Moving towards Autonomous education / true Unschooling

Alainnah decided to quit choir as well today. This is no surprise as I could see she was losing interest in choir and in her modern dancing as well as drama. She was just more interested in doing her stuff on the computer than going there. Which is fair enough. I guess I started properly unschooling only now. So that explains why she’s only making the decision to quit after having gone to these choir, dance and drama lessons for years after starting homeschooling. And I have to say, after having tried different approaches to homeschooling in the past nearly 3 years of homeschooling, from being totally “school-at-home” to Waldorf-inspired to eclectic… I think I’ve come full circle now finally. I mean, I started home educating with the highest intentions, after reading John Holt and Sandra Dodd and being majorly impressed by what I’ve read… not to mention, enlightened, and touched at heart. But I could never really loosen up completely. I kept feeling I had to have that control over what the kids did because I was worried that if I didn’t, things will go upside down.Well I don’t feel that anymore. I’ve tried the many different ways of home educating, and I learnt a lot about my children and their learning styles over this time. I have come to the conclusion that it is actually perfectly fine to totally unschool them. That I don’t need to be concerned about Math, language, or anything. I’ve seen how my younger kids just pick up knowledge naturally, as they go, guided by their instincts and preferences. I have to admit my concerns over control extend far more to my eldest than to my two younger ones. But I’ve since realised that I have nothing to be worried about because my eldest is perfectly able to pick up knowledge naturally without being coerced.

I have to admit that all this came about also due to a change in my own personal philosophy of life. I have and still am undergoing a major personal shift in the way I view life and existence. I’ve always thought of unschooling (or Autonomous Education, to be exact) to be akin to Buddhism in a way. It is to live and let live, to let nature take its course, to be kind and to value each and every person for the unique strengths they were born with.

It is incredibly hard to try and follow the Buddhist path, because life is forever testing our limits and we are not perfect. Ever. And to unschool (or Autonomous Education) is just as hard.

Letting nature take its course? What does that mean? Well it means truly letting go of control and preconceptions. To go with the flow of life.

To apply that to homeschooling, is hard. Because once one tries to coerce another into learning something, then it is no longer letting nature take its course.

For once in my life, I fully embrace the Buddhist concept that nothing in life truly belongs to us. And there is really nothing to lose, because if we don’t really own anything at all, there is nothing to lose.

I have been able to transplant that concept into my home education.

For once, I am able to just let my kids be, be who they want to be, do what they want to do. I will only step in if it appears to me they are being mean… and even then, I try to reason with them rather than guilt-trip them or shame them.

Only thing I can’t do yet at this point is letting my kids choose their own bedtime. We live in a small flat and my husband starts work really early everyday and needs a quiet home to sleep. And I know my kids will go potty over the no-time-restriction thing with regards to bedtime and stay up till crazy hours if I let them. And my kids will not be able to help making noise if they do.

So that’s something to be put off until later. Once we move into a larger place, I’d be able to do the unrestricted bedtimes with them. We’ll see.

But I’m glad Laney’s made the decision to quit the things she no longer felt interested in. I hope that by continuing to walk the unschooling, i.e. the Autonomous Education path, she will eventually find her own inner voice and let it grow stronger.

Helping kids learn to save

I felt we’d gained some headway today on reinforcing the you-only-get-pocket-money-for-the-work-you-do new rule in our house today. We implemented it not so long ago. Maybe a few days back, after we’d read this new report published by the Royal Economic Society about research conducted on children and patterns of saving/financial sense. And to be fair, up till this point, we have been quite dismayed at the children’s lack of financial sense, spending their pocket money straight away for instant gratification rather than to save up for the things they really want.

Take tablets for example. In our home, we have two (rather outdated now) ASUS TF101 tablets – me and my husband use them. We just never thought we should be buying such expensive toys for kids. But boy do the kids fight over them almost everyday. I didn’t like the fighting, and I often hoped they would find something else to do with their time.. but they didn’t. So I figured out a way which would be to up their pocket money and let them work for the pocket money (by doing some light household chores for us like tidying their rooms, helping clean up the lounge, cleaning the bath or the sink, etc.) if they are willing to do so.

