A little unschooling?

I'm currently reading "The unschooling handbook: How to Use the Whole World as your child's Classroom" by Mary Griffith. As I was reading, first J was reading another Junie B Jones (Aloha-ha-ha!), and she was giggling in quite a few places. There's nothing like watching your kids absorbed and giggling over a book! This is totally her idea of fun reading.

Then she did few other things and as I was looking at her, I remember during our car ride to the museum today, J mentioned she was trying to write down how we get to the museum. She said the reason for doing this is in case she is lost, she will know how to get to museum. So anyway, I ask her to show me what she wrote, and I couldn't help myself but smile. She wrote down a whole bunch of landmarks along with a bunch of the road names which we passed and only very few of the road names that we were actually on. What I mean is if we are traveling on road A but we passed road B, C, and D as they intersect, she wrote road B, C, D down. I guess those are road names she saw. She says she can't write them all down because we pass them too fast. Daddy says its good to write those down as it shows one is paying attention to the details.

Anyway, I ask her if she wants me to show her the actual route to the museum and her eyes just lit up as she happily said yes! So we went to yahoo maps and looked it up and she asked to see the route to a few other places, namely Target (gosh, why does that store keep coming up? ;)) and her formal school. Anyway, I thought this was kind of like "unschooling" led by her interest and I "facilitated" her learning.

Some other times in the past, we have also done what has been described by the book as unschooling. We have looked for some info due to the curiosity of the kids either on-line or in the library. We got various different books looking for specific information or looked at different website hunting for some specific information. Like probably all or most homeschoolers, we definitely love our library and I do plenty of inter-library loan. :)

And Prime, that boy definitely likes to be unschooled. His passion is playing with his "guys" whether they are the TMNT, stuffed animals, or the power rangers. And he loves to read books or watch videos that are related to those. He will bring me a pile of books and ask me to read to him. On some occasion, I ask him if he wants to do something else, he says yes, but "after I am done playing". Talk about a little negotiator and boy who knows what he wants.

So I think our (okay maybe me) educational philosophy has some aspects of unschooling in it. I'll know for sure when I am done reading the book. So far, I find the book very interesting and it has many good points.