A Day in the Life of Unschooling with my Daughter

Let me first burst any expectations here with the fact that no day looks the same in our learning adventure. Ever.

You see, my husband and I have chosen to unschool our daughter, at least for now. Well, okay, I decided I wanted to unschool, explained what that basically meant to my husband, and he trusted my decision, bless him.

I’ll explain more in future posts, but for now, let me just say that when it boils right down to it, unschooling is learning by living life. Quite simply, it involves trusting small humans to know what they are interested in and how they want to investigate those interests. No school-like environment and no curriculum

Parent(s) do what needs to be done as part of life (appointments, self-care, work, etc.), inherently showing children how life works, yet also let children focus their time on their own passions and curiosities.

So, with that in mind, our days look like whatever we want them to look like. BUT, it also means that ‘schooling’ occurs all day, everyday, 24/7.

It’s not just a ‘curriculum’, it’s a lifestyle, and involves a big commitment.

As the parent (and ‘teacher’) I try to be as present as possible, ask questions, offer ideas for things to do/see/try/play/visit, be a resource guru, and attempt to say ‘yes’ more than ‘no’.

This is not for everyone!

wakie wakie Mommy & Blankie

My daughter generally wakes up around 7:30am these days. BUT, she just started a hard gym ninja class on Tuesday afternoons and I think she’s having a growth spurt, so she slept in this Wednesday morning (God bless her).

So our day blissfully started at 8:45am when my daughter walked into my room and crawled up into my bed with her blankie to tell me she wanted breakfast. Lol. Now that part of my day is predictable. The girl wakes up and she’s immediately hungry.

For the last year or more my daughter wants the same thing for breakfast 95% of the time: (non-dairy) yogurt and granola. I fix it for her, set it on the table, and she enjoys her breakfast while she watches YouTube* and I have a little breakfast and coffee while I check email, news, etc. on my phone.

* YouTube for her is not what you might imagine. These are her favorite YouTube channels:

I have been through many cycles of ‘she shouldn’t watch screens while she eats’ for many reasons. But the girl just can NOT sit and eat without being focused on learning something. There will be more food around and on her than in her. And she soaks up video knowledge like a freakin’ sponge, so I deal with it. I mean, this IS the girl who only wanted to watch animal and science documentaries as a toddler…not cartoons or PBS (except Clifford). *shrug*

post breakfast snuggle

Because of my daughter’s personality and sensory quirks (topics for future posts), she has never been a super snuggly kid. Loving and attached, yes, but physically snuggly not so much. However, in the last few weeks, she’ll finish her breakfast and climb up into the recliner I sit in to eat/read and want to snuggle and watch YouTube with me. Well hell, I’m not saying no to snuggles! Lol. So it’s become a routine. Sometimes her ‘brother’ (our cat) joins us and sometimes no. Today he went off to do his own thing.

Today was also different in that my daughter wanted to snuggle and watch YouTube videos for literally hours. And you know what? I let her. (I can hear the gasps now…)

Why? Because I was tired and she was obviously tired and it was quality time together. Because this little lady usually watches a video or two with me and then begs to play. When she snuggles instead she’s either tired and growing or not feeling well.

So I went with the flow and enjoyed the blessing of snuggles with my little.

And in that time she learned, among other things, how to make functioning mechanical systems out of cardboard, how cats react to saran wrap and other obstacles, and even got in some reading practice (she asks me to read the captions in some of her favorite cat videos – and she knows when I say the wrong word…lol).

The Tummy Decrees – both human and feline

Finally at 1:30 I tell my daughter I have to move. lol. I couldn’t sit in that chair any longer. Thankfully, her tummy decided it was hungry so getting up was allowed without too much of a tussle. We agree upon something for lunch and she watches another YouTube video while she eats and I can go get dressed.

(Everyday she gets practice in food science – always having to have a protein with her fruit, or a vegetable with her protein, etc. and when she asks ‘but why’ again we have another discussion about human biology, energy, and blood sugar…always learning!)

Now that she’s eaten and I’ve finally gotten dressed, I have to try to get her dressed. A year of isolating for a pandemic has made getting dressed a battle – staying in her nightgown all day is her preference, but I’ve found it messes with her circadian rhythm.

