It's working.....

I've read and studied homeschooling for a long time. The more I did that and the more I know kids, the more I believe that the unschooling thing really works. The bottom line in unschooling is that kids naturally love to learn and if you let them delve into what they're really interested in then greater learning takes place.

I believe it.

I was prompted to write this post after hearing "I LOVE the dictionary". Jill is reading something in the kitchen and decided to look up some words she didn't understand. (I love it when she does that!)

The other day Jill and I went to Wal-Mart. She saw a sign that said if you buy a certain kind of chocolate bar you'd get a spa vacation. I tried to explain to her that buying a chocolate bar wouldn't get us a spa vacation...but she was pretty sure it would. So we bought the chocolate bar (turned out I was right....but that's a story for another post) Since there was no spa vacation in sight we decided to go ahead and eat the chocolate bar...caramilk...four little cups worth. Yum! We each ate one and then Jill started to read the nutrition facts on the package....the light went on. She couldn't believe the percentage of nothing that was good for you was so high in that little package. She read and calculated and alarmingly discussed what the make up of the chocolate bar was. When we got home she hurried to the computer and looked up the nutrition facts of other food. She got on a real roll when she looked up McDonald's food. Now she was really alarmed! So she got some paper and did a comparison of a homemade sandwich versus a Big Mac. She drew circles and wrote info in the circles. The circles intersected and inside the intersected parts she wrote down things that were similar between a McDonald's sandwich and a homemade sandiwch...I don't think we'll ever need to go to McDonald's again. Even Peirce was wailing after Jill explained to him how terrible a Big Mac is for you (she's a good teacher!) Soon she found herself on the computer looking up information about McDonald's: how much they serve, how much they make, how much meat they use in a year, how much fruit, etc. She probably spent 3 hours on all that....reading, writing, researching.

If I had assigned her the same topic, believe me, she could have been finished in, um......about 7 minutes max.