Looking at and pondering what many educational philosophies have in common with each other, I recently achieved a level of clarity and understanding, where everything fell into place for me.  I think I may have come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Homeschooling.  Actually, you could call it a Grand Unified Theory of Education, because I think this idea could be implemented in public schools as well… But, since I am a homeschooler, and this is a homeschooling blog, and to actually implement this in public schools would require far more change than most would probably be willing to do… let’s just stick with the “Homeschooling” side of it for now.

The fundamental basis of this Grand Unified Theory, upon which everything else rests, is this:

The most important stage of learning for any child is not until after they have started adolescence — usually around 14 years old.  There are essential changes that happen to the human brain when it goes through puberty.  Children around this age are capable of complex and abstract thought processes, and are able to analyze facts and ideas with great depth and insight.  This is almost entirely a function of physical development, and is not based on prior learning.

This is fairly well recognized as true, even if you haven’t specifically noticed it before.  This is the age of “high school” in the public schools, which is a very different environment than elementary and middle schools.  Classical education calls this stage “Rhetoric,” where students apply advanced logic and analysis to discuss, defend, and persuade myriad ideas.  The Waldorf tradition speaks of the “14-year change”, the beginning of the third 7-year-cycle of development.  In Waldorf terms, the first stage (up to age 7) is “hands” – primarily active and physical development and learning; the second stage (age 7-14) is “heart,” an age of deep feeling; and 14-21 is “head,” as they move into their intellect.

However you explain it, around age 14 is when our children become truly capable of deep learning.  And so my argument now, is that everything learned before age 14 is merely preparatory.  Not that it is unimportant, but that it is only skeletal.  A framework upon which the real learning that takes place in adolescence can be built.  Much as how knowing the letters of the alphabet is preparatory to reading (but is not, in itself, reading), education in the first 13 years of life is merely the setting up of the basic skills that will be needed for in-depth learning later.

So here is the second part of the Grand Unified Theory of Homeschooling.  Rather than worrying about “what my 5yo should know” or “what does a 3rd grader need to learn,” all we really need to concern ourselves with is “what should my child be able to do by the time he is 14 years old?”

Once you look at it this way, you find an awful lot of freedom.  You will quickly see that there are many ways to arrive at this goal.  And you will also, hopefully, realize that what any child knows at age 6 or 8 or 10 is, by and large, quite irrelevant.  (Not that the knowledge is irrelevant; just the age at which they learned it is irrelevant.)  Whether they start to read at 3 or 11, as long as they can read comfortably by the time they’re 14, that’s all that matters.  Whether they learn long division when they’re 8 or when they’re 13, as long as they’re okay with it by the time they’re 14, they’ll be fine.  Instead of worrying about lists and requirements for each and every year along the way, and whether we’re ahead or behind or what have you… why don’t we take a more long-term view of things?

And so the next piece of the puzzle, therefore, is what are those skills that are needed for the in-depth learning stage of adolescents?

This is my suggested list.  A child 14 years old should, by and large, know or know how to:

• read
• elementary arithmetic, fractions, patterns, decimals.
• cook a simple meal
• write a coherent paragraph
• look up something they don’t know (online or in books)
• do the laundry
• basic concept of historical eras in a broad sense
• basic concept of the earth, continents, and different cultures
• speak a few phrases in another language
• keep their belongings and their personal timetable organized
• basic understanding of money, budgeting
• draw, paint, sculpt
• tell time, understand seasonal cycles (not necessarily the mechanics of why there are cycles, just the fact that there are)
• brush their teeth, wash their hair, shower
• basic understanding of physical sciences (hot air goes up, gravity goes down, birds are alive and rocks are not)
• ride a bike
• swim
• cross the street safely
• talk to other people respectfully
• type
• choose nutritious food
• take public transportation
• light a match, build a campfire
• first aid
• sew on a button
• read music, play a musical instrument, or sing, at a basic level

You will notice that not all of this list is academic subjects.  In fact, most of it is not.  Yet all of these topics are, or should be, essential aspects of any child’s education.  They are all important skills needed for living life; and life is about much, much more than academic knowledge.