Before we even have to address that challenge, Daddy comes upstairs (he works from home) and tells my daughter to come look out the window at a cat that is sunbathing right outside. Cats – always a sure-fire way to get her attention.

So I suggest that we can go see if the cat will come visit us if she gets dressed real quick. Voila! She’s off. lol.

She picks out some clothes and brings them into my room (she can dress herself but she usually wants to do it near me so I can help if she gets flustered – a personality trait for another post).

…aaand another reason for unschooling with her.

For reasons I’ll get into in other posts, my daughter can shut down if faced with something too frustrating. She can also shutdown if not given time to acclimate to a challenge or new situation.

Schools often just cannot allow for that – I know that as well as anyone, having taught in them.

As she is getting dressed I’m tasked with “keeping an eye on the cat.” lol.

Long story short, she breaks down into tears when the cat starts wandering off into the forest, but I get her re-directed by suggesting an ‘experiment’ (she loves experiments) involving luring the cat back.

Gotta love a girl that can get excited about the scientific process!! lol.

So her little brain is running with it. I’ve been tasked to get our cat’s treats while she gets shoes, and then we’re off to go put some treats on the tree stump the cat was sunbathing upon.

She decides how many she thinks is appropriate…lol…then I ask her if she thinks some treats in other parts of the yard might be a good idea to lure him back. Oh yes! So she comes up with a list. I suggest that placing them in the blackberry patch may not be the best idea (“Why??”) because we might be accidentally training him to eat our blackberries. “Oh!”

There are a LOT of “why” questions in this house. But ‘Daddy’ and I have agreed from the start that she deserves to know ‘why’ she is or is not allowed to do something and is allowed to ask any question she wants, even if it’s a way of contradicting us. Because if we don’t have a good answer, then maybe we need to rethink our reasoning.

So she and I work together to determine a few spots around the outside of the house where treats might lure the cat back within sight. Then we talk about what else the treats might lure – a different cat, a possum, a raccoon, as well as why I said we don’t want to end up luring a neighborhood of cats to the house (it would stress out our cat).

So science, communication, problem solving, critical thinking, all are a part of our impromptu feline experiment. Which also aided in getting her outside on a perfect spring day (getting her outside can also be difficult – a combination of anxiety and sensory issues – topics in other posts).

the freedom and responsibility of choice

Now that we’re outside on a gorgeous spring day I give my daughter options. Let’s do something outside! We can go for a walk here, get in the car and take a walk somewhere else, paint something, play in the yard…and she decides to take a walk here. So she grabs my hand and we set off up the driveway.

I point out the two different Iris plants that are starting to bloom in the yard and then she checks the mailbox and finds there are ants in there. “Why are ants in the mailbox, mom?”

I don’t truly know but have some ideas. So, I ask her why she thinks there are ants in the mailbox. She decides maybe it’s their home, so I ask her what she thinks the ants would say if I asked them about it, and we have an imaginary conversation with her playing the part of the ants as we walk down the street.

Science. Drama. Oral communication. Critical thinking. Empathy/Perspective. Just spending that peaceful, inquisitive, yet silly time with her, communicating with her, set off all kinds of possible learning connections. I could have simply said ‘the ants wanted a cool, dry spot’ and be done, but this was far more fun for both of us.

We made it to the neighbor’s house, where we discussed the retaining wall he was building. How much faster he was building it than Daddy thought it would take, what made us think it was complete or still in progress, and why he was building a retaining wall in the first place. Physics, science, problem solving, observational skills, comparative thought, etc. in one short conversation.

I’m letting her decide how far we walk, and she suddenly stops and turns around. She tweaked her knee at Gym Ninja class yesterday and wants to go back. No problem! We don’t have a schedule and no appointments today so I’m going on her whim.

When we get back home I ask her what next. Go get a paintbrush I need from the antique mall she likes (and we can mask and distance well there), go to the park, sit on the glider for a bit…and she ultimately decides she wants to play at the park and her knee will be fine. Okie dokie then. Into the car and off to the park.

