A world map of stamps

Jake collects lots of things. Marbles. Stones. Sea shells. Seeds. And stamps. Around lunchtime every day he runs down the stairs, all the way from the third to the ground floor, to check the letter box for letters or postcards with stamps on them. Sadly, very little of our mail has a good old-fashioned stamp attached to it. With the help of his two stamp-collecting grandfathers and a number of friends who kindly keep any stamps they come across, he has managed to generate a collection of several hundred stamps. They come from all over the world, some of them from countries Jake has not even heard of.
This week, Jake took out his stamp album to see which countries the stamps come from and where these countries are. We laid out a huge world map on a piece of thick cardboard. Using pins, Jake marked the countries from which he holds stamps. Tanzania, Iceland, Paraguay, Romania, Japan, Madagascar... Allocating twenty countries to their respective continents and finding them on the map took almost the entire morning. Sophie and Jake were proud of the result. They went downstairs to check the letter box three times that day - just in case someone has happened to send us a postcard from Mauritius...

Venetian diary writing

Jake has been writing a diary for almost eleven months, not having missed a single day! It was his idea because he likes remembering things. Dishes he ate, people he met, places he saw, gifts he received, paintings he made. The diary entries vary in length. Mostly he writes three to six sentences but sometimes he fills the entire page and needs to glue in another sheet of paper. In summertime he had a lot to write about because he recorded every Worldcup game he watched and every fruit and vegetable he harvested from the garden. His handwriting and spelling have changed a lot due to his diary-writing. He tries out different spellings and eventually looks up the correct spelling in the dictionary. He has also been experimenting with different styles of handwriting.
Last Friday Jake went to Venice for the day to show the city to a friend who was staying with us for a few days. If you have ever been to Venice you can imagine how busy he was while being there... and that he needed several pages to record what they'd seen...

Curries and Cookies

It's that time of year when we start doing curries on an increasingly regular basis. In late September, we might do the occasional curry, perhaps once a week, and by mid-October we cook one as often as four times a week. We love the smells and textures of the spices, the colours and, of course, the taste once it is done.
Sophie and Jake love curries, especially those that involve chicken and rice. This year, Jake has started cooking his own curries, with almost no help from us grown-ups. I needed to remind myself to be patient when he fiddled with the apron, trying to pull the strings together on his back. He bravely wiped away his tears while cutting onions. Before he ground the spices he wanted to know their names and where they come from. 'Are they healthy?', he asked inquiringly as he has recently become aware of the fact that not every type of food is actually good for you.
For a few days Jake experimented with fennel seeds, cardamon, turmeric, cumin and lots of other stuff, slowly making his way through an Indian cookbook. Sometimes he loved the result and licked the pan clean, long after everyone else had finished lunch. Sometimes he would cautiously say, 'I don't like it as much as the one we had yesterday', and prefer to eat plain rice and salad instead. But he was always proud of what he had achieved, because there always happened to be someone at the table who got himself a second helping and truthfully praised the curry to the sky.
Sophie has also been experimenting in the kitchen. We had realized that she finds writing numbers really difficult - but is desperate to do it. She's had no trouble with 0, 3, 4 and 7, but the others she found impossible to do. While her understanding of what the numbers actually mean and how to work with them has progressed rather fast over the past few months, she has become increasingly frustrated about writing them. We assured her that she can take her time with that and that there is absolutely no need for her to write them right now, but she insisted on trying, which almost always resulted in anger and frustration.
Yesterday we felt it was about time to help her relax a little. We suggested that she bake numbers rather than write. We prepared a huge amount of cookie dough and let her have a go. And she was so into it! Now she could try figuring out the numbers she found so difficult as often as she wanted. Whenever the result didn't please her she could roll up the dough and start again, with no 'ugly' numbers on the sheet that reminded her of not having written them correctly. The results were beautiful, trays and trays of beautifully formed numbers that were nice to look at and even nicer to eat.
The real surprise came the this morning though. 'I am going to write down all the numbers I know today!', Sophie announced very matter-of-factly over her breakfast cereals. A little later, she got herself some paper and a pencil and wrote a dozen of beautiful Twoes. All the other 'difficult' numbers followed, one more flawless than the other. She had managed to do something with ease and joy, something which she had found impossible to do just a few days before.
I'll write again soon.

New here

This is my first blog and today is my first post, so I'm a little excited. We have unschooled (or homeschooled) our children for a little more than a year and I decided that I want to write about it. It is such a rich, wonderful experience that I feel I need to share it with whoever is interested. None of the people I meet in my day-to-day life are homeschoolers. While homeschooling is legal in Italy (as i t is in most other European countries), it is extremely rare. The Italians I get to talk to tend to react indignantly to the fact that our children do not go to school. I have gotten used to them finding me extremely strange at best or completely mad at worst. In a way this has made me even more determined to continue what we have begun.
Jake and Sophie, our son and daughter who are aged nine and five, love that we school our own. Jake went to a Montessori school in Germany for one year before we moved to Italy. He did have an okay time there, but within that year his enthusiasm for learning reduced quite noticeably. Somehow school had not made him want to learn and explore more, but less. While we have always been attracted by the idea of homeschooling, his experience in school led us decide that we want at least try it. Now we are about 14 months down the road and there are so many tales we could tell.
What is clear is that unschooling is an amazing experience, both for the children and whoever happens to 'teach' them (which we don't really). I often find it hard to tell friends and family who are not directly involved about it, as it seems to be way off anything they imagine. They sort of imagine us playing teacher and pupils in our living room (which we don't), me standing in front of a blackboard, trying to fill my kids' brains with knowledge. Well, it definitely does not work like that, at least not for us, and still our children have learned a lot so far. Everyone we meet - even the Italians who are so adamant about a child having to go to school - expresses delight about Sophie and Jake, how clever they are, how creative, focused, sociable and adaptable. It is true that they love exploring and being creative, and they love interacting with other people, both young and old, whatever their background. It is a great gift, and the fact that I am able to share it with them every day feels like a huge privilege to me.
I'll be back soon, as there is a lot to tell about what they do and how they learn, about the difficulties and the delights. Have a good day! Ciao from Verona - Maria