Stealth learning

Y'all may be wondering at this point what I was doing with Alyssa.

We knew by the time the first year of homeschooling had passed that Lyssa would be homeschooling, too. We were just loving the whole lifestyle. I wasn't worried about preschool or curriculum for her though, because she was doing very well. She was articulate and quite opinionated at a very young age.

I spent time every day reading with her, letting her color, play with the letter and number magnets that were all over the side of the filing cabinet in the kitchen (remember, it wasn't a kitchen most of the time, it was a classroom). We counted things everywhere we went. Steps, rocks, plants. She watched Sesame Street and Barney. We sang songs, did nursery rhymes, let her pick out books from the library. I put up an ABC poster at her level so she could touch it and look at the pictures and say the words. I found a set of Alphabet cards at Goodwill that had little fuzzy animals on them and put those up along a wall in the hallway of our little house. She walked by and said the names of the animals at least twice a day. She loved the Rabbit and the Zebra ones the most. She had to pet them or give them kisses each time she saw them. It really was awfully cute.

Each morning, she started the day by taking all the toys out of her toy box in the living room, gathering her favorite books and climbing in. She would sit and 'read' them, a sippy cup in one hand and a book in the other, babbling happily for half an hour or more.

When one is writing a story about past events, it's wonderful how time can just zip by. Years of it in only a few sentences. One can also skip around and take things out of order, which is what I am going to do now.

I'll eventually wander back to how we ended up unschooling, but if you've followed along this far, I think you've probably already detected our pattern...

Get curriculum .

Try it.

Find a better way to learn.

Ditch curriculum.

Go learn more stuff.

I started reading to Alyssa when she was about six months old. When she was about two and a half, she started recognizing certain words as I read aloud to her.

Everyone knows how babies love repetition, and she was no different. She had favorite books, and we had read them so often she knew when to turn the page. She began to point to words and shout them out loud when it was time to say them. She bounced up and down next to me with excitement as we read. She carried her books all over the house with her. She brought them in the car. She brought them to bed with her. I'd love to have a quarter for every time I woke up with a book poking me in the ribs.

(Yeah, she slept in our bed with us. Dial 1-800- waa-aaah if you don't like it.)

I started putting index card labels on everyday things around the house. Doors, windows, walls, the oven, the tub, the washer... if I could stick a piece of tape to it, it had a label. She used to go around and point to the words.

She knew those words named the objects they were attached to, and we could not fool her. We could take them off and rearrange them. We could, for example, remove the card from the Nintendo box and stick it to the door, and take the door card and put it on the wall and she would go and change them back, sometimes scolding me, little hands on hips, little face all furrowed and frowny.

Then one day, she started to find it humorous. I don't know what changed, but she started laughing when she discovered I'd switched things while she was asleep or playing in another room.

She started asking for more words. I started writing them down and putting them on the front of the cabinet in the kitchen. We wrote any word she asked for, no matter how large or small. We had magnificent, happy, stinky, yummy, chocolate, chicken, nap time, toenail... well, you get the idea. I could arrange them in any order. She knew them. The thing is, I wasn't trying to teach her to read. We were just... playing.

She was beginning to read at three.