You will also notice that the academic parts of the list are rather short on details.  And that’s precisely the point.  The details are merely that — details.  All the fine-tuning, all the depth, all the details are easily learned in the adolescent or “high school” years.  One child might know a lot about, say, human biology by the time they’re 10, and that’s fine if that’s what interests them.  But it’s not necessary.  All that is truly necessary in the elementary years in terms of science, is that they keep a love of discovery and an interest in the natural world.

The same is true in pretty much every academic area.  Really all that is necessary is a basic framework.  The details and the depth come in high school.

So here is the final part of the Grand Unified Theory of Homeschooling.  Having recognized this list of skills as the goal for the first 13 years of life, it’s quite easy to recognize that it does not take 7-8 years of intense daily work and study to achieve those skills.  Some are best practiced from an early age, so as to develop good habits.  Others can be quite easily learned within a month or two by a 12 or 13-year-old child, even if it was completely ignored before.  Most homeschooling families will recognize that they will have mastered most (if not all) of these skills, at least the academic ones, long before 14 years old.

And so the point is, whatever style of homeschooling you find works best for your child and your family… in the end, the details don’t matter.  You can save yourself a lot of time, and a whole lot of stress, by not worrying about yearly timetables and schedules and curriculum requirements.  You can choose to follow a curriculum if you prefer to have that structure, but you don’t have to stress if your child seems “behind” when they’re 8 years old.  And even if they’re “ahead”, it’s still only just “details” — the real ‘deep’ learning still is not going to happen until they reach adolescence.  Until that time, everything else is just placeholding.  It is introductions.  It is frameworks.  It is exposure.  But that’s all it is.

Within this Grand Unified Theory of Homeschooling, there is an awful lot of freedom.  There is room for every individual circumstance.  Even the age of 14 is somewhat arbitrary… for some children, that stage of brain development comes a year or 2 earlier.  For others, it may be a year or 2 later.  But as a general goal to keep in mind, 14 is pretty consistent.

The main point I want to get across is this.  Grade levels and standard curricula are completely arbitrary, often based on child development science but not always, and are more often about being able to say you “did something” than about that ‘something’ being actually necessary to know at that age or stage.   Year-to-year curricula are useful for organization and planning, for learning habits and routines, but should not be taken as ‘rules’ or absolute guidelines for what a child should know at any particular age.  Far better, less stressful, less time-consuming, whatever homeschooling methodology or philosophy resonates best with you, is to take a long-range view.  Don’t fret about what they retain and what they forget when they’re still young, it’s all merely “details,” the real learning happens later.  Focus less on the year-to-year, and instead focus on the day-to-day art of living.

So what are your thoughts?  Is there something missing from this basic list of skills?  What are your experiences with the adolescent “change,” and how relevant – or not – were your children’s (or your own) learning experiences when younger?

In our case, it’s how I overdid early academics with my son, forcing him to do lots of workbooks (and yes, I do mean *forcing*) when he was far too young because I thought he showed signs of giftedness and wanted to jump on it, having been gifted myself (and never gotten the FULL chance to excel from a young age), as well as a desire to ‘prove’ how superior homeschooling could be.  It created a lot of damage and took us years to heal.

I learned my lesson well and learned a TON about homeschooling methodologies, freedom, child development, etc etc.  I resolved when my daughter Pomme was born years later that she would be unschooled.  At *least* until she was 7.  Around age 7, we might start some gentle academics if she seemed so inclined.  We’d use Montessori “lessons” through toddlerhood (not academic but practical skills) and let her be creative and independent and all that wonderful stuff I didn’t do with my son.  And there would be NO WORKBOOKS!  And I was so happy and pleased with myself, and so looking forward to this ‘better way’.

Well, then my daughter, barely age 2, started begging for workbooks.

Oh, not every day, but when the mood struck her, she could sit at her little desk and work for a solid hour, focussed and uninterrupted.

