Noah insists on unschooling
Aug 10, 2002 Homeschooling
Everytime I try to do anything “schooled” with Noah, he shoots me down.
Yesterday we went to a working historical farm that’s about 45 minutes away from us. It’s like Frontier House without the evil Clunes. No one actually lives there full-time but they have park employees (I think) and volunteers, who come out dressed in 1880s garb and work the farm. They buy their animals from the Amish and the vegetables are all heirloom varieties. It’s very cool. And, by the way, it’s free.
So this is the second time Noah and I have gone. I, of course, am bubbling with 1880s facts because I’ve read all the Laura Ingalls book and fancy myself an expert.
“Noah,” I say brightly. “Did you see they have a kitchen that’s built behind the house? That’s called a summer kitchen. Now why do you think they’d have a special kitchen just for the summer?”
Noah ignores me.
“Why do you think they’d have a special kitchen just for summer?”
“I don’t know,” Noah answers politely. “Why do you think?”
I told him but I don’t think he cared.
We wandered around the farm and everytime I tried a prompting question, he would ignore me or turn it around on me so I finally got the message and shut up.
What I realized is that I’ve got to drop *my* ideas about what counts as learning. I had already decided that the point of this visit was to give Noah a grounding in history but Noah hadn’t decided that. He wanted to see the animals and he didn’t care if they were in authentic pens or what. I reminded myself that because we’re homeschooling, we’ll get to come back to this farm again and again and again and that Noah will probably discover many layers of learning. He’ll probably be interested in the historical part another time. This time, what he did was connect the animals he saw with the animals we’ve read about.
(We just got done reading Charlotte’s Web and now we’re reading a Dick King-Smith book.)
Noah wanted to examine the animals minutely. He was surprised by the size of the ducklings feet and he wanted to know why turkeys were so ugly. We saw the pigs and Noah wanted to find a stick so we could scratch the pigs back “like in the book” so we did that. He got down and watched the strange piggy noses and we talked about how what’s ugly to us might be beautiful to them. We pet the horses and watched a farmer hitch one up to haul hay. He helped herd some escaped sheep back into their pen and he watched a farmer walk an ox back to the barn. Then he examined some of the animal bones that the farmers save to grind into bonemeal for fertilizing the garden.
Noah also pumped water and hauled it to the tomato plants (pumping water is his favorite thing), relaxed in a hammock and then he fell off of a swing. I don’t really know what he “learned” at the farm but I learned plenty. I’m going to have to trust Noah more and (even scarier) I might become superfluous to this whole homeschooling thing. But that’s the point, right?
Now those Laura Ingalls books did end up coming in handy. When we saw the ox, I told Noah that I had a book about a little boy and in this book he gets two oxen and trains them.
“Their names,” I told him. “Were Star and Bright.”
This interested him. When we got home, I got out Farmer Boy and we read two of the chapters about Star and Bright. I’ll admit, despite the lesson just learned at the farm, I slipped a couple times to ask, “Hmmm, how do you think Almanzo will solve this problem?”
Noah, however, didn’t let me get away with it.
“I don’t know, Mommy,” he said patiently. “Why don’t you read some more so that we can see?”
August 11th, 2002 at 9:15 pm
Have you heard of the books by Thorton Burgess? Great animal/nature stories. He wrote them ~1912 so the language is different from how we speak but my daughter loves the stories.