On 'Autonomous Home Education'-and then maps! · Tuesday January 30, 2007 by Ann

I have been looking at how people describe/define/explain Autonomous Home Education/Unschooling, in response to a post on our local list and one from a friend.

I have been enjoying Joyce Fetteroll’s Joyfully Rejoycing
She summarises by saying “”Put the relationship first and then figure out how to fit everything else around that.”
When asked what an day in the life of an ‘unschooler’ looks like she replies “To put it in a nutshell, unschooling days are like great days of summer vacation. They can be anywhere from filled to the brim with activities or they can be laid back leisurely days of watching clouds (or playing video games ;-)”
I will happily second all of that!

The question most often asked next is of course-well if you are not sitting down doing formal work-how do you know what they have learnt?
The answer is, it is immediately obvious whether a child has understood something, from their reaction and questions they may ask, in response say, to a TV programme we have been watching or a one to one ‘purposeful conversation’ we have been having. What is not always obvious is how much more learning is going on afterwards-inside the person.
In a recent edition of the Home Education Journal Jan Fortune-Wood said “Most of what autonomously home educated children will learn will remain in their private minds, not amenable to testing, perhaps not even articulated, but some of it will suddenly flourish in the world and blossoms can come out in quite unexpected shapes and colours.

An example of this happened after Lucy and I had had a discussion -early on in our HE time, when Lucy would have been about 9 years old, about vowels and vowel sounds in words. On the way home down the M42 in a storm, several weeks later, Lucy asked if all languages used words that had vowels in them in the same way that English does. She had been looking at some Welsh words on signposts during our holidays in the summer and and was wondering about their construction. Do the same rules apply in Chinese? in Arabic? This of course lead to long discussions with Welsh, Iraqi and Chinese friends in order to find out.

It leads me to think there might even be a possibility that our severely dyslexic daughter, might one day end up taking a course in the English language possibly to a high level or maybe just for the sheer pleasure of it – or perhaps she will be a crossword/Scrabble enthusiast to rival her father. So how can this be when she was effectively so left behind with reading and writing when she was in school (she was measured at aged 8 as having a reading level in the bottom 3%) and didn’t really start to read until the age of 13-and we are not making her sit and do work?
Because as Jan FW again says; “Anyone, with a real interest can plunge into any area of learning if they have the intrinsic motivation to do so, whether it is degree level physics or silversmithing”

David had done no formal work at all for the years he had been home educated-yes we had covered lots of subjects, yes we had been on lots of visits and he had spent his time enjoying his life, but not one bit of formal sit down and have a lesson sort of work. Then out of the blue it seemed, he declared one weekend that he had decided to go to college and do some qualifications and to get himself a Saturday job. He did both, enrolling in college within a couple of days and getting a job, both with great success.

Autonomous home education fascinates me-you never know where you are going to end up in any one day. I could be helping with sociology statistics, or with revising psychology theories. We could be involved in painting a Warhammer figure, doing a piece of ‘Batik’ or making a rag rug. We have taken long, long walks and talked and talked and talked. I have helped to write a poem on a beautiful hillside in Malvern and helped to Lucy to commit to memory to be performed at a Street Festival. I have learned to milk a goat. We helped to take down a tee pee in the valley of the river Wye. I have helped to make electrical circuits and bath bombs. We have curled up in bed, reading stories for hours on end, on wintry days and made igloos in the snow on a snowy day. We have been fossil hunting on a beach in the sun and the rain! In short all the wonderful things other parents of schooled children, get to do for very short periods between school, home work and bed, we get to do all day if we want ;o)

And as I have said before autonomously home educating in this way has allowed all three children, but especially Lucy’s, education to run ahead, whilst allowing their reading and writing ability to catch up in its own time, without the pressure stifling a love of learning and a thirst for knowledge.

Maps seem to be figuring in our HE days at the moment.
We have had a text message from Tom’s brother and his wife they have arrived safely in the Philippines-so we have had the globe out again, so that Lucy can see how far away they are now. We have discussed that they are flying to Dubai first and then on to Manila, followed by a local bus journey. Comparing how far they have to go and the time it takes has given Lucy some insight on how quickly planes travel, when compared to how long it takes us to drive to our favourite holiday haunt in north Wales for instance. This came back to the amount of fuel it takes to get the plane into the air, to stay there and to travel that distance in so short a time. Lucy realises what the energy costs of this are and is now considering her desire to travel the world compared to her desire not to waste energy and how she might address this in her lifetime.

A chance comment from Rich was that the island is directly below Hong Kong on the map, made it easy for us to imagine where it was. Lucy then asked if you look at a flat map of the world would it be the same as if you flattened out the map on a globe.

This lead us to looking up world maps on the Internet and then discussing the Peter’s map-and how some people think that it would be a better representation of land mass if you were to flatten out the globe.

Once we had the big world atlas out we began to look at all sorts of places. We have close HE friends who emigrated to Florida a year ago. We were looking up where they live on the atlas, compared to zoning in on their house plot on Google Earth David was surprised-he hadn’t realised that Florida stretched as far south as Texas did. He then told me a load of things he knows about the Texan and Mexican border-things he has learned from television and films. I noticed him studying the map of the world that is pinned to the wall in the bathroom, whilst he was brushing his teeth today. I wonder what else he is noticing.

We plotted our home, the homes of their half siblings (Bromsgrove, Nottingham and Wirksworth in Derbyshire), the site of the Okehampton EO gathering next month and all of the other camps and gatherings we go to, onto Google Earth. The we got out the OS maps we have of those areas that we have collected on previous visits. We looked at how hills/valleys/roads/railways etc are represented on the OS maps and talked about scale on the maps – taking us back to the difference the distance from here to the Philippines is compared to here to north Wales!

Then when it was time for Lucy to go off to join her friend, to go off to Explorer scouts, we needed to find out where her mom lived in the next town as that is where Penny was staying. We got the local map out and I showed Lucy how to use the index, to look up the page it was on and we traced the journey together.

I can’t believe another week has flown by and it is time for Explorers again! All three of the youngsters are out again tonight, staying with different friends, but three year old Nancy has been here today all day and is staying over night with her mom Louise-so the house isn’t as quiet tonight as it would otherwise be.

A long post, catching up with three days of activities! What next?