this is when you know

that life learning/ natural learning/ unschooling is working

for you and your kids (and so sweetly!)…


Last night I was cooking dinner and my son was a few feet away, chatting.

He said, "Something something something, Yuri Gagarin, something something something, Mum."

(and I wish I could remember exactly what he said, but we've both wracked our brains and can't remember why Yuri Gagarin's name came up!)

me: "Um, Who is Yuri Gagarin?"

my boy: "Oh, he was the first man up in space. He was a Russian Cosmonaut."

Then my girl, casually turning around from her desk, said, "And he died in a plane crash."

me: "He did, huh? How'd you know that?"

my girl, waving her hand breezily: "Oh, I read it somewhere…"


Of course she did…(!)

(and so did my boy),

read it somewhere, in one of our Space books,
one of dozens we borrowed from the library weeks ago, that have been out and available to read any time and every time…

And the information stuck… of course!



And then, after dinner

and after a game of
Duck Duck Bruce,

my boy started reading my book of Robert Frost poems,

because the other night (while my husband and I were out on our date)
he'd seen it on a shelf and—remembering the poet from something I'd read at Writers Workshop—decided to read some poems and loved them…

So last night we talked about another of my favourite (but sad) Frost poems, about a boy who died 'cos he was cut with a saw, and I said, "The poem's called "Out! Out!"
and my son said, "Oh, maybe it should be called, 'Ouch! Ouch!' "

(yes, he has a very sick sense of humour…! I'm so proud)

So he read that poem too,
and then I leapt up and
found my Norton Anthology of Poetry and we pored over it together,
and then he asked me about a nonsense poem I'd showed him once,
so we looked up Edward Lear and he read Edward Lear into the night.

Beautiful.


Tomorrow,
when we go to the library

we'll be getting Edward Lear's poetry and hopefully books with cats in them and

we will NOT be returning our space books
because we just aren't done with them yet
and…

this is how we roll.

This is how we learn and love to learn.

So random and beautiful…!


Kind of like life, don't you think?


:)