Keeping track of learning

From my archives

Thank you paid subscribers! One of the perks is that you get to read some of my journal entries or discussion board posts from back when I was homeschooling my kids. I stumbled on this one from 2002-2003 today and thought it was perfect for the start of the new school year.

If you want to trust natural learning or unschooling or project-based learning a little more, here’s a great example of how a child’s subject-area learning interconnects with the interests they enjoy!

Hi all.

One thing that has been beneficial to me as a homeschooling mom, who is transitioning to a more unschooling oriented homeschool (since we didn’t start that way) is to keep a little log of what my kids do during each day.

I have a special calendar just for this purpose and I just jot down “Casablanca” (the film) or X-Box Halo or Discovery Channel “Temple of Artemis.” I was one of those moms who worried that “all my kids would do all day is watch TV and play X-box left to themselves.”

What’s been so wonderful about my little, informal log is that it is physical proof to myself that my kids are doing a lot more than TV and X-Box. It fact, it helps me to track the interconnectedness of what they’re learning which includes TV and X-Box. Imagine that!

For example, my kids love to watch Jackie Chan cartoons on Saturday mornings. Last week, we read aloud from the book In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord. Both of these have tie-ins to China which led us to reading more about China, the country.

We went on a curiosity binge of figuring out our Chinese birth year names. (Mine is the Year of the White Cow) Then we went from that to the constellations and various ways that other cultures count years and keep calendars (solar, lunar, or solar/lunar).