Unschooling: FIRUM KHALILA FOOR YOU TO KILIR AN

The first letter my daughter ever wrote to me. She's five, almost six. By standards of the local bureaucracy, she wasn't quite old enough for kindergarten last year. But no matter, we've been homeschooling her since day one. (Khalila is the Moorish Orthodox name I've given her.) We're doing a style of homeschooling called unschooling, which means we don't try to recreate school in the home. Some homeschoolers do that, to various degrees, and I'm all for each family doing whatever works for them. Some homeschoolers we know have been laying off on the "school" stuff like worksheets or schedules, since they've begun to see how kids really learn. Kids love to learn. They cannot help but learn. And a person learns best when they're actually interested in something. And when they can learn in a style that works for them, at their own pace.

So it has gone with reading. We've read to her since she was little, and over the years, without much prodding from us, she's learned to recognize letters & connect them to the sounds they make, learned to read simple words, learned to sound out words she doesn't recognize. All this without an arbitrary, dualistic conflict between "phonics" and "whole words," and without any agonizing on our part regarding which expensive curriculum we should purchase and follow through on to make sure our little scholar is keeping up. Forget keeping up. Take time. Let it sink in. For a while she wasn't trying to read words any more, and we didn't sweat it. Then she started writing.

I had my face stuck to the screen, I was probably on this very web site. Khalila had earlier drawn a picture of a "winter bear" with abstract mosaic-like drawing around it, which she called a map. She told me it was for me to color on. Then she took it away, hid somewhere, and wrote on the back side: FIRUM KHALILA FOOR YOU TO KILIR AN. From Khalila for you to color on. Sure, it's all wrong. But that's all right. She took the initiative, and did what she wanted to do.

Next she wrote me a note, folded the paper in half, and made the outside like an envelope, with a doodled stamp in the stamp position, "FRM JJ" as a return address ("From JJ", a pretend name she chose), and "GO to NAMBr 50,00" for the address, which she said was number five thousand. I was gushing. I mean, we never sat down with her and gave her a lesson on how to properly address an envelope, but she has helped us stamp and address envelopes from time to time, and that's enough to get the idea. Unschooling.

We wound up spending the rest of the afternoon writing notes to each other. She would tell me what her notes said, and I began to get a better sense of how she's making sense of writing words. A few days later a relative (whose identity will not be shared) came over. She kept insisting to Khalila that she was spelling things wrong and that this is the right way to spell. A few minutes of that led to an uninterested, uncooperative child. Schooling.

Almost every written word she sees is spelled "right", and as she learns how to write, she will be interested in communicating effectively and spelling things sensibly. We're just happy she has taken another step. Unschooling.