It’s that time of year when homeschooling maven mamas are creating educational plans for the coming year. This is our first summer since we jumped the tracks and became unschoolers. I see all these lovely plans and collections of carefully chosen curricula in cyberspace — ah I miss that! I LOVE planning. In fact, I feel kind of like a “junkie” watching people “shoot up” in an alley. Mama Mia! Such jitters! Such cravings!

Sarah just finished her standardized test and I’ve been drafting a Notice of Intent for the School Board. This is the first time I’ve ever written a description of our curriculum that doesn’t make mention of any actual curricula. That’s not really as hard as it sounds.

So … (does anyone read this neglected blog anymore? I guess I’ll find out. ) … this is what you’re getting instead of a homeschool planning post. Just me drafting a non-curricular description of curriculum and pondering a bit.

For me, a big part of unschooling has always been, in the words of Charlotte Mason, developing the habit of attention. The more I attend to what is going on, the more I see that I don’t need a curriculum or a timetable to ensure that the kids are getting a developmentally appropriate education. In the words of my wise friend Jennifer, it is “child led and seemingly casual, but actually closely observed and deeply thought out.” Unschooling is really a form of mindfulness. We hang out with our kids, really watch and listen to them, and play with them. When we see their passions and developmental skills poking their tender heads out of the soil, seeking the sunlight, we nurture them.

This is what I believe philosophically, and what I experience on a good day. In everyday life, I am riddled with questions and self-doubt. Occasionally I wake up in the middle of the night, in a panic, berating myself. What kind of darn fool allows her children not to be schooled, for God’s sake! — Egads, woman, are you DRUNK?

Then I blog, and I try to make sense of it.

This is my NOI “curriculum description” for Trishy:

Student: Patricia Elizabeth (age 5)

Patricia will continue to develop pre-reading skills through her daily activities, which include imaginative play, conversation, looking at books, listening to stories, and dictating stories and letters. She also enjoys drawing and “writing” – making letter-like marks on paper.

She will keep developing problem-solving abilities, including math skills, through her daily life. This includes playing games, counting and spending her money, and various hands-on activities.

What else is there to say? She can’t get enough of narrating wildly imaginative plays, which she acts out with little animals, dolls, math manipulatives, game pieces, or whatever else catches her fancy. She’s always talking, asking questions, sharing everything that’s going through her head. She likes to look at books, listen to stories, “write” and draw. If that’s not preparing to be a reader and a writer, I don’t know what is.

She also can’t get enough of board and card games — she loves video games too. Games have “taught” her logic and strategy (Mastermind, The 10 Days In … games), addition (Rat-a-Tat Cat — she got tired of waiting for someone else to tally her score and taught herself to add), comparing numbers (Feed the Kitty), sets (Blink, Go Fish) and so much more. She also gets a lot of play out of her pattern blocks.

I’m moving further away from thinking of learning as being something that is divided into “subjects.” For example, I’m less apt to think of Math as a “subject” and more likely to think of it as one facet of the process of building reasoning skills, thinking creatively about how to solve problems and thinking dynamically (more on that later).

Thus far, I haven’t needed any kind of plan to help Trishy learn these skills; they emerge on her own timetable. I’m trying to practice that mindfulness, strew some interesting challenges, and even throw out some standards-of-learning friendly seeds along the way.

If you scatter seeds, and the soil is fertile, they’ll germinate. If not, it’s not the right time — or maybe not the right seeds.

For example, when we were playing a card game one day, I pointed out that since she and I each had the same number of cards, we each had half of the deck. I didn’t think she was really interested, so I let it go; that was fine with me. Then a few days later, she was walking down the stairs holding her stuffed dog. She held up its tail, with her hand firmly clasped around the middle. “Look — this is half of his tail!” And so it was. Not long after that, she pointed out “half” to me as we were dividing up game pieces.

Encouraged by that, I brought it up again when we were collaborating on some mosaics with her pattern blocks:

I divided it in half and introduced her to the concept of symmetry. She didn’t seem to take off with that — which is fine too.

Lately Trishy has been really enjoying maps (we’re delving into a little geography through the 10 Days in … games), so I’m planning some “Around the World” activities for next year.  She is also quite interested in writing — maybe she’s been inspired by our Family Writing Club. She’s dictated a number of stories, and she laughs hysterically at her own wit as we’re reading them aloud in Writer’s Club. My personal favorite included a scene in which a family of dogs and cats caused an accident, fueled by a mishap at the gas station, which blew up the entire planet. Our intrepid heroes donned spacesuits and put the earth back together again. Kind of like a jigsaw puzzle.

A few days ago, I gave her a notebook with half of each page ruled, for writing, and half blank for pictures. She recently christened it by drawing a picture and writing/dictating the story to me. We did a lot of this in first grade, with Mrs. Ford, and I LOVED it. It’s actually one of my best memories of school.

She has also been telling me directly that she wants to learn to  spell words. She enjoys writing in her own cryptic language, but she realizes this poses a disadvantage if she wants to share her creations. So she helped me make some word cards for a Montessorish kind of activity — I’ll post a picture later.

That’s sort of a snapshot of where we are right now. I’ll blog about the other kids in another sitting.