To read entire article from MSNBC please click on the title.
Controversial home-taught approach lets kids take the lead in learning
It’s a Monday afternoon in Mar Vista, Calif., and while other 9-year-olds might be fidgeting at their desks, Isobel Dowdee has played all morning and is now joining her mother and two sisters on a big blanket in their front yard.
Mom, Heather Cushman-Dowdee, keeps the younger girls, Fiona, 5, and Gwyneth, 2, busy drawing pictures. For Isobel, she’s made a large grid with numbers down the side and across the top so her daughter can fill in the multiplication answers. Not that Cushman-Dowdee cares if Isobel does the chart. It’s just that the girl actually wants to do it. Occasionally they play math games or sing counting songs.
For the past three weeks this has been the ritual — Math Mondays they’ve taken to calling it. Yet Cushman-Dowdee bristles at the idea that this is any kind of mathematics class. That’s absolutely against what she and her husband, Kevin Dowdee, believe in.
“The kids love it so far, but I am open to them changing their mind. We adapt and alter what we are doing all of the time,” says Cushman-Dowdee, an artist and cartoonist.
The Dowdees’ ultra-relaxed learning is called “unschooling.” It’s a fast-growing subset of homeschooling that turns traditional education on its ear.
