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Let’s be real, as a parent considering home education or unschooling, the thought of your child missing out on crucial academic skills may be keeping you up at night. Perhaps you’ve told your family and they’re more worried than you. “How will they ever get a job?”
Firstly… fuck that being the pinnacle of a successful life! (We’ll come back to this in a future post.)
Regardless of their ultimate economic activity as an adult, taking your kid out of school, or never even sending them in the first place, will not ‘ruin’ them.
Far from it…
Unschooling (self-directed learning) in a loving supportive family provides children with the space and freedom to become the best version of themselves.
With our old “schooled” way of thinking that was difficult to fully grasp. But like you can’t stop a toddler from graffitiing the walls of your house… learning is inevitable.
As you keep reading this post, you’ll see following a curriculum isn’t necessarily necessary. Opportunities for kids to acquire and sharpen core skills like science, English and maths are hiding in plain sight amongst the carpet of cereal, baking soda and slime.
Anarchy to alchemy
Part 1 and Part 2 of Anarchy in the Kitchen showed how our little kids have more freedom than we ever thought. Particularly in the kitchen.
As we continue to deschool ourselves and do our best to move away from modern over-protective parenting pressures, the kitchen has become their laboratory and educational playground. As we live our home educating lifestyle, their messy play is evolving into a desire to cook, create, explore, experiment and evaluate.
The kids want to know how stuff works.
They’re beginning to quantify and compare what they see and develop and share their own theories about the world around them.
Once we’ve chosen to nurture the children’s passions and embrace their independent thinking, we close our mouths, chill out* and let them get on with learning.
*Still a work in progress!
Alchemy to Understanding
So it’s not like we lay out hydrochloric acid and ammonium nitrate in the tuff tray ( …yet) but on the whole we are now more at ease with their desire to figure out what happens if they mix this with that?
What felt before, and still often looks, like pure anarchy, is actually… alchemy. The kid’s creativity sparks a thousand questions. Some of which we help answer. Some they figure out themselves. Often, they repeat experiments and solidify their understanding.
Not stuck behind a desk, and with no ‘teachy’ teacher in sight, that learning thing… just… happens.
Knowledge and facts, words and numbers are everywhere and kids suck it right up if you let them.
Heating, freezing, mixing and blending are all processes used in the laboratory and the kitchen. When we cook food, a myriad of different physical and chemical processes simultaneously take place to transform the ingredients (i.e. chemicals) involved.
Kitchen Science: everything you eat is made of chemicals – The Conversation
Weird Science
Regardless of whether you’re unschooling your children, if you give them the opportunity they will learn a hell of a lot in the kitchen.
We are daily witnesses to the chemistry and physical processes around cooking and food prep. With a little support from Google or YouTube we learn things together about:
- Developing gluten networks in bread dough
- The Millard reaction (browning)
- Emulsification (home made mayonnaise)
- Non-newtonian fluids that get thicker the more energy you put into them, like custard or cornflour and water
- Freezing/ boiling points of different liquids
- Water evaporation in a simmering pan
- Suspensions of different substances – which ones mix well, which ones separate
- Diffusion – with food colouring or adding concentrated blackcurrant squash to water
- How the human body metabolises food
- Hygiene and the science of bacteria, viruses, spread of germs and how the body defends itself against them
It all comes from being together and allowing ourselves to follow trains of thought. Ours and theirs.
I’m not going to be a scientist when I’m older. I already am a scientist!
Ada – Age 5
Alongside “normal” kitchen activities, a whole host of other stuff happens here – usually initiated by the kids and carried out at the tuff tray. They will have either dreamt it up themselves, found ideas in library books or from awesome kids apps like DIY.org.
We’ve listed just a few of their ideas below. Not only do we think they’re brilliant but they clearly have learning outcomes that tick those ‘school-ey’ boxes and tap in to the fun, curious side of our brains.
- Making rainbow foam and super slime
- Magic milk / Skittles rainbow
- Build a fizzy erupting papier-mâché volcano
- Archeological excavation of toys trapped in ice
- Create glitter globes / nebula jars
- Make a shaker – rainsticks with pringles tube and different ingredients (rice, pasta, cheerios etc)
- Electronics deconstruction – old radios, toys etc
- Light shows – torches, LED candles, colour magnetic tiles, mirrors, gels and prisms
- Gunk generator – mixing different food materials and liquids exploring viscosities and emulsification.
- Chain reactions – combining dominos, hot wheels, wobble boards and anything else to make things zoom around the room.
Please note, this is possibly the cleanest baking session we’ve ever had.
Words are literally everywhere
As we observe our little kids, its obvious that along with new ideas and knowledge, their literacy, numeracy, and analytical skills are quickly developing.
The beautiful thing is that it’s happening at their own pace.
Without pressure and testing, the children are free to develop in these areas without being publicly compared to others and the potential unnecessary psychological damage that can create.
Language and the written word is being continually absorbed. Perhaps not every word they assimilate is ideal (whoops!) but it’s amazing to hear their vocabulary develop and see them begin to recognise and decode more and more words.
Whether or not we write letters or read books to the same extent people did before the internet, words are still everywhere. On their apps, road signs, television, brands and all over the home.
We listen to music, audiobooks and podcasts whilst we cook and play. Interesting song lyrics spark conversation, they get deep into stories and their minds are filled with fascinating facts, new words and concepts.
They often see us typing while we work and so we get asked: “Can we do some?”
Ada likes to take items from the kitchen cupboards. She’ll type out words on the packaging and ask us to read them to her. She’s learning which letters are which, where they are on a keyboard, how to add spaces between words, when and how to change between upper and lowercase, etc. After getting all the ingredients out, she’ll want to cook with them.