She’s now going to be turning 5 this December.  Along the way, everything else has indeed gone as planned… the Montessori practical skills, the independent self-reliance, the creative free range imaginative play.  But… she also LOVES to do sit-down academic work.

It’s like they do this on purpose, you know?  Just to drive us mad?  Just to keep us on our toes?  Just to always challenge our drift into complacency?

If she were going to school, she’d be starting kindergarten this year, although with her December birthday I think we’d have the option of delaying a year if we wanted to.  Except when I look at the kindergarten curriculum here… well, she’s finished all that.  It’s been quite awhile since I’ve blogged here, but as a quick catch-up: she’s now reading, loves doing lapbooks and learning about science, is CONSTANTLY asking questions and telling us “I learned something!”, and we’re almost finished Right Start Math level A.

What I really wanted to share right now is the story of what happened yesterday.

This time of year is, of course, back-to-school.  When I was young, this was my favourite time of year.  Yeah, I was a weird kid.  I love school supplies.  New pencils, crisp fresh new books, the latest nifty binders, colourful scissors, sparkly pens… Love it, love it, love it.  I’m almost 40 and I still love it.

I do not love shopping for school supplies this time of year, though.  The store is crowded, full to the rafters with parents dragging their kids around, supply lists in hand, desperately trying to get the 8 binders and the made-in-Canada-only pencils and the right colour pens and the white bristleboard that every store seems to have run out of.  It’s not a fun place, it’s a place of stress.

But, we needed poster mounting tabs for her new world map.  So off we went.

She, of course, was in heaven.  She wanted everything. But the thing that caught her attention most of all, more than the pretty pencils, more than the stickers, more than the bright highlighters… The thing that made her stop and beg… was the “curriculum helpers” workbooks.  Which every other kid in the store was very specifically and deliberately not noticing.

You know the ones I mean.  Every bookstore and stationery store has the little display of these grade-level subject practice books.  Usually there’s one for math, one for reading, and one for writing, as well as a big fat combined one for each grade.

My daughter picked up a grade 2 math book and exclaimed, “mommy!!!  This is math!!!  Can we get this??  Please!??!??”

I’m not making this up.

Now she is advanced in math, but not that advanced.  I took a look through the book, and well yes, she could do some of it, but really it was too much.  So I told her we’d need to look for one that had a “K” or maybe a “1″ on it instead of a “2″.  She eagerly helped me look.  We found “K” math — which a quick glance through proved to be waaaay too easy.  We found “1″ writing… but since we’re doing cursive first, any standard writing book would be useless, besides she’s not interested in writing too much yet anyway.  Unless it’s numbers, or her name.

We eventually did find a “1″ math book, and it was indeed “just right”.

She carried it proudly through the store, beaming.

When we got to the car, she couldn’t wait to start it.  We used her new pencils (I caved there too).  She’d read the instructions out loud, and spell for me any words too difficult for her (‘mom, what’s n-u-m-e-r-a-t-i-o-n?’)  She would squeal with glee when she finished a page.  She would whine with disappointment when she came across an activity that needed coloured pencils (since we had none with us).

When we went to the grocery store next on our errands, she sat in the cart and worked in her new book.

One lady stocking shelves noticed, and commented “oh, are you getting ready for school?”

Pomme grinned and giggled shyly.  I knew she was going to explain that we actually homeschool — she has been very keen on this fact lately.  And indeed, she did.  Almost.

She said “Actually, I do homework!”

“Oh,” said the stock lady, “this is homework, is it?”

I should add that school has not yet started in our district, though I know it has in many other areas.  So it probably seemed a little odd to her that this little girl had homework already.

I whispered to my daughter, “you mean homeSCHOOL, sweetie.”

She laughed and said out loud, “I mean, actually we do home SCHOOL!”

The stock lady said “oh, I see, you do homeschooling?  That must be very nice.”

“Yes,” said Pomme, “It’s way more better than regular school!”

Although it seems we need to work a little on grammar.  Heh.

