Effie has this incredible way of connecting many of her passions. Last week, she navigated through a website to find each of the Bratz dolls she’s currently enamoured with and then did a printout AND a drawing of each of the 20-odd dolls. All with this glint in her eye that shouts “I’m up to something and I’m having a great time doing it!”
Effie, who has not yet decided to read, has opened wide all of her senses to discovery. She has developed a system of navigating books, magazines, websites, conversations… (life!) through observation and absolute desire.
Reading, when it happens, will add another layer. For now, she’s copying; remembering things; listening to stories; keenly watching stories; collecting stories; absorbing and embedding herself into stories; imagining; inventing; list-making… she loves this stuff!
While she continues to copy out words to form mega-lists of dolls, movies and books, earlier this week she began, of her own volition, to write out words from scratch. As with other steps in her life-learning journey, this “accomplishment” was not pre-planned but rather it was, for her, realized as a “necessity”: she wanted to add some items to the grocery list. So, up went "peppermints", "caramels", "white chocolate" and "tape".
When all this happens so organically it is hard not to just stand there in amazement. And although we’ll add this story to our ever-expanding mental-pile of unschooling trust and faith, rather than celebrate it - per se - as an accomplishment, me thinks this particular grocery list is destined to end up in Effie’s treasure trove!
2 comments:
Loved this post. And loved that it's LONGER than usual. Hee hee. It's just so nice to hear more about what's going on there. :)
What a great list, by the way. The essentials in life: candy and tape. That's how it is around here too. !
Awesome! That's some pretty sophisticated reasoning and connecting going on there.
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