Archive for the ‘Unschooling’ Category
“But I’m bored!”
There’s a difference between boredom, and the quiet space and time that lead to new activity.
Children are without resources. They come into the world wholly dependent on you to show them the way, to provide for them, to create their environment.
When a child complains, “I’m bored,” it usually means that the current environment appears flat. They can’t see the possibilities any more. They’re used to the furniture, the materials, the toys, the games, the places these are housed. Routine and predictability are good for a smoothly flowing life, but they can be the enemy of creativity.
Rather than abandoning your child to his or her boredom, help your child to reinterpret the space. You don’t need to make suggestions (bored kids are notorious for shooting down each one as tedious, too difficult, not interesting). The suggestions feel coercive to the bored person, and not like they will create the relief being sought.
Rather, boredom can foster creativity if the parent wisely redirects the child into reflection combined with seeing the old with new eyes. Rather than saying, “Go play with your Legos,” you might say, “I wonder how else Legos can be used besides for building things…”
You might offer, “I bet if you hid behind the couch for 15 minutes with your flashlight, you might get some new ideas.”
Sometimes feeding your child helps. You could say, “While you figure out what to do next, have some crackers and cheese.”
You could turn your child loose with a new, more advanced tool.
“Take pictures with my camera while you figure out what you want to do.”
“What if you put on make up to look like (favorite character right now) while you think about what to do next? Use my kit upstairs.”
“If you want to use the mixer (or any appliance) for a new project, let me know and I’ll show you how it’s operated.”
“I find drawing helps me think of things to do. Do you want to borrow my ‘special Mommy markers’ for added magic?”
You can share methods that have helped you conquer your boredom:
“Maybe you will find something to do by clicking around the Internet for 15 minutes.”
“When I get bored, I page through magazines, walk around the block, read a chapter from a book, drink tea, go exercise… Any of those sound good to you?”
And you can do things silently:
- Put a new hat or scarf on top of the dress-up clothes and move the basket to the middle of the room.
- Arrange the library books on a coffee table in a stack.
- Add brand new drawing utensils or decks of cards to the game drawer.
- Bring the sheets and blankets downstairs out of the linen closet and tell your kids they can use them any way they want.
- Put the microscope on the table when it’s not scheduled for use.
Your role in facilitating creativity is to help foster an environment that awakens curiosity to explore a new function or new pursuit, that relieves the mundane from its tedium, and that leads to new uses of old things. Your job isn’t to solve the boredom with a scripted activity.
If after giving your kids these incentives, they continue to look bored, just know that this is the quiet, evolving space that leads to a new idea. You can offer comfort for the process:
“I bet it’s frustrating when nothing interests you… no matter what! I hope it doesn’t last long. Let me know if you need something from me.”
Then move on.
It won’t be too long before the new interest arises.
Email: What other curricula did I use?
Hi Julie,
Thanks to The Writer’s Jungle, I can now relax and teach writing in a more natural and fun way. Your blog has helped inspire our homeschooling and remind us of what really matters. I like your homeschool style and wonder if I could get your recommendations on any particular materials that you used over the years that you found to be valuable.
I get the idea that you are probably not the type to use a curriculum – but thought I would ask anyway. I’m sort of a curriculum junkie. I have two daughters, 12 and 10.
For the moment we are using the follow…..
- Math-U-See
- Singapore Math
- Apologia Science
- History Odyssey
- Writer’s Jungle and The Arrow
- Worldly Wise
I’ve wasted a lot of money on plenty of other resources.
Thanks so much,
Susie
——
Hi Susie!
I certainly did use a variety of curricula over the years. Some of it I regret (and cringe to think about now). Some of it I loved and would use again. And then for a period of some years, we unschooled (though the definition of that word varies group to group, but from my perspective, that is who we were).
Some of my favorite resources follow, as well as how I “solved” some of the needs we had where I didn’t purchase curricula. I have omitted choices I regretted.
Math:
- Miquon Math (For elementary school; combined with Cuisinaire rods—I literally didn’t understand multiplication until these books)
- Family Math (I loved this book – we did everything in it)
- Math-It (A game to learn multiplication tables quickly)
- Keys to… (Fractions, Decimals, Percents)
- Murderous Maths (Hands-down the most fun we’ve ever had with math; lots of volumes)
- The I Hate Mathematics Book and Math for Smarty Pants by the Brown Paper School company
- Saxon Math for Algebra and Geometry
- Tutoring for math in exchange for writing help between homeschool families
- Paid tutoring for high school math
- Parttime enrollment at the local high school
History:
- Sonlight (back when the Instructor’s Guides weren’t so enormous)
- Well Trained Mind for a reading list, and Story of the World books
- Personal rabbit trails and my own interests
- (My regrets are in this category more than any other so the list appears to be short.)
Science:
- Charter member of HENSE (Home Educators Neglecting Science Education)
- Kitchen chemistry experiments from books
- Ring of Fire Rock Study Kits (These are fabulous!!)
- DK books
- A telescope
- Nature journaling
- Bird study through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, including their BIG book and course.
- Biology through our co-op
- Chemistry through the local high school
Language arts:
- Wordly Wise (some of my kids loved these and others thought they were twaddle)
- Explode the Code
- Ruth Beechik (everything she wrote)
- Charlotte Mason
- My own writing resources
- Grammar Songs
- Winston Grammar and Advanced Winston Grammar
- Word Roots
- Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories (both volumes)
- Literature—selected by consulting reading lists for each age bracket and my own memories, the kids’ dad, and online trolling.
Logic:
Art:
- Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting (Oh My Goddess!! I just googled and all of her “videos” are now online for free. Just the music alone sent me wheeling with memories and happiness. Don’t miss these.)
- Linnea and Monet’s Garden (Then look at the recommended books and you will see all the others we read and enjoyed!)
- Any museum in driving distance, regularly visited. Bought the books in the museum shop to review at home.
We also had fun with Ancient Greek, Rosetta Stone Chinese (didn’t get far in it, but it was fun to wet our feet), and Power Glide for French. Still, in the end, it was much easier for my kids to learn foreign languages in school (they attended the local high school for language learning, all except Noah who studied Klingon on his own <g>).
Hope that helps! Would love to hear about other favorite resources in the comments below.
