One of my favorite days of the week is whatever day we make our way to the library because there is nothing I enjoy more than perusing the stacks for fascinating fact books and books focusing on other intriguing topics and people. As I stack our books on the small table in the middle grade reader section, I am already mapping out how those books will factor into our unschooling adventures at home. Truly, I love nothing more than learning captivating tidbits alongside my teenagers.
Sometimes those tidbits appear in my email and I get to read them aloud to my teens as a precursor to our unschooling day. Apparently because I once visited a history-related website, I am now on the email list for a few different related sites, including National Geographic photos and historical curiosities as well as History Facts, Feeding Curiosity, and Interesting Facts. Yes, it can be annoying to be added to email lists I didn’t subscribe to, but I have weeded through those and remained on these because they provide some obscure and interesting pieces of information. Honestly, it is right up my alley, and that is an alley I enjoy leading my teenagers down from time to time.
Today, we traveled down the alleyway of Fascinating Facts showcasing six famous foods invented by accident. What I loved about this unschooling side quest is that my girls knew half of the foods before we even dove into the short article—chocolate chip cookies, popsicles, and nachos. Yes, they recalled nachos after I got to that item, but they also named potato chips, which were not mentioned in this particular article but that my 17 year old read about in one of the many fact books we’ve read during our homeschooling years.
One of my favorite things about doing school together is how often these two incredible young women teach me something they’ve learned about in one of the many library books I bring home and place on the bookshelves designated as schooling options. When I consider my own learning journey, I am hard pressed to recall much of the information I learned at my desk in a classroom of at least 20-24 other students. While the information may have been intriguing or even fascinating, it didn’t stick because it wasn’t something we paused over in the classroom; there are too many students and too much information to convey in limited amounts of time. Such is the constraint of the public school system and I get that, which is why I remain ever grateful for the opportunity for these unschooling adventures my teen girls and I embark on regularly each day.
One of the conversations we’ve had around learning is about learning styles. More than once one of my teens has lamented how embarrassing they think it is that I procure some of our books from nonfiction picture books or from the middle-grade area of our library. My response is always the same. The books procured and provided by our incredible librarians are phenomenal and they provide a fun learning adventure that appeals to the way my teens’ minds tend to work when it comes to learning. The books are more visual, providing illustrations alongside blocks of text rather than all text. They are fun and funny and in my opinion, that opens up areas of the mind when it comes to learning.
They may not realize it at this point in time, but the books we tend to use in our unschooling homeschool days open doors to so much more learning than the curriculum options I’ve tried in the past. We learn about people that history and science books don’t always include because space is limited. We uncover intriguing and curious aspects of history and events that are equally new to me. And those fact books I collect have provided them with an eclectic mix of information that tends to stick more than they realize.
That article I shared with them today brought to their mind almost immediately food we’ve read about in nonfiction picture books we’ve read together. And today, as we read Victor Hugo Green and his glorious book, the book Victor Hugo Green created for African Americans first in 1936 and then updated through the years until the Civil Rights Act, my youngest immediately realized she’d read about him in one of the many fact books (even if she couldn’t pinpoint which book or when she first encountered Victor Hugo Green).
As any homeschooling parent can understand, there are days when you wonder if what you’re doing is “enough” or whether you’re doing the things you set out to do. Days like today, you stumble across a fun and funny article about foods invented by accident that brings ideas to the forefront of your kids’ minds and also makes all of you laugh because one of those foods is worcestershire sauce, a word that makes all of you laugh and roll your eyes at the absurdity of a word so difficult to pronounce, you get a reminder of the why behind the things you choose to do. And you embrace that your adventures mark you all as weird about weird facts, because you are thrilled with that designation and you wish more teenagers could experience this sort of adventure.