Okay, I wasn’t going to get into this whole “Tot School” thing, since we’re not really doing all that much in terms of formal schooling.  But, she did a few really cool things this week, and I know that “Tot School” isn’t supposed to necessarily mean “formal schooling” anyway, so I decided to jump on board and share.  Maybe next week I’ll take more pictures too…

First, art.  I’ve been getting Waldorf-y lately art-wise.  I’ve just read Painting with Children — I’ll post a review of that another time.  I’ve also broken down and ordered Stockmar watercolour paints and some accessories (painting board, paint jars and holder)… We’re still awaiting those, so I decided not to do the typical early Waldorf painting experience, where we would start with just one colour to fully experience it.  Pomme loves drawing great details — even though she’s only 3, she draws people with hair, eyelashes and eyebrows, toes, teeth, clothes… she draws a baseline too, which is apparently very unusual for her age.

So I decided to do a Waldorf-inspired “child copies the parent” painting.  I started with a light wash on part of the paper, for the grass, which she then imitated.  Then another wash for the sky.  Then we added a tree, apples on the tree (using a different brush technique), a sun in the sky, and a few people around the tree, all of which she duly (and most excitedly) imitated!

Here is my finished model:

According to Waldorf art principles, the people are deliberately simple, mere suggestions of people.  Here is her finished work — she had a bit too much water in the tree paint, so it ended up spreading and fading as it dried, obscuring just how amazing her tree looked originally.  But it still looks pretty cool!

Notice that her people are more detailed than mine — she tried to add faces, hair, etc, which didn’t work as well with the thicker paintbrushes, but she refused to just to basic shapes like I had.  The taller person is daddy, apparently, and the shorter one is her.  Then there’s a mere suggestion of a person on the other side of the tree — that’s one of her imaginary friends!

This was such a fun and simple activity.  We’ll definitely do this sort of thing again.

The only other thing we did ‘formally’ this week was math.  We’re working through Right Start level A — nice and slow, she’s only 3!  But she gets it and she loves it, so why not, eh?

So far, she’s learned to recognize quantities up to ten at sight (when grouped as “five and something”), using fingers, objects, tally sticks, or the abacus; instantly count aural taps up to ten; parallel and perpendicular; squares, rectangles and triangles (which she mostly already knew, but didn’t know a square was also a rectangle!); and repeating patterns with up to 4 elements (ie, Red Red Blue Green).

Rather than using the “bead cards” (reproducible in the appendix of the book) as a manipulative, I decided to make Montessori-style bead bars — like the golden bead bars, but using the 5-and-something patterns of Right Start, and using natural wood beads à la Waldorf.  Here’s one finished set:

I’m actually really proud of how these turned out.  I plan to make another post describing how they’re made, with more photos, and a video of Pomme helping!  She instantly recognizes each one, it’s so cool.

This week she did her first official math worksheet, as part of lesson 10.  This was writing tally marks to match the number of objects shown.  She’s only 3, so her writing is not great, but I think it’s darn good for a 3yo… (today she wrote “mom” on her own…)

Ain’t she something?!?

Most of this, of course, has not been “taught” to her.  At least not with any sense of expectation.  She’s been exposed to the concepts, she works with them herself, and she picks things up in her own time.  We only “teach” her when she’s asking for more, which she often does — a sign that she’s developmentally ready to learn it.  I’m so glad that I’ve read Dr. Montessori’s writings on early development and letting the child’s own interests and instinctive drives to learn lead the way.  Mostly, we just sit back and watch her develop.  We try not to interfere by ‘helping’ too much, but let her figure things out herself — that’s what she wants to do, anyway!

The next phase in her numeracy development that I’ve been watching is actually counting objects (ie, recognizing quantity as opposed to merely rattling off the sequence of counting words).  She’s recognized and been able to identify quantities of one and two for a long time now, but anything three and up was hit or miss.  She’d often get three, but usually anything three or above was just “a bunch of stuff” to her and she’d name a random large number.

Given just the option of “two or three” she did fine — for instance, I’d shown her that the black keys on the piano are in groups of two’s and three’s, and she loves going up and down the keyboard, placing her fingers over the groups, and saying “two group” and “three group”.  (And she also now knows that the white key in the middle of the two group is D in his doghouse!)