Buuuut, this mama is getting a coffee treat for the adventure. After I give my order and we wait our turn, she decides she wishes she had gotten a blueberry muffin. No worries! We can ask at the window – “really?!”

So at the window she starts asking me why I haven’t asked the man about the muffin yet – well, he’s making a drink right now so let’s let him finish one task before we ask him about another, etc. Learning about life in action. Learning it’s okay to interrupt the flow of things if done in a polite and timely manner, and why that’s okay. Learning she has options that aren’t even offered to her if she’s willing to speak up in a polite way. Totally made her day! Lol.

Again, unschooling is a lifestyle. Any moment can be a ‘learning opportunity’ if you decide to live that way. If it is in your makeup to allow and answer questions, encourage them even, and foster imagination and inquisition.

always learning…both of us

Now…which park to go to. It’s nearly 3:00, when our schools start letting out, and we are still in a pandemic. So, I’m trying to decide where is best and start asking her questions to help: want to go to the park with the fake trees to climb? “No, we’ve gone there a lot.” Okay,…hmmm…”but I want a park with a playground.” Okay, that narrows it down for sure. I’m stumped until I start naming all the parks and then ‘ah-ha!’ got it.

She asks which one so I have to try to figure out how to tell her. lol. The one near my therapist and near where Grandma works out. No help…lol. BUT, it starts a conversation about where things are and when she’s been there before, and what’s there. So she’s developing a concept of internal mapping, community systems, visualization, etc. and preparing herself for what she will experience (something that is really key for her to enjoy herself because of her personality…again, more in another post).

Somehow we get on the topic of how different a big town is from ours in the green time of Spring, like now. So, I compare our average Midwest town to a friend of mine’s – Istanbul.

I have made friends from all over the world during the pandemic, and tell Willa about them so she can have a more global perspective. So, I explain that my friend Ashkin, who lives in Istanbul, sees Spring very differently than we do because there are SO many more people there. Now how to explain that…

Have you ever heard the phrase that teaching something is the best way to learn it? It’s also the best way to determine if you actually know what you’re talking about. Lol. So my analogy was by no means precise, but I essentially explained about how many people are in our city and that it would take 100 of our cities to be all the people in Istanbul…BUT in the same area of land as our city takes up. Totally recognizing I’m probably terribly inaccurate, but it gives her the basic idea of LOTS of people stacked together as compared to our town of mostly yards and trees and single family homes. Unschooling = learning for her AND for me. lol.

Are you starting to get the idea of how our unschooling lifestyle often works?

Well, below is how the rest of the day went. (I’ll share another day in our life in the future and it won’t look anything like this. That’s part of the adventure!)

The rest of our day:

We get to the park to play but see a couple of geese with six goslings first – cuuute! My daughter wants to feed them part of her blueberry muffin, BUT we have a discussion why that might not be totally safe for them (processed food, etc).

She likes to play by herself at the park unless she finds just the right child, AND during a pandemic she doesn’t like to wear a mask outside so she tends to play by herself. She has focused today on trying some challenges that scare her a bit and she hasn’t been able to succeed at before. I try to balance watching her self-play with aiding her just enough to keep her trying instead of giving up.

I find I have to deal with my OWN issues (NOT hers) when she very politely says ‘no thank you’ to another girl asking her: ‘do you want to be my friend’? As a teacher and empath I tend to immediately think ‘she should be polite and play’ but as a mother working to be my most authentic self I zip my lip because there is no real reason she HAS to do that. She was very polite and had the self-assurance yet kindness to decline when she preferred to play alone.

We had many many short discussions about geese, about growing to reach different parts of the playground she couldn’t reach the last time we were here, about how other children were playing and why, about being proud of what she accomplished, about strategies for her next ‘ninja obstacle course’, why it seems everyone left at the same time, etc.

We decided on comfort food for dinner: macaroni and cheese with hot dogs and a vegetable. BUT, Daddy did not have any mac and cheese at home (my daughter can’t have dairy and I can’t have gluten, so we eat Daiya Mac & Cheese and Daddy gets the regular).

