Unschooling Day

Homeschooling moms can’t call in a sub.

But sometimes we have those days.

This morning I just don’t have the energy to teach anyone.

I also don’t have the energy to fight with my 8 year old daughter who is going through one of those temporary phases homeschooled kids go through, where they become resistant to doing any schoolwork. (She would be quite happy to read for several hours, which makes me think perhaps I should change to a reading based curriculum for her? Advice is most welcome!)

I know she’ll grow out of it. In the past she was one of my easier kids to teach, but now she and her 10 year old brother have switched places (I think they meet together late at night and plot out how to make mom nuts). Now she is the hard one, and he is the diligent one.

Or maybe it’s because the baby has just recovered from Roseola but is still fussy and doesn’t want me to do anything but pay attention to her. And she’s been waking me up all night for a week.

Maybe it’s because I’m on day 23 of my cycle which means my energy is turned inward anyway.

Not sure.

So I announced to the children that today was Unschooling Day.

I expected them to jump up and down and shout, “Hooray!”.

Curiously, I got no reaction other than, “Why?” from the 10 year old. See below.

What were they doing when I made this particular announcement?

The oldest is finishing up the last book in the Lord of the Rings series. (He devoured the first two last week.)

The 10 year old is creating soda machines out of Legos that actually work. (You have to insert “money” to make the mechanism work, and a little Lego Coke can spits out. He’s also making videos showing how he does it and uploading them to YouTube.)

The 8 year old is reading the Sunday comics, then cutting them out and pasting them onto paper bags that say “Ilana’s money”, etc. Maybe it’s her version of the Envelope System of budgeting?

The 5 year old is working in her garden.

She planted wildflowers in pots on our back deck.

Every day she dutifully tends to them.

As homeschooling moms, sometimes we feel a lot of pressure to be perfect, to be “on” all the time so that we present a good image to people. But we’re human, and sometimes we have bad days. That’s ok.

I guess the kids’ll be alright. You think?