Keeping up with their interests
As unschooling parents, one of our biggest jobs is to keep up with our children’s interests, providing them as many resources and learning opportunities as possible for their passions. In some ways, this is more difficult than using a curriculum; instead of planning the year with one set of materials, things are constantly changing. Every day you wonder what you’re going to be learning about together.
This morning, for example, I found myself putting a detective kit together with Wood Sprite. We raided her chemistry sets—she has four or five, I think—to find tweezers, specimen jars, collection cups, baggies, labels and other items. She packed it all up in her new 4-H backpack (she won this through the Move Across Missouri program) and promptly went on to solve mysteries, including who the new car in the neighborhood belonged to (I already knew the answer to this, but she didn’t ask so I didn’t ruin the mystery!), what was making the holes in the front yard, what killed the baby snake by the compost bin (we are pretty sure it was one of the cats…again) and other mysteries.
Being a detective isn’t exactly new for Wood Sprite, but she’s graduated from simple treasure maps and sandbox hunts to more complex problem solving. It’s very exciting, but it’s also very humbling; sometimes I worry that she’s growing too quickly, too out of my league. Finding the gemstones I bury is no longer enough; now she wants to solve real mysteries. (And she’s very miffed that I don’t know of a local ghost mystery she can solve, so now I’m on the case for that, too.)
How do you keep up with your kids’ interests? I expect that I’ll eventually have to hire or bring in some experts; for example, she took piano for a little while, then graduated Kindermusik and now wants to play guitar. Grandma bought her one for her upcoming birthday and we already have some friends who offered to teach her since I don’t know a thing about guitars.
Of course, I also need to keep reminding myself that Sprite doesn’t need experts to learn anything. It’s that old, comfortable school mentality settling on me again.She has the library, the computer, the community and best of all, herself, to rely on.
Photo courtesy of Wood Sprite. This is one of her pieces of photo documentation for solving the mystery of the front yard holes.