So instead of doing what we used to do, which was to give each of them £2 a week regardless of what they did, we now say to them that there are £3 worth of pocket money a day, up for grabs. Now if all of them wanted to do work for us in a day, then the £3 would be split between them so each gets £1. If only 2 of them wanted to do work that day, then the £3 would be split between the two so each gets £1.50. If only one of them wanted to do work that day, then he/she gets the full £3. And if nobody wants to do any work for us, then nobody gets anything.

Simple?
That means though, that if they wished to work everyday for the money, they could possibly earn around £30 a month each. Which would enable each of them to have saved enough for a Google Nexus 7 tablet, say, in just under 6 months’ time. And if they wanted Apple iPads or something, well that would require just under 12 months of savings (and daily work) to save up enough for one.  Hell, me and my husband are not even happy to splurge on an iPad on ourselves! Let alone buy for our kids such an expensive gadget that breaks easily!
It’s really quite a lot of money to be giving children for pocket money to us. None of our immediate families ever gave their children as much as £30 a month at the age our kids are at. And of course we would still pay out on top of pocket money for anything which we feel is educational and we’d be happy to pay out for – stuff like dancing or music lessons, books, that sort of thing.

So yea… It’s only been in effect 3 days so far. On the first day, all 3 kids were eager to help out with chores to earn their £1 each. Yesterday my 2 girls both didn’t want to do any cleaning up, and only my little boy did, so he got the full £3. Today, after they’d been fighting over the tablets at home in the afternoon, with the memory of fighting for the tablet fresh in their heads, they’ve agreed to work for the pocket money quite eagerly by evening time.

I’m sure there’ll be days in the future when they don’t feel like working for the money. And days when they will. Whatever it is though, it is our hope that they will learn the value of holding back the desire to spend fruitlessly on very short-term goals. By associating the household chores with pocket money they earn, we are trying in effect to replicate something of adult life in a way. So if kids learn to see that the money they have comes from work, they might be less tempted to spend it all so soon… and might somehow be able to carry that mentality into adulthood.

Saving is such a good skill to learn. And these things start young. Few people go from being splurgers to being savers. The problem is that once one develops a habit of spending and not living within one’s means, the spending can go overboard and cause one to be saddled with long-term debt. (I speak from personal experience)

But… if my kids don’t feel like working for money sometimes, that’s okay too.

I am prepared to pick up the rubbish off the floor myself if they don’t want to. It is my problem, after all… since it bugs me most.

And its not a big job.

We live in a flat.

Home education is not mainly a mother’s role

It seems to me that many mothers get handed the brunt of the home education responsibility while dads seem to be mainly responsible for earning the dough to keep the roof over the house.

Well I dispute that. I for one feel that dads can and should try to be more involved in the home education of their children. Dads are very important role models for their children.

When I first started out home educating, my husband was skeptical. He was, as any typical schooled adult would be, apprehensive that kids will be doomed if they did not attend school, despite not having done very well in school himself. Whereas I just knew that home education can work so well with my kids. I’d done a lot of soul-searching, a lot of research into home ed for years before taking the plunge. And I am certain home education would have worked wonders for me and my husband respectively, if we’d been given the chance when we were children. In the beginning of our home ed journey, I was steering the “home ed ship” while my husband just followed and sailed along with me. Unsure, but he followed anyway. Which is nice. Over time, he saw the light and became much more involved in this endeavour. He’d seen that home ed works. Our kids do learn and evolve day by day, even without being forced to endure lessons in things they aren’t interested in.

You see, we’ve never been the kind of kids who paid attention in class. Or liked following rules just because rules were there. We had interests which we’d be happy to pursue all day long every day if given the chance, and whatever we felt had no bearing at all on our interests, we felt it pointless to be forced to go through the motions and study for exams in them just for the sake of well, graduating.

We both graduated high school in the end. I did well but I was always a bit of an impetuous, inquisitive, dreamy, closet bookworm in school so yes, I was kinda made for academics in a way, even though I was always interested in other things like art and music. If you asked me what is my biggest regret looking back at my younger days, I would say I wish I had pursued my interests in art and music more and not wasted so much time on academia – but in truth, I was completely brainwashed by my mum and dad to value academia over art/music at that time. Unfortunately so.

