Unschooling Resource Post # Three

What else helps us unschool?

Our form of life without school means weaving education into life , threading an interest into a day, a book into a car trip, a movie alongside dinner.

A shopping trip and a discussion.

Learning to read with computer games and Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes.

Understanding strategies and problem solving playing Warhammer.

That kind of thing.

So what helps us in this life? We cook and we pray, as discussed in recent posts.

With the thread of prayer, our life is woven.

But to weave requires time.

Plain and simple, to unschool requires time. Not always quality time but quantative time. Time spent day after day, day in and day out.

And not even time spent in great pursuits, in learning adventures, or even mindfully.

These sorts of time are important to unschooling, to learning, to memories...but so is the every day time, ordinary time, time spent in the dailiness, the discipline of life...but spent together more often than not.

Time like a morning last week.

The older boys were up and went to university, with a friend who had stayed the night. I was going to work eleven a.m. until six p.m , no six forty-five a.m. start for a change and Mass for St Anthony at seven that night...so I had a slow morning... no rushing, just doing stuff at home, chatting to the fifteen year old unschooler son, doing a workout while he played computer games and then we did chores together. We went to the shopping centre and post office about ten and just had time to talk about inconsequential things ... but those things make relationships don't they? Anthony helped me buy shoes, we talked about his winter clothing needs then I drove to work and he went to the library, to walk home the thirty minute walk later, to do some Maths and Saxon Physics and meet up with his older brother at home to fold junk mail.

Almost sounds like nothing, doesn't it? But that is the simplicity of unschooling time.... That which is small is actually great. The little spending of time in small things reaps big benefits long term....The chores, the discussion, the reading is woven into learning and relationships and memories and Faith and Love.

The Little Way of Homeschooling. As in that new unschooling book. And that quote, again, of St Therese...."You know well enough that Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, but at the love at which we do them."