Unschooling moments

Yesterday my daughter got out her "Clifford Magnet Math" book, which comes with small magnets with bones on them. You use the magnets to fill in little squares in the book, which is designed to help kids learn to count to ten. Toward the end there are also some simple equations like 1 + 3 = 4, with the corresponding squares to be filled in.

"Where is the taking away page?" A. asked me.

"You mean subtraction?" I asked. "Like with minus signs?"

Yes, that's what she was looking for, but it turned out there weren't any such pages, which A. found quite annoying. She thought it was ridiculous to have a book with adding but not taking away. Anyhow, she resigned herself to filling in 8 magnets on one of the counting pages, and then saying to herself "Eight take away two--" and she'd remove two magnets-- "makes six." And then she'd count the six remaining magnets to verify. She did this with various combinations of numbers. Apparently she was determined to do both adding and taking away.

She's been counting everything lately. Earlier she was surprised to get 5 green goldfish crackers in a handful of 7 crackers. "There are only two that aren't green!" she pointed out. I resisted the urge to go into instructional mode and trot out the word "probability," because she tunes out when I interrupt what she's doing with that tutorial tone in my voice. (I can just hear her reply: "Okay, but can we talk about this later? I want to eat these crackers.") So I merely agreed that with so many colors, it was very strange to get 5 of 7 that were green.

Today, just as I was wondering about the suspicious silence, A. came downstairs with a sheet of paper on which she'd written "fiSH". "Wow," I said, "I didn't know you knew how to write fish."

She had gotten out an old Maisy book which includes a wheel you can turn, inside one of the pages. At the bottom an object will show up in a little window, and in another slot at the top, the name of the object appears. You turn the wheel, and another object and another word appear. She used this to write fish, crab, octopus, boot, bucket, and starfish, and she seemed to remember which was which. She also wrote boo since it was only one letter away from boot. "See, this Maisy book teaches you to read," she informed me.

And right now, she's sitting on the floor putting together three-piece puzzles, one letter per piece, which show a picture and spell things like cat, dog, bus, and van. I forgot we even had those, they must've been hidden in the game closet or something.

It isn't that I doubted the concept of child-led learning, but it's still reassuring to see A. trying to learn these things herself.

Hurrah for unschooling in action!