Caterpillar Craft, Balloon, Blood Mobile 21 June 2011

Our fifth learning co op.

The bright morning started with making an adorable caterpillar on cloth peg.

Such a sweet one with a pair of goggly eyes. :)

Hui chose only her favourite colours.

Then, we watched "Blood Mobile", Here Comes Science. One of EnHui's favourite from  "They Might Be Giants".

You can find it on You tube.

 Balloons that I used to play when I was little.  

Hui seated among the mothers, browsing books. Her immense love for book is indescribable. I have never read that many books when I was young. Unschooler Hui reminded me of my huge mistake in "teaching" En to read.

En could read at a young age of 2 years old through flashcards. Glenn Doman was one of very first children books I read. I used his method since En was a baby. When she was 4-5 months old, where she could sat upright on her own, she would read countless of books dailly and spent long hours immensed in it. By three, she has read more books than I have read  throughout my whole life.

This was good till I was overly ambitious and turned reading books into "teaching" and "testing" and reading became more of a chore than merely reading for the love of it and bonding between me and En. .At the age of 4+, her interest for book became lesser.

And I learnt about unschool, about uninvited teaching.

"Anytime that, without being invited, without being asked, we try to teach somebody else something, anytime we do that, we convey to that person, whether we know it or not, a double message. The first part of the message is: I am teaching you something important but you are not smart enough to see how important it is. Unless I teach it to you, you'd probably never bother to find out. The second message that uninvited teaching conveys to the other person is: What I 'm teaching you is so difficult that, if I didn't teach it to you, you couldn't learn it. 

This double message of distrust and contempt is very clearly understood by children, because they are extremely good at receiving emotional messages. It makes them furious. And why shouldn't it? All uninvited teaching contains the message of distrust and contempt. Once I realized this, I found that I had to catch myself all the time. I have to catch the words right on the edge of my tongue. The problem is that we human beings like teaching. We're a teaching animal, as well as a learning animal. We have to restrain that impulse, that habit, that need to explain things to everybody... unless we are asked " By John Holt. 

Thanks to unschool, En's interest on book returned.