Learning All the Time

Further proof that I should just leave that kid to his own devices. It’s summer holidays, guitar lessons are over, and the guitar is completely off my radar screen. I could care less whether it gets played or not. I know that Tee said he was keen to take lessons again in September, and I was happy to wait till then to start back up again with musical instruction.

So now that there’s no-one teaching him, and no external pressure to practice, it only stands to reason that he’d start strumming away for every visitor to the house, begin making up songs, and scrounge around for the long-lost music paper (sorry Meagan, I can’t remember what you said that was called!) so that he could write those songs down.

Now that he isn’t expected to play the guitar, he’s re-experiencing the internal desire to play it. Now that it isn’t a chore, it’s fun again. I have GOT to get this lesson through my thick head. My angsting and worrying and planning and micromanaging does not make for a better learning environment for my kids. My job is to give them the freedom to learn at their own pace, in their own way. It is very, very hard to trust that they will cover all the bases on their own schedule, even when I see it happening over and over and over again.

Summer holidays are a good unschooling template for me, because it’s a time when I am completely free of the need to “make sure the kids are learning something”. I’m A-okay with them spending day after day playing with friends, riding bikes, going to the playground and generally having fun. I never feel the pressure to get them to sit down with a math workbook and I never start feeling like I should make them study spelling lists. And why not? Probably because summer was free time for me when I was a kid. So summer is “supposed” to be unstructured. It’s all about learned expectations, isn’t it? I feel anxious about my kids having “too much” unstructured time during the school year because all of the other kids are in school, and because it’s a time when they “should” be doing “school work”.

Today, on a day when school wasn’t on any of our minds, the kids learned about solar ovens, evolution, early man and the human body. They did a science experiment with playdoh, and tried various ways to make water boil using the heat of the sun. They also read books, played with friends, drew pictures, and played outside.

I wonder what they’ll do tomorrow?