Free Children

Ms 8 had another of her periodic fits of wanting to do school-at-home today, which I suspect will pass even faster than last time since she didn't even make it past the first hour before she had found something more interesting to do. This time I found her a blackline master map of Australia (courtesy of a link posted on the Australian unschoolers e-list a while ago which I bookmarked for future reference) and she added the names of the capitals. Then we brainstormed all the sorts of things she was interested in doing more of, while I took careful notes. The main interests she wants to follow up are geology and meteorology, so we hunted around in the bookshelves til we'd found all the resources I've collected on those subjects, and thought of different ways we could explore further. After that, she did a couple of pages in a maths workbook and a couple of pages in an English workbook, read through a short list of sight words, played at buying morning tea from the canteen, and then declared that one of the things you can buy from the canteen is an hour watching TV *chortle* She got me to set the timer for an hour, but before that was over Miss almost-1 had gone down for a nap and I started cutting out the pieces to make some new semi-fitted cloth nappies, so she joined me to make her own creative projects with the scraps. I will be surprised if "school" is resurrected tomorrow, although I'm now ready for her learning rhythms to start shifting into a higher gear. A good time to start planning some new things to do...