Yesterday, she quite suddenly (to my observation anyway — though of course it’s been gradually developing for awhile) and spontaneously pointed at my hand and said “four!” — I had indeed had four fingers up at that time (I can’t remember why lol).  So I tried other combinations and she was able to correctly identify how many when I’d hold up my fingers, all the way up to five.  She was confident and excited and loved the game.

I’ve been thinking of different activities we might do today to play with this new ability.  Then about a half-hour ago, she was sitting on my lap while I was on the computer, held up her own hand, and counted “one, two, fee, four, five!” while raising her fingers in turn.

She’s got it!  By george, she’s got it.

Flipper was about three when he did one more big step — he held up his hand, counted up his fingers “one, two, three, four, five”, then thought for a moment while staring at them… then put his fingers DOWN in turn and said “five, four, three, two, one” — completely spontaneously.  I don’t think he’d even had any real modelling of counting backwards, he just figured it out.  I remember how stunned I was that he would do that.

I’m very curious when Pomme will figure it out!

So I pounced on Pomme’s bedroom, which at one time a few months ago had been a paragon of Montessori organization and the epitome of orderliness.  In a bizarre series of events which I’m sure most parents are well-familiar with, empty boxes piled up, toys multiplied and spread, clothes expanded and erupted from drawers.  Besides which, there were still several moving boxes stowed in her closet that had yet to be unpacked (mostly toys belonging to Flipper).

The boxes were unpacked and sorted into stuff for the basement playroom, stuff for Flipper’s room, and GARBAGE to be tossed.  Honestly, if it weren’t for the wasted space in Flipper’s packing boxes — full of garbage (sometimes literally, like a rotten apple core), empty containers, and just plain old wasted space due to thing packed loosely — we could have been able to bring several things with us that ended up having to get left behind because there was no more room in the moving truck.  Things like, I’ve just discovered, my bike helmet (not too big a deal, easily replaced and probably due anyway), and one of my saddlebags (a bigger deal, because it was quite expensive and I believe was storing the waterproof covers for both the bags as well as my cycling computer — another expensive item).  But I digress.

Then we went after her clothes.  She has grown quite a bit lately, so there were plenty of things to pack away that were now too small.  The poor thing actually cried about some of them, especially the shoes.  Other things, it was just like a fun game.  “Too mall!” she would happily exclaim upon trying something on (even if it actually still fit just fine).

After that, we could tackle the toys.  Now of course by “toys” I mostly mean, well, educational activities of a Montessori bent.  The toy-toys are downstairs, the “developmental” toys are in her room, so she has access to both worlds… a free-form, disorganized, creative free-for-all in the basement; and a calm, orderly, intellectually stimulating environment in her room.

But there were in fact, an awful lot of toy-toys that had relocated themselves to her room.   And even the Montessori-style items have been reproducing at an alarming rate — we recently inherited a fantastic set of lacing beads from her cousin, as well as a wooden texture-matching clock puzzle and an alphabet fishing game (which she just loves)… And I’ve yet to tell my husband that I finally broke down and ordered the metal insets which I’ve been pining for.   She’s very keen on letters, loves to draw, and is always asking us to write letters for her — I think she’s ready for the “pre-writing” exercises of the metal insets.  I actually had got her a simple wooden frame with an oval cutout as a cheap inset substitute, and she does so well with it, I can’t just leave it at that.

Those insets take up a lot of space.  And so do the number rods… which I also ordered.  She’s completely obsessed with numbers right now, and with the concepts of quantity and counting.  The number rods seem to be the appropriate ‘next phase’ for her right now, along with the spindle box — which I will make myself and save a few dollars.

So, with the extra space cleared out of her dresser drawers after the clothing cull, I was able to put away the little empty boxes and baskets that weren’t currently being used, as well as several puzzles and activities that either are too advanced for her right now or just aren’t being used.  These can then be rotated out every once in awhile.

