day. So far since we started school in Feb. we have yet to have a full week of classes, fine with us. Since they only go for five hours a day it is really amazing they learn anything.

We did figure out they teach them to read by sight. The reading book we bought teaches them two words at a time. They memorize the words and move on. Maybe that works better with Spanish I don't know. I do know baby certainly prefers it as that is how she does her English reading lessons also. For her it is much less work to memorize than it is to sound out words.

Looks like a pool day for us tomorrow for sure! And then off to check out the gymnastics gym and see if that is something she wants to try. We have checked out dance, too boring, music, too boring and now gymnastics. She does love skating so we will go do that next week. This is too fun.

Teeny spent the day at the pool with our student. They have hit it off well and been enjoying hanging out until our student heads to Nicaragua to work for awhile. Seeing that she was also a unschooler I think that helps them get along better. In fact the majority of our students have been home or unschoolers. Cool beans!

Unschooling Then and Now

Thirty years ago I was about six months pregnant with baby numero uno. We had just met a friend in Texas where we were living who exposed us to all kinds of really cool stuff. The first one was home birthing, and it was like the first in a long line of dominoes.

Once we started studying about home birthing we became convinced that we needed to step up our nutrition. Hubby had been a vegetarian before we got married, so slipping back into that life style was not a problem for him or me. I did not ever really like meat anyway, so no sacrifice on my part.

Of course once you fall into the rabbit hole of nutrition it is a hole that you will pretty much stay in forever, and we have.

Next came our discovery of home schooling. We knew when we read about it it was something we wanted for our children. The book "School Can Wait" by Raymond Moore was the first book we read and I loved it. It just resonated with me to my core and I knew this was something I would do.

When we told people about it they would laugh and say, "yeah just wait until they get old enough to go to school, you will change your minds". I didn't but hubby did, many times in fact.

People were pretty negative with us back in the day, but now it is amazing how different people are toward the whole homeschool topic. I should clarify that, they were accepting in the U.S. Here in Costa Rica they are not at all accepting, in fact they think we are crazy.

It is like the early days of homeschooling our older kids, only now we are dealing with it all over again with the younger kids. It is just not really accepted here because once again it is not understood. In the U.S. there has been enough publicity to make it understood, but not here. I guess once again we will be the pioneers and expose people to a new idea that they have never heard of and maybe open some minds.

Mainstream Media's Attempt to Understand Unschooling

If you are a "homeschooler", you have no problems. In fact most people will look very kindly on you and think you are a saint or something. They will ask what curriculum you use and how many hours a day you all put in, and how many support groups you belong to. All this makes you very acceptable to them and to the educational world as a whole.

But whoa, tell them you are an unschooler and you will be slammed. Try this one on for size. This incredibly brave family did something I could never do.

They put themselves on the chopping block. And in a big way. I was so impressed with the parents as well as the teens in their answers and very confident responses. My children have always been a little more like me, a closet unschooler.

In fact I have always told people that we homeschool. When I was asked all the above questions I would tell them about all the curriculum that we had sitting home on the shelf collecting dust, and all the groups that we hadn't seen in years due to the fact we were busy living!

As for the hours put in? Why of course every waking hour is spent learning in our family!

Cleaning

When is a good time to get children doing chores? We have had them start as soon as they can walk, all the way up to never doing chores. Some could argue and fight so much better that we could not begin to have enough energy to get them to do them.

I think the best method that worked for our family was that they were all assigned a room. In the morning before breakfast they had to make sure their room was cleaned and swept or vacuumed. In the evening they had to do another quick clean before dinner time.

That seemed to work best for our family. Yes we tried chore charts, awards, rewards, you name it. The only thing that really worked was just, get your assigned room clean everyday. Less arguments and I don't forget who has what chore, works great.

Teenagers and Jobs

Our children have always had part=time jobs. The reasoning is they want cell phones and they want to drive, so the jobs finance their cell phones as well as their car insurance. Our current teenager does not need car insurance, we don't even have a car. But she does "need" a cell phone. And of course there is the iPod, that is another necessity these days.

Today she went for an interview at the "flower" place out by the airport. I still have not decided if it is a good thing or not. It is a call center, so it is not like it will be hard work for her. The problem is that it is a full-time job. Like she would have to go to work every single day.

Her siblings have assured me it will not last. Who would work full-time if they did not have to? I finally came to an agreement with her that she could work until she replaced the stolen cell phone and her broken iPod. After that we will be out of the country for a month anyway, so she will be done.

Now I am starting to think maybe not. She is 16 and a half, but she is a very young sixteen. My older daughter was a volunteer candy striper at the hospital at 15, got her CNA at 16 and was working everyday after work at the local assisted living center. She was an older 16 for sure.

In fact I can still remember she would drive our big old suburban to school, stay and work and get home late at night. Wow now that I think about it she was really different. In a really good way and boy do I appreciate it now.

Cell Phone Saga

And the cell phone saga continues. My really brave, really outspoken daughter is still working this cell phone thing to death. After we left off with her taking the police over to the guys house that she knew took it and he denied it we let it rest. Oh but not this girl. She is like a little bull dog, let her get a hold of you and man she will never, I mean nunca let go of you.

I am here to tell you these guys are going to rue the day they ever took this chicks cell phone. Yesterday she went up to them at the park and asked them how they liked having a cell phone with no chip in it, as we had it canceled. Then she asked them where they were going to get the thirty thousand, about sixty dollars, to go and free up the line. They just all gave her a really dumb look and shrugged.

Today, oh yeah it is still on. Those little creeps had the nerve to call her here at home and ask her if she would like to buy her cell phone back from them for forty thousand, or about eighty dollars! I could hear her yelling from my room as she told them to stick the cell phone where the sun don't shine. She asked them how in the heck they could ask her to pay for her own phone. They told her because of the embarrassment she caused them taking the police to their home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Are you kidding me? Please tell me this is a really big joke. As you can see she ain't laughing!

Give Me Six Minutes

You may be asking yourself, "why six minutes?" My reasoning it that this would be about the attention span of my six year old. Honest truth and I bet you would find the same thing with your child. They seem to be able to really put their whole heart and soul into something they really are not too interested in for about the length of time they are old.

This does not mean she cannot play a computer game for hours on end, which she can. It also does not mean she cannot take a shower for about an hour, which she does. It just means that she cannot really put forth
hard, concentrated effort for more than about six minutes.

For some reason I tend to forget this with subsequent children, but it really never changes. I see the same with my 16 yr. old. She can do her math pretty seriously for about 16 minutes. At around that time she has to get up and get a drink, make her some matte, or go to the bathroom. She will chat online for hours, but remember that is not concentrated, focused work.

It used to drive me crazy when my kids did this break thing. But I have been paying attention to it in myself. You know what? About 48 minutes is all I'm good for, if that!

As a side note, the cell phone that my teen gave a great chase for last week is now history. Yup got it ripped off at her "friends" house last night. I, not being the supportive oh I'm sorry mom that I am, reminded her that she was not supposed to be at that friends house anyway. She did not get any sympathy from us, which made her really mad. As she put it, madder than getting her cell phone ripped off.

She enlisted the help of our neighbor and had him drive her to the police station. They drove her to the guy's house, that she thought took the phone. He swore up and down that he did not have her cell phone, that it was two other guys. He even told the cops that these other two guys had taken his computer key as well as something else from him. I told her it was gone. She still went to meet a couple of friends today to try and beg them to give her phone back.

Her statement which I believe expressed the sentiments of all us living in Costa Rica were, "just because I live in Costa Rica does not mean I want to get ripped off". The people laugh at her and say "you are in Costa Rica, get used to it".