So, we decided to run by the store on the way home, which was a HUGE deal because my daughter had not been inside a store for over a year, thanks to COVID. She was SO excited: fully masked, in the cart, wanting to look at everything! lol. So she got to pick out a few ‘treats’ – some gummy butterflies, some of her favorite dill pickles, and some of her favorite granola in a new cereal. With each option, we discussed why she could or could not eat them (dairy), what she liked better than something else, and if they were good for her or not and why. She had the BEST time, and as a natural course of our outing we talked food science, health, commerce, and more.

While in the grocery store, my daughter saw some princess bath bombs and wanted one. She doesn’t want princess things often, but there was no way I was paying $10 for one princess bath bomb. SO, we had a short little discussion about how they put the most expensive options on the endcaps and the less expensive options in the middle of the aisle. Let’s go look down the aisle and see what other options there are.

She was very interested in why this was done and thought we knew a ‘secret’ to outsmart the store. lol. So it was a very fun lesson in consumer psychology and brand marketing…and yet I had to chuckle because while learning such ‘adult’ concepts, I still had to do very 6-year-old things like distract her from one side of the aisle where there were things I didn’t want her asking for.

So we head home for dinner and Daddy time. I generally work on my freelance writing projects after dinner while she has ‘Daddy play time,’ then he gets her ready and into bed while I continue working, until I finally go to bed myself. It makes for a long day for me, BUT she gets dedicated time with Dad, which she LOVES, and I get dedicated time to get work done for my clients.

She also learns about how I work both as a Mom and a writer (note my fuzzy co-writer), as I often talk to her about my clients if they message during the day. So she gets to see that ‘work’ can look many ways, because Daddy works from home in his pajamas, BUT she still remembers when he left everyday for an 8-5 office job and we would try to go have lunch with him sometimes.

You know what? Something I said I would NEVER do, we let my daughter watch her YouTube channels while we eat dinner too, unless we have guests. That way Daddy and I can talk and she gets more food in her mouth than on the floor, herself, and the table. The girl canNOT sit still when she’s eating. So she keeps learning while she’s eating as well – today it was cat videos from the Munchkin channel, so she was working on her sight words, experimentation with animals (I believe today was how they react to saran wrap), etc.

After dinner, as I’m working, she and Daddy generally play for an hour or two before bed. Today it was playing downstairs, which involved throwing and jumping and tumbling on the giant couch and imagining they were pirates (seriously, giant couch is the BEST imagination station).

She sets the story and characters, explains Daddy’s role and what he is to say, creates extra characters, limitations to his strengths, etc. So she is developing her oral communication skills while he also adds in tidbits about real pirates from history and what weapons they would have used or things they would have said. So history, truth versus legend, story development, oral communication, compromise and interpersonal relations, etc. are all being practiced.

After Daddy play time, she comes upstairs and starts asking me questions about what I’m doing while he gets things ready for bed. Thus, over recent evenings she sees the crossword puzzles I make for one client and I show her how the words work together, while today she sees the website I have been working on and what I choose to share here and why.

Learning about life as it goes, but it’s not just after school and on weekends – it’s part of her ongoing day. She also gets very inquisitive when she’s supposed to be putting her pajamas on and brushing her teeth…lol…so we balance the two but she’s still learning as she’s getting her tasks done. She’s also naturally testing her boundaries as a little human in this household, so she asks for the hundredth time WHY she has to go to bed now.

So, we go through it again – how she gets hyper and grumpy if she doesn’t go to bed on time, how we each have a responsibility to be respectful to each other and ignoring what Dad has asked her to do is not being respectful, etc.

Every night, as part of bedtime routine, my daughter picks a story she wants Daddy (sometimes me) to read. Then she gets to pick a meditation (it’s actually called a Sleepcast) to listen to from the Headspace app to help her go to sleep. From a very early age it was apparent to me that she deals with a brain that doesn’t turn off easily – like me. So we tried the Headspace app, because my own doctor had suggested it for me.

Now it has been a nightly routine for at least half of her life. So, not only has she learned a little about how her brain works (because of course she has asked about the meditations’ purpose), but she also learns about all kinds of random things from different meditation stories that she pops into practice at random times.

More times than I can count, when we ask how she knows something she says “it’s in [name of meditation].” Lol. Learning as she goes to sleep. I mean how much better does it get??