I’m still not sure what to do with her closet.  I’d like to move the closet rod down to within her reach (or just add a second one below the one that’s in there now), but I’m not sure what to do with the area as a whole.  Most closet organizer systems seem to assume that you can access the entire width of the closet (or nearly so) from the front, but her closet (all our closets actually) just has a single, regular, door in the middle, despite its “double” width.

Well, I feel like it’s not nearly finished yet, but we made some very good progress.  Now I just need to remember to take some pictures…

Don’t want to take my word for it?  Have a look for yourself.  Here she is cuddlin Gunther the “orange cat”, who she used to just call “owan tat” and now calls “peu peu”, which apparently is the closest she can get to “Gunther”.

See what I mean?

Not convinced?  Here is how we came across her this morning.  Flipper walked by the bathroom and saw her in there.  She goes through phases of increasing demands for independence.  For a time, she only wanted to use her little green potty, then only wanted to use the big toilet with the cushioned seat insert and her little step stool to get up there.  And of course, she had to put the insert in all by herself (“DO IT SELF!!”) and push the stool into just the right place, which usually meant that by the time she’d got it all organized, she’d pee herself just as she was climbing up onto the stool and starting to pull down her pants.

Well, no more of that.  Now she skips all that ‘baby stuff’ and goes right to it.  I swear to you, this is exactly how we found her, she had no assistance in any part of this.

Yup, just sitting there doing her thing.  Number two, in fact.  And the book?  H.P. Lovecraft, of course.

So by now you’re saying, sure, she does cute things, but is she, y’know, truly cute, as in, to look at?

Exhibit three, pigtails.

I mean, come on.  That’s a face begging for a magazine cover.

Okay, I’m just supremely chuffed that she finally does have enough hair to put into pigtails.

She loves them, gets very excited about them, then about five minutes later, pulls them out.  How do you get toddlers to keep their hair up???

See?  There she goes.

Well, I’d like to conclude this argument for Cutest. Baby. Ever. with a final montage of Pomme at her domestic best.  I’ll mention at this point that she made the hot dogs for lunch pretty much completely by herself, putting the weiners in the pan, turning them over with tongs, removing them and putting them into the buns.  But I didn’t get any pictures of that.  What I did get is a documentary of her latest discovery… she can reach the kitchen faucet.  And therefore, she does the dishes.

Well, I rest my case.  Cutest Toddler Ever, both in appearance and in action.  So what do we win?

I’m particularly looking forward to Home is Where You Start From‘s look at Homer’s Odyssey.  As I’ve mentioned, we’ve recently shifted to a Charlotte Mason style with my 10yo son, Flipper.  Into week 5 now and still liking it!  For history, we’ve been doing “introduction to history” things this session (each of our sessions is 6 weeks), looking at archaeology and what history means, as well as a wee bit on the earliest civilizations   Our next session will be Ancient Egypt, and I’m all planned up for that.  Following that, we’ll be taking a session on Ancient Greece, which I haven’t done too much planning for as yet.  I’ve heard about only a couple adaptations of the Odyssey for kids, so I’m very keen to check out all the great ideas in this post.

The Recession Depression Therapy blog has a post on Cookbooks for Kids, and I think I’ll have to search out the Little House inspired cookbook!   I’ve recently been exposed to Montessori’s teachings on little kids in the kitchen, and so my 2yo daughter Pomme helps me a great deal with food preparation.  But I was none so enlightened when Flipper was a wee boy, and boy oh boy it’s a struggle to get him interested in helping.  Or doing anything for himself.  “MOM!  I need you to butter my toast!” is a refrain heard far too often.  One trick that sometimes works is dangling the carrot that girls like boys who can cook… he’s only 10, but he’s already looking forward to finding a wife!  What works the very best, however, is one cookbook we have, a Company’s Coming cookbook for kids.  He’ll do absolutely everything by himself when he finds a dish in there he wants to try.  He even made breakfast for himself and his sister this morning, a toasted “cheesy apple melt.”  I’ll pass, thanks.

