One of the main reasons why we wanted Ethan to be an unschooler and learn from home is that he loves being creative. He finds something to make almost every single day and having the time to explore his creativity has been one of the biggest benefits of homeschooling. Today, it was creating a puzzle with Chinese characters and ended with writing and illustrating four comic books in a new series he came up with.
I don’t intend to sound like we’re bragging about Ethan’s accomplishments. We feel that this creativity is within every child. As parents, we’ve all seen the imagination, the passion and the limitless creativity in our kids. The only difference is finding a way to allow Ethan to express his creativity and to nurture it. We’re so proud of Ethan and all the things he does. I’m honestly not sure how it would be possible for him to do so much if we didn’t take the leap and homeschool him.
Anyway, I hope if you’re a parent you’ll find a way to carve more time into your child’s day and allow him or her to express their creativity without any judgement or the “help” we sometimes want to give our kids.
With that said…here’s how Ethan’s day went.
As I mentioned earlier, he made a puzzle using Chinese characters. We borrowed a book about Chinese New Year because we want Ethan to learn more about his Chinese heritage. He wasn’t too excited at first, but the craft book and seeing the meaning of certain characters inspired him to create a puzzle from the characters for good luck.
Ethan also made a Chinese dragon from the Chinese paper crafts book we borrowed.
Loving Division
Ethan has been fascinated by division for about the past week or so. He likes solving the division problems and finding remainders, if there are any. It’s so easy to get him to practice math.
Loves Origami
And today, Ethan got back into doing some origami. He was making origami projects quite often during the road trip so it was nice to see him picking it up again.
He made a bouncy rocket and a pair of lips, as well as a pencil rocket. The pencil rocket can be launched by flicking the rocket off the end of a pencil 🙂
Haircut
Ethan finally wanted to cut his hair so we took him to get it done. We weren’t overly thrilled with the results, though.
This photo doesn’t really show what we mean, but it got Dong Eun thinking about how to deal with his hair.
Learning to like language arts
I certainly wouldn’t say that Ethan loves language arts when he has to learn about prepositions and other parts of speech, but at least he doesn’t whine or complain anymore.
Getting better at using a dictionary is great!
Starting the comics
After the language arts stuff was over, Ethan started making a new comic book series called The Adventures of a Piece of Paper.
And he took some time to read about pirates in Canadian history from the Canadian Flyer series.
We tried to fix his hair
Dong Eun and I thought that Ethan’s hair just wasn’t right so Dong Eun watched a bunch of YouTube videos and tried to cut Ethan’s hair. She did an amazing job without an electric hair clipper and using a dull pair of scissors. It’s not as good as she wanted so we’re debating taking him to a different salon or trying to fix it again with a clipper.
More comics
By the end of the night, Ethan had produced four comics. We were pretty amazed by how much he did, but we weren’t completely surprised because we know that when he’s into something, he really gets into it. And that’s what I mean by how great it is that Ethan can have this time to be creative. If he was going to traditional school, he would have had to go to bed much earlier and probably wouldn’t have been able to ride his stream of ideas and creativity for a full day.
And he also made an origami wallet for me!
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