SHHH! She's Learning!

Since I decided to opt for unschooling Sierra, I have felt a little lost. There have been days when I've felt like all of the creative learning ideas I came up with while homeschooling Chase and Marina would end up packed away in a closet in my brain, unused. It's hard to teach a strong personality. Sierra is an explorer, much as I was. She learns best through self-discovery. If she asks for help, I offer it, but otherwise I've learned to step back and just let things happen. I also try to breathe slowly to reduce my anxiety about filling out those quarterlies.

What I have found is that I've inadvertently prepared for this little unschooler.

Many of my comic strips have covered some of the ideas and experiments I did while teaching Marina and Chase. I've amassed quite a collection in the four (five?) years I've been drawing them. They are a semi-autobiographical chronicle of our homeschooling years. Those who are new to my blog may not realize they can find the entire collection in my archives. But looking at them in the archives can be daunting. 600+ comics takes up a lot of space. That was part of the reason I added the Linked Within feature at the bottom. Sometimes it brings up comics I've forgotten about!

Sierra shares my computer for blogging and playing on various sites. She loves reading my comics and blog articles and makes use of the suggested reading links at the bottom of each post. I will often come to my blog and find an article or comic strip open that I haven't read in years. She's reading them. And she's learning from them. How do I know? I see it happening. Yesterday she wandered around the house with her notebook, writing down the reactions of each cat to a ball of fur. She had just brushed Merlin and wanted to see how the cats would respond to the fluff she collected. She wants to do further observations of the cats' behavior. I had written a series of comics depicting similar animal behavior projects the other two did for one of our nature classes many years ago. I never thought I would be able to share an experience like that with my youngest child. I realize now, that I have.