Unschooling Snapshots: Work
When Issac is over at Pappap’s Pappap lets him “drive” the Cabota.
He has gotten pretty good.
This is how we (my brothers and I) all learned to drive first the tractor and then the car.
Category: Educational play
Unschooling Snapshots: Work
Issac helping Pappap build onto a drain in order to flush the fish pond. The conversations that go on during these activities are more educational than most high school science classes. 🙂
Unschooling Snapshots: Fish
Issac LOVES feeding the fish–even though he is scared of the huge bass that only eats hot dogs. He can recognize most fish types around here and prefers the bass to the bluegills–despite the viciousness.
Unschooling Snapshots: Work
Issac spent most of an afternooon helping Pappap plant waterplants. Funny thing is he doesn’t consider it work–he was spending time “helping” Pappap.
Unschooling Snapshots: Logs
Uncle James and Pappap took down a tree last fall. Issac LOVES using the remains as an obstacle course/playground.
Unschooling Snapshots: Issac
I have TONS of photos of Issac hanging out with Pappap (my dad) so am going to divide one day into a slew of posts.
Let’s Go to the Pond
there’s really no place better, let’s go to the pond…. (If you don’t know the song then before you read the article you have got to visit here. We sing this song EVERY time we go to the pond–at least I do–the kids groan along and repeatedly request that I stop singing.)
On Thursday I realized that my son’s only pair of still intact jeans had a giant hole in the knee, were slightly too tight and definitely too short. (“I can button them if I hold in my tummy like this, Mom.”) So Buddy and I headed to Kmart (the closest non-thrift shop that might possibly have his size–7 Slim) so he could try on some pants and I could figure out what size he really is wearing. Turns out they had them on sale AND in his size. Which was good–because my boy is picky and all the other pants they had were about 3 inches too big in the waist.
Upon returning home from shopping for pants (he was less than thrilled that I not only made him go along but TRY THEM ON), we discovered that my dad had borrowed the girls. I should explain that earlier in the day the girls had decided to build a tree house in the rather tall tree out back. When I realized that they had used 1 inch nails to nail an old piece of pressed wood from hubby’s old desk to the tree–sticking out like a shelf, and that they believed that this shelf would actually hold one of them, 8 feet up, I told them to call Pappap before they did anything else. They did and he said he would come look later. Not only did he do that but he whisked them off to the pond to look for a better tree for tree house building, volunteering my brother as a helper for building.
Issac and I immediately turned around and followed them to the pond where we found them taking a walk in the woods while they waited for Uncle James to get home.
While waiting the kids relearned skipping stones.
And when Uncle James got there they attacked him–at my dad’s prompting.
How would you like to be attacked by this mob immediately after school.
My poor, poor baby brother. 🙂
To be continued…
Unschooling Notes
Since I have been so busy I am trying to make quick updates (and because of Flock it is MUCH easier to do so.) First, I finished another painting here.
The girls have been spending a lot of time recently on the Build-a-bear site so Issac has been spending lots of time with me.
Today he spent some time writing with watercolors at my desk.
He then asked to go to Pappap’s.
It was cold (really cold–19 degrees F cold).
But it was a beautiful, sunny day for a walk.
And Issac had a good time helping Pappap burn a pine tree that had fallen earlier in the month due to wind. He also worked out a ton of energy jumping on their trampoline.
Winter Unschooling
I am finally at a pause in all the busy-ness and wanted to share some unschooling type photos with you. We finally got some warm weather which meant, of course, the end of ice skating this year. So on the day it was still cold enough but warming quickly my dad picked us up for some more ice skating (because our car has issues with cold weather).
We were met with this:
About 20 turkeys were roosting in the trees and came down as we pulled in.
A cool thing we learned this year. It is better to put ice skates on in the warm garage but the garage is at the top of the hill and the ice at the bottom which means that there is only one way to get down that makes any sense.
We had had some snow but since we knew it was going to melt didn’t bother to clear the ice–which made ice skating kind of different than usual.
It was gorgeous and rather warm.
Once the ice got too soft to skate on it was time for tobogganing.
With Pappap.
And Mom, onto the ice.
And some bird watching.
Then warming up in the garage and playing with a 1 ton pulley and pretending to drive the tractor (which lead to a discussion of all the simple machines in use and how a snow blower works.)
Oh, and some squirrel watching.
And today most of the snow and ice are gone. It was 50 yesterday and today it was 40. And of course last night I found MY ice skates (I have been borrowing my mom’s which are slightly too big.)
Kayla comes to play
In case you are wondering, yes, life has gotten even more busy in surprising sorts of ways including multiple jobs I have had to get done which are not worth photographing (though I must mention I REALLY, REALLY hate Windows and reinstalling because people have managed to get viruses because they have done silly things) and I did manage to join the Art Center and get 2 paintings in the show this week. I won’t go into all of it right now–I don’t have time, but I will be sharing photos of some of the more fun to photograph bits of craziness over the next few days.