My husband on the other hand, didn’t do so well at school, but I think he was the opposite. His parents were not crazy about academics, and so never pushed him nor made him feel that academics were crucial for happiness or success in life. If I asked him what his greatest regret is regarding his childhood days, he would tell me he wished he had worked a little harder in school and gotten better grades.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Grass is always greener on the other side and all that. But I also realised that we complement each other very well.

I think its fab that my husband was hard at work on the sewing machine last weekend making new curtains for the caravan in a cool VW vintage campervan print fabric. Defying society’s stifling old fashioned gender roles… No. Sewing is not just a woman’s activity. It can be anyone’s. We’re no longer living in the stone age. And my kids will grow up knowing this. Good for them.

My husband’s mum had a role to play in all this. She taught my husband to sew and cook from young. It has never been ingrained into his psyche that sewing and cooking are “just for women”. And you can be sure this is exactly what I will be teaching my son, as well as reassuring my daughters that just because they are girls, doesn’t mean they have to rely on their looks or on men for their survival. Being female doesn’t mean they will have to be in charge of household chores and needlework when they become wives and/or mothers.

We bought a caravan a few weeks back. It’s not the newest model, cost about £800 and needed some repair work done to it, but my husband really enjoyed doing all that stuff. He loves working with his hands. Commonsensical. Practical. Salt of the earth. Just what I am not. LOL… and I love him for all that.

So you see, home education is not just mainly a mother’s role.

Dads can play very vital roles as well in this home ed malarkey, and it is something I know their kids will benefit from enormously.

Day out in Anglesey

We went to the isle of Anglesey in Wales for a day trip.

We spent about an hour in Penmaenmawr, which is a seaside town in North Wales. It is rather scenic but also a very pebbley beach which made for rather tricky walking!

I also noticed that many of the local adult men sported tattoos on their arms at the very least. Thinking of a few famous Welsh musicians (Lost Prophets and Catatonia…and Tom Jones, if you’re familiar with him), it did occur to me that rock/band music seems to be very popular in Wales.

My husband had an interesting chat with a local guy who was also at the beach with his little girl. He was a guy with tattoos right down the length of both arms and wearing a black heavy metal t shirt and jeans. The guy said he is into metal music and likes listening to Die Antwoord as a guilty pleasure (obviously said that after he learnt my husband is South African!)

Eventually we set off for the rest of our trip and drove down along the motorway all the way past Bangor and Menai Bridge, all the way to Holyhead – one of the most Easterly coasts of North Wales

We found a beautiful, quiet beach near the Holyhead Boat House and spent the rest of our day there. It felt private because it was so quiet and the people there were mainly families with young children or couples. It’s great that this place isn’t an overcrowded popular tourist destination. I envy the locals for having such a beautiful stretch of beach right on their doorstep.

Kids had a ball there. There were rock pools where they could study marine life, sand to play in, loads to seashells to collect, windy enough to fly a kite, the water felt clean and it was beautifully blue and clear.

Holyhead faces the Irish Sea and the water was cold (like the temperature inside a refrigerator) even though it was about 19 degrees Celsius during the day.

I saw some people on their jetskis and kayaks in the water when we were there, but it was too cold for us to swim in it.

Happiness is…

We’ve been doing a trial run of sleeping overnight in our caravan outside. The kids have been the happiest and keen. They absolutely love sleeping in it. Tonight is the second night running. Children require the simplest things to be happy. Parents who love them. A cosy little corner to snuggle up into at night to sleep, and in the day, a wide open space outdoors to run around in, cycle in, and play imaginary games with each other using bits of stuff they find in nature – a broken tree branch, weeds, even ash from last night’s burnt firewood. Children remind us adults of a time when life was simple.

I have been contemplating the possibility of us living a new kind of life.

Off the grid.

Travelling.

Just living in a caravan.

Not sure if that might ever play out though, but isn’t it nice?

“I want to be a dancer, mummy”

Erich bumped his head on the floor trying to do a front flip like you see on breakdancers.

