Hello all! I wanted to give you all a sort of short peek into some of the things we might do during the typical unschooling week. Maybe this will give you ideas about what you might do with your own kids whether they be unschoolers or traditionally schooled. Either way, these are activities that not only encourage educational learning but mental, emotional, and social skills, fine and gross motor skills, and life skills.
We built an easel that her aunt gave her for Christmas. It helped develop her fine motor skills, confidence and determination, and engineering. As we worked, I showed her the letter labeled pieces on the instructions and she learned the names of the hardware bits we used (nuts, bolts, etc.)!Art time getting to use the easel we built!Playing board games! This is the Paw Patrol Mighty Pups board game she got for Yule. It encourages turn taking and other social skills, fine motor skills, counting, following directions, and decision making. It was fun! 🙂 See my upcoming review of the game here soon!Rainy day play! It was warm out and had been pouring, leaving big puddles outside! We love rainy days because of this opportunity, at least as long as there’s no thunder or lightning. We go outside and I let her get as messy as she wants before we go in and have a nice hot bath. It encourages a lot of the sensory processing skills and experiences that so many of our kids are lacking nowadays. Little Maxwell has been treated in the past for sensory processing disorder so these outdoor messy play days are especially important for her. After we have them and she’s all clean, she’s calmer, happier, and far more easy to engage in other activities. She even sleeps better! Sensory experiences can make a huge difference for kids of all neurodiversities. And the best place to get those experiences is outdoors.Night time play! Another day where it was warm. Soaking up the opportunity, we took our dinner outside for a picnic under the stars and to watch the fanfare that was our neighbor’s Christmas light projectors. Little Maxwell was enraptured! She wanted to know how it worked and explore the play of light on the house next door. It was also an excellent opportunity to point out some constellations and talk about stars and planets!Exploring some resin bug gems with a magnifying glass so we could see all the different parts and pieces and how some of them are even shiny and different colors! Bugs collected ethically.Some evergreen seeds we planted sprouting up! These will eventually become giant spruce trees that will help provide oxygen to the world as well as a home and shelter for many other creatures, plants, and fungi. We named this seedling ‘Ever’. 🙂 Planting seeds of all different kinds, especially ones that kids can help harvest and eat or use is an excellent way to encourage sensory experience, science knowledge, life skills, and helps grow and understanding and love of our natural world and all of the processes and creatures that make it up. For those of you who may be wondering, the orange peels inside of the planter help keep our cat away! The other plants behind is a cutting from a succulent that was once my grandmothers, then my mothers, and now mine. And eventually, when she’s old enough to care for it on her own in a few years, Little Maxwell will get a cutting for her very own! A multi-generational succulent! How special! 🙂
These are all just a few things that we get up to during the week. Rain or shine they are opportunities to be found outside and inside. There important life skills That children can learn that they’ll use for the rest of their life. Just a few examples from these snapshots are reading instruction diagrams, learning how to use tools and other hardware pieces, confidence and taking on projects, independence, astronomy, reading and writing, math skills. Maybe more important than all of those, however, is a love and passion for learning and a curiosity. The confidence and self-determination to do and learn on her own, without someone having to cram that learning down her throat.
Kids don’t need to be forced or coerced into learning. If you just give them the tools and step out of their way, You will be amazed what you see them do, create, and pick up all on their own. Admittedly, it is a little bit of a leap of faith. It can be scary sometimes wondering if you’re doing the right thing but then, one day, you look over and realize that they’re reading the words in their books without every being taught. Or they are building these massive complicated structures, picking up a musical instrument that they saw on TV, maybe even learning something like how electrical currents work in a circuit or how to build a computer program, without any teacher assigning a single piece of homework.
They can do it. They are capable and they only need you to give them the chance to show it. All we have to do is get out of their way.
Libby is a companion app for the previously reviewed Overdrive library app, the both of which are put out by Overdrive Inc, a subsidiary of Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten. Overdrive Inc also developed a book and audio book app specifically for schools called Sora that I will also be reviewing here soon! The three apps are used to connect library accounts and read or listen to books and magazines, watch videos and checkout resources from libraries where you hold an account, completely on the go! The best part? No late fees! Materials are removed automatically from your account and you even have the option to renew materials from the app as well! I’m pretty interested in checking out Sora tomorrow!
For today, however, we go to Libby.
It’s cute. That seems to be the prevailing commentary about it. I’ve had a local librarian comment when asked about it that Libby was user friendly and it’s interface is more simple. That it was cute, and to their credit, it is cute. Regrettably, that’s about the extent of It’s noteworthiness. My experience was quite the opposite of user-friendly. I found it to be very buggy whether on my Chromebook or on mobile. I can’t speak to how the iOS version is, but the Android version that I used was glitchy and frustrating. Granted, this is what I have to say about it as far as the end of 2019. I am certainly open to re-reviewing it in the future should these issues be addressed.
This list of issues and my thoughts on the app I do plan to send to the development team and I have refrained from leaving a starred review in hopes that these bugs will be fixed and I can review it again in the future. I had high hopes for Libby because I love and use the Overdrive app so much.
There isn’t a single day that goes by that I’m not using it for personal reading/listening or using it for our homeschool. I love that I can link my library accounts for two different local libraries as well as the account we have with the San Bernardino public library in California. We can check out books from all three libraries on a single app and it’s wonderful! I only wish I could say the same for the Libby app.
Granted, the bugs one person faces may not necessarily be an issue for another. Some apps can face similar issues if internet connection is sketchy or if the app is behind on an update, etc. I will be going into my review of the Sora app with an open and optimistic mind and that’s exactly what I hope you will do with Libby! If you face a similar experience as I did then leave feedback! The developers for an app can only fix issues that their users know about after all!
Little Journeys Everywhere 