The First Report

Life has brought me, at last, to this forum. I need a place to track and share our walk through this unschooling adventure. Here is a place to catalog and collect ourselves. A place for friends and family to note and share our progress. A place to capture those rich moments that glitter and wink in our days. Are we arriving home exhausted at the end of a typical kid filled day complete with mud and scraped knees and the cranky hunger that mark dinner time? When looking back do we remember a blur of blond and brown heads running and jumping and leaping through the forest? Do we remember the ten minutes stolen out of our day when we found a lizard and stopped to chat? Then, dropping back packs and grocery bags and dog leashes, we rush inside to discover the scientific name of our swift stripey friend. Did I grab the camera? Here is a place for the photo. Here is a place to share the name we delighted to find. Here is a place to tally what we learn, our report card to ourselves. A place to highlight our progress as thoughts of grocery lists and bills unpaid slip back for a moment and let me see and share, written out and miraculously concrete, why we are unschooling. Why we forgo a second income. Why I choose to be here day after day after day. We are working hard. We are having fun. And the children are getting their education, mostly and surprisingly, in the stolen moments. We learn as we go along, stopping, noticing, negotiating, and desperately defending the time and space to walk slowly or run as we need to. Did we have a trip to the park? Or did we just have a class in biology, ecology, and sociology? The answer is, all of that. And it happens wrapped in a jumble and confusion of marvelous dirt and even occasional long days of boredom. If I don't take the time to sift through the dog hair and Lego's and note our learning, I almost miss it altogether. The kids don't miss a thing. They arrive before me with hungry tummies and full minds, glittering. They know how they got that way. Us grown ups are more distracted. We want a place to see just how the kids arrive home for dinner hungry and full at the same time. Perhaps dependent on quantification, we need report cards.