The Thinking Mother ponders about Self-Directed Learning Moments, and how not every “teachable moment” has to involve parental interference.  Once again, I find Montessori parallels… Dr. Montessori observed, very wisely I think, that parents and teachers should not automatically jump in and help, cheer on, encourage, enrich, advise, or otherwise interfere when a child is absorbed in something.  We want to help, it’s a natural impulse, but in fact we’re breaking their concentration.  Since learning this, I’ve found myself having to restrain my impulse to ‘jump in’ with Pomme fairly often (although like any habit, this has gotten much easier with practice), wanting to show her how to do something, or — even worse — just do it for her.  I’ve been gratified, amazed, and enlightened to see that when I just sit back and let her do her own thing, she’ll figure it out on her own.  Not only does this foster confidence and independence, but it’s practicing her own problem-solving skills.  Of course, if she gets frustrated and ASKS me for help, I will.  The idea is not to never help your kids.  It’s just to realize when they really do need help, and when they just need some time to work it out for themselves.

And finally, Dad’s Homeschool Blog sings the praises of StumbleUpon as a search tool for homeschooling resources. I’ve been using StumbleUpon myself for awhile, to help promote my articles at Eco Child’s Play as well as my little blog here.  I’ve also randomly stumbled through their listed sites, and have found some really amazing things.   I’m a bit annoyed right now, in fact, that my latest Firefox upgrade seems to have deleted my StumbleUpon toolbar, so now I have to go find it and install it again.  Such is life, I guess.

According to her, the one on the bottom is a cat, the one at the very top is a pig, and the rest are whales.  The spots are eyes.  She has labelled her drawings before (usually as whales lol), and she has drawn circles, spots, and lines before.  The new thing this week was deliberately making spots to represent eyes, using different drawing techniques to represent different parts of a whole.

She has also started to be able to trace shapes within a stencil.  I’d love to get the set of Montessori metal insets for this purpose, but can’t really afford them right now.  For now, I picked up a $1.50 wooden craft frame with an oval shape (which you can see in the picture), and we also use Flipper’s drawing tools triangles.

She loves to use Flipper’s dry erase board, and that’s fine by me.  It’s easy to clean the dry erase marker if she ‘misses’ the board, and she can erase and do it all over again, getting lots of drawing practice without leaving mountains of scribbled paper.

One Montessori item we did invest in was a set of wooden place value number cards.  I had initially put them out of her reach, because she’s not really ready for those kinds of math concepts yet.  But she found them and took them down and has been happily playing with them for weeks.  She sorts them by size and colour, identifies what digits she recognizes (for instance, she’ll say “one zero zero zero” for the one thousand tile), and practices putting them away:

We haven’t “instructed” her on anything with these, she has created all her own activities with them.

In fact, just after this picture was taken of her putting them away, I turned my back to her to focus on the stove and dinner.  When I turned back again a few minutes later, I assumed that I’d see them all put away, or perhaps taken out again to repeat putting them away.  What I saw instead, was this:

How cool is that?

Anyway, as I said, she likes to identify what digits she knows so far.  She has a wooden number puzzle which has pictures under the digits.  For instance, there are four dogs under “4″, seven hippos under “7″, etc.  At first, she would solve the puzzle just by fitting the shapes, but soon made the association with the animals.  She would pick up the puzzle number “7″ and say “hippos!!”  One exciting day (exciting for me as a proud mama), she saw a number 7 in a completely different context, just a regular printed digit 7, and very enthusiastically said “hippos!!”

Ah, the first step… the recognition that this particular shape, or symbol, represents something.  It didn’t really matter that she hadn’t yet made the connection with the symbol and the concept of quantity.  What mattered was the concept of symbol itself, of one thing standing for something else.  And what’s more, this 7 did not look exactly like the one in her puzzle, which is slightly cartoonish.  So she was recognizing that it was not the size, or the colour, or style, or the wooden-ness, or the texture of it that mattered… it was the basic shape itself.  Very, very cool indeed.

