PART FIVE
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NATURAL AND UN-NATURAL
LEARNING
Sandra Dodd is an
unschooling mentor of many years. She coined the phrase “strew the
path” this gives me a vivid picture of a life filled with wonderful
learning opportunities and resources – from trips to the beach and
the park, farmlands, clifftops, mountains and gardens to owning and
using books, paints and other beautiful art supplies, computers,
culinary equipment and ingredients. All these are “real life”
things – and can provide much fodder for natural learning not
contrived, forced, readily forgotten facts. Of course, even natural
resources can be (in my opinion) “wrecked” by squashing the joy
out of it – take for example cooking biscuits. A small child will
happily stir, lick the spoon, roll out their own piece of dough, use
a biscuit cutter, watch as the biscuits are put on the tray, eat the
left-over bit in the bowl, as long as they know they are involved in
some way they will stick with you. Yes, even if it’s like Michael
aged 3 playing with the water in the sink. But that same child
some years later could have the process spoiled by being required to
write the recipe out, draw a picture, discuss the scientific process
happening when the baking soda and the warm milk are mixed together –
which I could call “turning something lovely into a school
project”.
I remember going to Lake
Rotoiti on a school camp, which I hated because I always get
extremely homesick, but this memory stays in my mind for the fact
that it clearly illustrates that for me “learning” had become
something I only did at school. We went for a walk around the lake –
it was drizzling with rain and we all had clipboards with sheets of
information, tucked inside plastic bags, that we needed to fill in as
we saw certain plants and trees etc. So what could have been a very
nice walk in a drizzly, dramatic real life sort of a day, was turned
into a “now we stop, and we look and we talk too much, and we get
our clipboard out of the plastic bag, and we read through the
instructions and we write this information down, don’t get it in
the wrong place, careful with your answers, no not in that section,
we have to draw the leaves in that box, are you even following what
we’re doing, yes, that’s right, and then we put the clipboard
back into the bag – don’t forget to put the pencil in, and on we
go, talking and rushing because we only have a limited amount of time
…”
Contrast that now with the
most natural and beautiful walk you could take with your children. I
have a wonderful memory that I can’t quite put together properly,
but speaking to my mum about it I must have been about 3 years old
and we went along on a school trip my brother had, deep into the
English countryside. Possibly it wasn’t hours away, but living
in the middle of London it was a rare treat to go to the country.
All I remember is the feeling of freedom, sunshine, warmth, trees, a
stile to climb over, wildflowers … I think my mind may have
embellished the memory to keep it sweet – my Mum doesn’t remember
it so well. Possibly it was a lot more work for her, especially as
my brother was rather difficult when he was younger. I hope my
children have a store of lovely memories like this.
In a perfect fictional
example of an excellent and worthwhile nature outing, the sort you
read about on the blogs of picture perfect mothers who make everyone
else feel guilty because their lives are not that neat, ordered and
satisfying, your children would walk nicely, respectfully and
quietly, stopping to photograph and examine anything that caught
their attention. You would stop and have a neat and picturesque
whole food lunch, sitting on a handmade picnic rug. They would
recall certain facts by themselves from books they had read, and if
you were interested in something you would ask their advice, and
offer any information you had, making a quick sketch in your nature
notebook because you wanted to, which action was then admired by a
child who later on asked for their own notebook to take on the next
walk. Actually this is entirely possible if you have a daughter
like mine, with a friend like Amber and if it was just those two plus
Amber’s mummy we could have a lovely time. But real life for us
includes quite a few little boys.
So in real life we’d
have children who didn’t walk so quietly, there’d be a certain
amount of whooping and yelling and zealous running back and forth, a
dropped camera, tears, a quiet child who wanted to examine everything
and a rambunctious child who wanted to get to the destination hardly
noticing the darling little curled fern fronds. Lunch would be dug
out of backpacks and you would be stifling great annoyance at the
fact that someone had put the drink bottles on top of the very ripe
bananas. BUT even in that scenario the children would be learning
naturally. ESPECIALLY if the parent had a
positive and excited-about-learning attitude, and was able to
maintain that attitude during the course of the adventure. I
struggle a little with this when there are arguments and stress
between the children.
