Unschooling Home Economics

There are a lot of really neat resources out there on the lost art of Home Economics. This is a big one, an important one. This is the value and respect that homemaking women do not get in society any longer. There are individual compliments and "Gee, wow, how do you do it" comments. But there is no longer a public sense of homemaking's contribution to the Gross Domestic Product, to workforce efficiency, to social stability.

There's really cool stuff available, like the Girlhood Home Companion. In the end, though, I don't like feeling I have to give constant, step-by-step instructions or monitor the kids' progress all day, every day. My unschooling philosophy is to create a structure in the form of expected things we do to keep life running, and only monitor that. And, while I salivate over the beautiful resources out there, I do have to ration where the money goes. So our Home Ec. is purely hands-on. It looks like this:

"Did you make your bed this morning? Uh huh. Put the cat down, go get dressed and make your bed."

"Would you like to make some oatmeal for breakfast?"

"It's 4 o'clock. It's time to clean your room."

"We'll fold a basket of laundry, then read a chapter of Black Stallion and have tea. Then it's time for another basket before we read again."

It consists of crochet demonstrations, and the handing over of the requisite how-to books. It is a series of ongoing discussions about family finances. The techniques for this type of learning are more motivational than curricular or planning-based. You set some goals - I would like to eventually get to the place where I don't have to check the 10-year-old's bed to see whether he's actually installed the sheets correctly. You give the kids the freedom to learn and experiment.

The 8-year-old Banana Brain got the kitchen to herself for an afternoon, and spent it producing three lovely loaves of banana bread. I asked her if she wanted help, and she said she'd let me know if there was anything she needed. That child tripled the recipe on her own, greased the pans, mixed everything, baked it, and cleaned up after herself.

Likewise, Spazzerific will sometimes decide to take the day to rearrange his room, clean things up or out, and reset his study area to what suits his needs at the moment. He likes to catalogue his books and sort and hang his good clothes.

In learning to crochet, Squirrelly Girlie and Banana Brain followed each other around, comparing techniques and keeping a shared bag of wool and hooks. Though their patience was short, I made very few requirements of them - other than asking them to please do a chain of at least 10 stitches before we started learning how to make a whole panel.

The kids have learned how to keep a savings account because we got them each one and make deposits of $5 per month. They budget their money carefully. They're aware that if they're wise, this will buy them their first car or some other thing of great consequence when they're a bit older. They keep an eye on their bank statements and track their balances. They've caught on to the pleasure of seeing those amounts grow, and that's all they need to lay a foundation for prudence later on.