Walking the unschooling talk

Sometime over the School Holidays I developed a severe obsession with workbooks and written curriculum. It started as a niggle and progressed to middle of the night cold sweats over "screwing up my kid's education".
I pushed mindless busy work onto the kids, feeling smug and assured it would translate into the brilliant minds of tomorrow. Of course they didn't share my obsession and began to detest "learning". So much so that we agreed Akira should perhaps look at the school :( That was a wake up call for me. I lay in bed the night before the school viewing feeling sick...I had become a school-at-home mum not the natural learner I started off as.

The school was bleak; the deputy principal was frank---this school is disadvangted, has a huge violence problem and most kids are just scraping by academically.
Lucky Akira hated the idea of total loss of autonomy, individuality and constant scheduling. He did however agree that meeting kids would be good so we have decided to go to more homeschooling meets and make friends :)

All this prompted me to revisit the fundamentals of Unschooling and remember what it was that made me want to learn outside the classroom with my children.
http://sandradodd.com/unschooling

Immediately I invited the kids over for an impromptu Monopoly game (Maths), we walked to the lake and talked to community gardeners (Science, HSIE, art-nature drawing), today we made biscuits (more maths), painted and mixed colours (Art and science), researched Little house on the Prarie (history and geography), Akira read 4 chapters of Little House book to me and of course lots of LEGO....

So you see, Learning is just life. It is not something contrived that can only be accessed through a workbook...It is simply the act of living in this big wide wondorous world.