I’m not saying that
clipboards and charts are wrong – just the other week our children
came racing in looking for clipboards and paper because they wanted
to chart the stars. I suspect it was because their big sister had
started that game off, and usually anything she does is going to be
fun. But it was their game – nothing I had made them do. The
same could be said if you model the act of taking photos of a trip,
and then compiling them into order and writing a short story to go
with it. Don’t spend hours over this, a child who enjoys your work
may have a go doing their own with the next trip you take.
For a quirky child, or a
child with sensory problems a walk in nature might not be their first
choice in activity, but still – handled naturally, rather than
forcing anything “educational” it will be enjoyable to some
degree. That same quirky child, even years later might remember a
schooly trip vaguely as a drudgery that had to be endured, like my
memory of the Lake Rotoiti trip. Our oldest son has reminded me that
quirky children may feel that many trips are spoiled by too many
people. Don’t feel that you always need to get together with a
group – you don’t need to make every trip into a “social”
event. We figured this out very early on as we stood looking at the
back of other children’s heads in Broadgreen, waiting for our turn
to look at what the lady was holding up and talking about. Field
trips are still counted as “field trips” when it is just your
family, or yours and one other perhaps if the children enjoy that.
For children on the spectrum “social” things can be very
stressful. The best thing for social contact for quirky children may
be a special interest group – a group of people getting together
FOR A REASON – the social contact is secondary and happens far more
naturally.
Spending time outdoors is vitally important for
children, every day should be an outdoor day no matter the weather.
This is something that we haven’t been doing recently, but now the
weather is cooler, and the wasps situation is less threatening we
will be outside more.
I just saw a quote recently that said “The best way to
get a child outdoors is to go with them.” Very simple, and very
true for some children. Even if they don’t need you outside, they
will mostly likely enjoy you being there with them. If you recognise
that boredom comes from within a child you may need to put more
effort yourself into providing things for them to do, long past a
time when their peers start to find their own activities. Sit with
them outside. Don’t turn it into a “lesson”, just drag a stick
around in the dirt making shapes that please you, or gather little
stones and make a house for an acorn man. Depending on the
personality of your child they may want to join in, or more than
likely if they are on the autism spectrum they may want to play
alongside rather than WITH you.
On that note, I’d just like to share a certain
strategy we have been introduced to: It is called FloorTime Therapy
where you encourage your child to interact with you during their
play. Apparently it can reduce the fixed thinking and need to
control a situation that people on the spectrum can be inclined
towards. We will keep this therapy in the back of our minds, and
bring it out once in a while, but for now it isn’t a priority –
the energy units expended to practice this therapy outweighed any
noticeable success at this time. A mother with two quirky children
once told me that any sort of therapy comes at a cost, I found that
to be true.
It is obvious in the manner of the child whose behaviour
becomes loud and defiant and he can actually tell you now that he
doesn’t like a certain therapy, or people coming to our house. It
is less obvious in the child whose sensory behaviour changes,
especially when the people leave. But there are no guarantees with
any sort of therapy. When I first heard that I felt disappointed
and exhausted even before I had begun. I wanted to cancel the whole
Aspergers thing and make my children neurotypical, because it was all
too hard. But I can’t do that. And even if I could it isn’t up
to me. God doesn’t make mistakes. He has made these children, he
chose me as their mother, and there are big lessons to be learned
here. The first time I met a psychologist who would be working with
one of our older boys I asked him “Why do you do this work?” He
said that “I love working out how these young people think, how
their brains work. And I have a feeling that one day, more than one
of them will achieve great things and I’ll be able to say “I know
that person!”
So having said all that,
and please excuse me when I go off down various trails – having
said all that, natural learning is really accepting that most
children learn perfectly happily and joyfully by themselves from the
time they are born and there is only one way you can wreck that for
them and that’s to interfere with their natural blossoming process.
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