Saturday, March 12, 2011

Unschooling the Unschooled

When it comes to preschoolers, the best learning tactic is the random lesson- I am truly a believer in this, but not yet ready to jump into "unschooling". In fact, my children will not be homeschooled, mostly because i would go insane and they would hate me way more than I disliked even my mean high school algebra teacher (who taught me that I was bad at math). Plus my hubsand is a great great teacher and I know that there are other really great teachers out there that need to, well, teach!
Not that I think there is anything wrong with homeschooling, I know plenty families that really make it work, I just don't think it would work for me- unless someone would pay me really well to do it :) Anyway- for now though, I try to find creative ways to introduce Nolan to new concepts. This morning as we were cleaning up breakfast, my husband started laughing (really) at my rather adult explanation about what honey was. I said "I will not dumb anything down for him- he will learn it now and be a genius later :)" and then we went about our day.
Later as we were driving and listening to the Barenaked Ladies Snacktime cd (GREAT) they were singing about oxygen and Nolan asked what it was. Our conversation uncovered that 1) Oxygen is an invisible thing in the air that we must breathe to live and that 2) Oxygen is made by plants when they use the sun to make their own breakfast- he was pretty interested in the latter so we got into the process of photosynthesis. You probably couldn't care less about photosynthesis, I know my college students are not too amused with it AND I agree this may be a bit above a three year old's thinking, but I am a biologist so if I have an audience I am going to go with it.....
I thought we were doing pretty well and then suddenly he groans and says " photothenasis mom? what the heck?!" I busted out laughing- maybe I should be dumbing things down just a little :)

2 comments:

judejo said...

I'm going to quiz him next time i see him - that little fart doesn't forget anything!

Jo said...

aaron asked him about oxygen later and he said that plants made food and oxygen too and that we bweeve it :)