Unschooling Voices #4: Unschooling Math

Welcome!!

The 5th Unschooling Voices will be out on November 1. If you'd like to participate, click here for the details. The new question for the month and past editions of Unschooling Voices can be found there also.

If you post a link to this months installment on your blog or site, please let me know (by leaving a comment here) so I can thank you with a link back. :-)

A small request...when you e-mail in a submission, please include a short description of it. I would much rather use your words, instead of mine to describe what you wrote. Thanks! Just a sentence or two is fine.

This month there are 15 participants who submitted 18 entries. As you click the links that take you to the different blogs and sites, I encourage you to comment on the ones that you particularly enjoy (tell 'em we sent ya!) or maybe offer some words of wisdom to someone at an unschooling crossroads. As you read, keep in mind that everyone who participated is at a different place in their unschooling journey.

The (always optional) question for October was on the topic of math and I'd like to start off with a quote from the post that Schuyler submitted.

"If you look at the world through schooled eyes your vision will be a fractured vision. School has taken a system of interconnected processes and ideas and separated them and stuffed them into a vacuum, leaving the learner with no sense that there is an applied relationship between what they are being taught and the rest of their lives."

The question for this month was, how do/did you get to that mindset. Lots of really good posts were submitted on this topic.

Paige submitted this blog post titled, "No Textbooks Required".

Michelle shares her thoughts on "Math or Living in the World without a Math Education".

Mama Chaos shares a small rant about math.

Cher submitted her thoughts on unschooling math.

Chris submitted an interesting exchange about math on an unschooling list.

Ron shares this thoughts on this months topic.

JoVE blogged about how her "struggle has been to get her (daughter) back to enjoying math, something school knocked out of her". She also shares how games are part of their lives.

Annalea (what a pretty name!) talks about living math.

Stephanie talks about a few of the fun math resources that her family has enjoyed lately from DVDs to entertaining books. Math does not have to be “drill and kill”…sometimes it can be (and should be!) about fascinating stories!

Leonie give us a glimpse into her life with a week of math.

Maureen shares a quote, and the link to Living Math.

Dharmamama updates us on her life with her new daughter and how she's been asking to learn math.

Laura e-mailed me two submissions and I posted them here.

My own two submissions are a collection of thoughts and ideas from a now defunct unschooling message board. I originally posted them because I didn't want to lose them but they go in with this months question, so here they are. Be warned-they're very long. Here is part one and part two.

There you have it! Thank you to all who participated this month. I really enjoyed reading all your thoughts on math. :-)

Related Tags: unschooling carnival, unschooling voices, unschooling