He was very interested in the Rita Ora “Hot Right Now” vid when I showed it to him yesterday – the clip was full of dancers who can do breakdancing moves and flips. The dancers in the video just seemed to have caught his attention. I think he was trying to copy their moves today.

When I went to comfort him after he bumped his head, he told me today “I want to be a dancer, Mummy.”

I was playing some late 90s early 2000 trance music, for memory’s sake, and he was also dancing to the music. He got a pair of his Daddy’s sunglasses and just began to dance with sunglasses on. Don’t know where or how he got the idea… could be from seeing his Daddy dancing to trance music at home or watching the Party Rock vids or the Party Rock flash mob vids on Youtube… Erich looked so cool. For a 4 year old, that is.

He started ballet lessons about a month ago. We decided to put him in to try and correct his feet positioning – his feet tend to be inward-pointing – and I had the same problem as a child myself. I remembered my mum took me to a doctor who gave me these really awkward clunky boot-like shoes to correct them. Didn’t work because I refused to wear these shoes at home and outside. Then my mother had the idea to send me to ballet classes to correct my feet, and it worked… To be honest I’m a bit double-jointed today so I can voluntarily make my feet inward or outward pointing whichever way I want.

He had always been very shy to dance in front of people, hated doing it, would refuse to do it. In fact prior to sending him to ballet class, we were stood outside the ballet studio for the entire duration of the class, just in case he might not like it, throw a fit, and we can then step in to take him out of the class. We explicitly made it clear to him that he can just try it out, and if he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t have to go again.

But he turned out to like the classes. And ever since he started ballet lessons, we’ve seen a big change in him. He would now just suddenly hop off the couch or whatever, and start grooving to the music when he hears dance music or music with a “doof-doof-doof” trancey beat, whether it’s on the radio or wherever.

It’s such an abrupt change! LOL… We’d never anticipated ballet lessons would do this to him. FYI both my older daughters went through ballet lessons too but chose to quit them at 9 years old and 6 years old respectively… But do my daughters like to dance? They do. I don’t expect Erich to follow through with ballet as he grows older – because it’s very common for kids to want to drop out once the ballet starts getting more serious at around the Grade 2 mark – but if it helped correct his feet positioning, it would have done all we’ve wanted it to do.

Annike and her favourite toy – Hexbug

Annike wanted a Hexbug since she first saw it on Youtube last year. I held off buying it because it costs £14.99 a bug at that time and I thought that was very pricey for a little robotic bug, lol. Today we saw it going for a heavily-discounted price of £2.99 at B&M, so we bought it. She really loves it! Now she wants a Hexbug habitat and 5 more Hexbugs for her birthday present this year!

Late birthday pressie from Laney

My birthday is technically in November but it’s only today that my eldest decided the present she made was “ready” to be gifted to me. It’s cute and I truly appreciate it.

Cooking

My eldest is 10. She had showed an interest in cooking/baking since about a year ago, so I bought a big children’s cookbook for her last Christmas and she pores through it often, chooses recipes she wants to try, then we source the ingredients for her and then allow her to follow the instructions herself, only stepping in to help when she is unable to follow through. This builds up her confidence working in the kitchen. One cool offshoot about her interest in cooking and her budding confidence in it is well… She fries her own egg every morning for breakfast, and she even does it for her little siblings! She then makes her own toast, and I normally encourage my 6 yr old daughter to prepare her own toast as well. Which she does. And when my son is a little bit older, I’d also encourage him to learn to make his own toast as well. These are all basic life skills which I believe everyone should learn from young. I had a very different childhood where my mum forbade me to use the kitchen (odd as it sounds, its true) and I never learned to cook a decent thing until I became a mother at 24 and decided to learn to cook on my own so I can eat healthier (rather than rely on takeouts). A little too late I think. I had been relying on takeouts for years and had ill health because of that. It’s a good thing my daughter finds cooking so interesting. Makes it easy to teach

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Minecrafting together

Yup here’s my 2 girls playing Minecraft at the same time.

And where’s my little man? Oh, here he is!

Playing Minecraft on my tablet!

Minecraft madness