Francis enjoys playing with the typography of the letters on the computer – sizes, layout, colour, fonts. He has a particular fascination with keyboard shortcuts. He can clearly see how powerful they are. There are plenty of adults who still struggle to remember how to quickly ‘undo’ something. But it’s ok because they know the date (actually only the year) of the Battle of Hastings.
All kids, not just those unschooling, soak up what is useful to them like a sponge.
But with unschooling children, play is ever present.
Learning is never a chore.
As a result, our children are learning to recognise words and decode sentences without ever being taught in the traditional sense. With some support from us they are able to translate those words into a series of actions as we read recipes and follow instructions together. Application of that knowledge cements their understanding.
But it’s on their terms.
Rather than doing a daily drill like we did at school, they find joy in writing out letters and simple words. They form letters from slime or paint their name with crushed Shreddies, milk and food colouring onto the inside of cereal boxes. Sometimes they’ll go to school-like workbooks and often write and create on their great but inexpensive LCD drawing tablets.
They practise and perfect through their play.
School is archaic in it preoccupation with handwriting. The way we tend to communicate in the real world changed years ago. People have moved on. If we’re in the middle of something, but the kids urgently want to document an idea, they’ll use voice memo’s, record a video or use dictation tools on their tablet and see their words come to life in an instant.
We never showed them how to do any of this.
Just wait til they get hold of AI!
Numbers Rule the Universe – “Pythagoras”
Despite Louise being a former maths teacher, she was concerned how the kids would learn more advanced stuff in the curriculum if it’s not directly taught. However the complexities of any subject are only truly complex if the foundational knowledge is shaky. Our children are still quite young, so we’re not at the point where they’re solving quadratic equations, but they are most certainly figuring out the basics, which will make more abstract stuff easier if and when the time comes.
They all learned to count very early on. In the kitchen they’d count out ingredients (such as eggs) for recipes, or set the table for dinner with the correct number of plates and cups, etc.
Now they’ll weight out ingredients and read the scales or side of the measuring jug. They’re reading numbers with different units (eg 50g, 250ml) and are piecing together how place value works without us forcing them to write out hundreds, tens and units.
Go down deep enough into anything and you will find Mathematics.
Dean Schlicler
The children have been discovering ratios, division, and fractions by experimenting with halving and doubling recipes to make the right number of cakes. We even used a spreadsheet to calculate these things.
They regularly use basic math skills, like figuring out how much cream cheese they need when they have 200g in a packet but need 350g.
They share food like pizzas and sandwiches by cutting them into fractions and biscuits by dividing them equally among them. The older two have had discussions about why there are sometimes leftover biscuits and how many people they need to share them with to make sure there are none left over. But they also know it’s not always possible to share whole numbers of biscuits without having extras – prime numbers.
Weighing ingredients led to an interesting conversion about how objects weigh less on the moon because weight is determined by the force of gravity and the mass of an object (physics).
BOOM… Francis created the superhero “Mass Man”. This formed the basis of his creative play (drama), storytelling (English) and even costume design (D&T/ art). It’s amazing to follow a thread and see where one little question leads their inquisitive minds.
It all comes from play and a real need for the knowledge or direct application.
Clearly they’re learning stuff… but what about exams?
There is obviously a whole load of other, unmeasurable, but no less valuable learning taking place as well. The kids are learning to work together, developing perseverance and observation skills, creative thinking, how to plan ahead and so much more.
“But what about their GCSE?!” We hear you cry…
“How will this help get them through their exams?”
The honest answer is…
It won’t…
Not on its own.
We’ll discuss our thoughts on exams, the over-importance given to them by schools/government and how forward thinking companies are caring less and less about them in another post. But in order to pass exams and play the game, unschooled kids may decide they want specific lessons, or may choose to self-study and ensure they understand the required curriculum and develop the necessary exam technique to jump through the hoops.
But, hopefully they’ll sit exams because they’ve developed a real interest and curiosity in something or it serves them to get them to the next step.
By unschooling our kids I’m certain they’ll have a great foundation of knowledge to build upon.
More importantly they’ll have the skills to learn and feel free to ask questions that deepen their understanding.
They’ll have the ability to read and understand written instructions and with self-motivation, translate that into action.
All invaluable skills for sitting exams. With all the free resources out there, it’s really nothing to worry about.
An affirmation of anarchy
We both did masters level science degrees at university so no doubt that helps us answer some of the kid’s questions. But they still ask so many things we can’t answer by ourselves. To be honest, we’ve probably forgotten way more than half of what we were ever taught because it’s completely irrelevant to our lives.
Does that sound familiar?
Whether your little kids go to school or not. Take a good look at your home and in particular, your kitchen. It’s the place where the magic happens.
Yes, it can be a pandemonium of paint, pens and paper…
a mishmash of mush and mess…
and, at times, super…
fucking…
stressful!!
But it’s where a canvas of creativity, endless exploration and collective curiosity combine to create the perfect storm for learning.
So like we do, take a loooong deep breath and embrace the anarchy.
Miles, an ex-teacher turned business owner, home educator and co-founder of home-educating blog healthycurious.com, is on a mission to empower others to break free from societal constraints and build the life they desire. He and his wife Louise, unschool their children.
With a rebellious spirit and a strong drive for success, Miles ran a DIY record label and music publishing company for five years after leaving teaching.
As a hobby Miles began creating a large catalogue of white noise and sleep-inducing sounds under the moniker Noise Foundation. Things went a bit nuts and he now receives millions of streams annually on Spotify and Apple Music from all around the world.
In addition, Miles and Louise run Cassette Property Group, a property investment company helping others to build assets for a freer life.