We haven’t done anything to “correct” her animal associations.  All we do is add to it… when she says “hippos!” for 7, we say “yes, seven hippos.”  Over time, she is picking up on this concept and has now substituted the real number name for most of the digits.  She identifies 0, 1, 5, and 7 consistently, 4 most of the time, sometimes mixes up 8 and 9, or 6 and 9, but she’s got the idea.

We have another set of smaller place value cards, that I made myself for Flipper before deciding to buy the wooden set.  She loves to pull them out of the baggie they’re stored in and sort them, and label the digits she knows.  As you can see in this video, she still uses the animal association for some numbers:

So that’s it! A week in the life of an unschooling, self-determining, Montessori-inspired 26-month old.

There is very little that we have actually ‘taught’ her.  She knows lots of things, of course, including some “academics,” but for the most part it is things she has simply absorbed.  Things that we have more directly “taught” are always under her direction — repeated as she insists, dropped when she wants to move on.  And so she is learning the alphabet and numbers from wooden puzzles (and still identifies the digit ’3′ as “cat!” since the puzzle shows 3 cats under the puzzle piece), and can count ‘by rote’ to 10, and count groups of objects accurately up to about 4.

But most of her “learning” is in practical areas, and this is most definitely from following her lead.  She demands to learn how to do things.

Following Montessori’s admonitions of letting children do things and not interfering, she is allowed to do many things not normally thought of as toddler activities.  I have learned to allow for the extra time for her to accomplish something, rather than feel a need to hurry her along by helping out.  I have also learned to stand back and let her make mistakes, and watch amazed as she figures it out without my diving in to ‘save’ her… or, if she cannot yet puzzle it out, she will calmly come to me and ask for my help.  And so I meet her only where she needs help, and not just where I assume she needs help.

And so before she was 26 months old, she was able to almost completely dress herself.  She sometimes gets her pants on backwards, and has a little trouble with shirts sometimes.  But she can pick out a complete outfit, underwear, socks, and all, and get herself ready independently.  And if you dare try to help her before she’s truly in need — watch out!

Some of her non-typical toddler activities include household things like vaccuuming, folding laundry, emptying the dishwasher, and drying dishes.  She is allowed to cut paper with scissors and slice cheese.  And she even helps me at the stove, stirring macaroni, turning hot dogs, mixing scrambled eggs.  Before we even get to the stove, she insists on helping to measure and pour ingredients, mixing and stirring it together… and cracking eggs!

So I’m sharing this video I took of her cracking eggs into a bowl the other day when we were making a white chocolate layer cake.  She actually cracked 3 eggs this time, I only caught the 3rd on video.  The first few times she helped with the eggs, a few weeks ago, she got a few little bits of shell.  Now she’s perfect every time.  She even puts away the empty shells and returns the carton to the fridge when we’re done. 

She had received Melissa and Doug’s clock shape puzzle for Christmas… or her birthday.  I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember which.  I think it was her birthday.  (Her birthday is only 2 weeks before Christmas so hopefully I can be forgiven!)

The shapes are the same 12 shapes.  They’re a bit smaller in the clock puzzle, and of course have big numbers printed on them, but it is the same set of shapes.

So I put it all together.  Shape puzzle pieces on the matching cards, clock puzzle pieces on top of the shape puzzle pieces.

First of all, I just thought this was COOL.  But I also had to think “educationally” so… this teaches that a shape is a shape whatever the size… which, admittedly, she already understands because she loves to draw and point out “GIG ty-goh” (that’s “big triangle”) as well as little ones.

It teaches coordination and dexterity, to place the smaller one on top of the larger.  Which she can do and has other tools already that practice the same skill… It teaches size differentiation, to determine which is the smaller one…. which she can already do.  Um, how about, colour doesn’t affect shape either?  Oh I know, we could use it to talk about colours, “put the red triangle on top of the… oh, both triangles are red, aren’t they… okay, put the green rectangle on top of the… oh right, the other rectangle is missing…”

It introduces the written words for shapes, therefore concepts of early literacy, letters, sounds, etc, as well as the verbal words for the shapes.  But it did that before I added the second set of shapes.

Um… so…

I guess it’s just cool.