Gorillas & Lessons in Unschooling

For most of our homeschool, I've wavered between attempting to meet the common core standards and letting the J-Rex explore knowledge based on her interests a'la unschooling. Recently, as I've been trying to prepare her for the rigours of 3rd grade in the public schools, I've been veering more and more toward a scheduled day focused on the standards.  Still, though, I try to work in at least 1/2 to 1 hour of interest-oriented learning per day.  Lately, I've been doing this by keeping a list of questions she asks at times when we don't have time to explore them so that, when planning for the week, I can write in 30 minutes of topic exploration to address these questions.

The other day, in the car and out of the blue, the J-Rex asked what kind of food gorillas eat.  I answered that I thought they ate mostly fruits and vegetables. The J-Rex followed up with, "So, they're herbivores, not omnivores?" I hesitated. I remember seeing images of gorillas picking bugs out of each other's fur and eating them...don't they eat other bugs, too? Does that make them omnivores? I shared my line of questioning and reasoning with the J-Rex and we agreed that some gorilla research needed to go on our unschool topic list asap.

Luckily, the next day was my planning day, so I wrote in a 30-min topic exploration (I try to leave the unschooling lesson open-ended, so I don't generally put more detail in my plans other than the title of the topic we are exploring) on gorillas, assuming we'd spend a little time looking up some facts about their eating habits online and then browsing pictures of gorillas eating. Afterwards, we were planning on doing Yoga for PE.  I thought I had a fun afternoon planned for the next day. I had no idea.
When we began doing our gorilla topic exploration, we found ourselves discussing resources and how we might go about finding information on this topic: Did we have any books in our home library that discuss gorillas? We do have a lot of books on animals, so let's see. How would we narrow down our options? Let's reject all books about animals in biomes that we are unlikely to find gorillas in, like cities or the biomes of the United States. How would we find out if gorillas are discussed in a book? Check the table of contents and/or the index. What if the book doesn't have a table of contents or an index? Browse through the pages. If we can't find the information in books, where is the next place we'd look? The internet! How can you tell if a site is legitimate? It takes time to know what is legitimate or not, but let's learn by example. Etc.

Just that simple act of discussing how to find information is helping to set the J-Rex up for a lifetime of independent learning and problem-solving. The process also helped me to understand what areas I might need to brush up on in terms of my own research skills so that I understand it well enough to teach my child (for me, this clearly was the determination of legitimate internet sources...always a tricky topic).

Once we made our way to the internet, we ended up visiting The Gorilla Foundation - a place I've been fascinated with since high school, mainly because of Koko and her amazing sign language skills.  I told the J-Rex all about this impressive lowland gorilla and her pet cat (the J-Rex thought it was Awesome that a gorilla had a pet) and we visited their fact page to get a brief overview of gorillas.  Our question about the eating habits of these great primates answered, we went on to examine population size, habitats, average heights and weights (comparing them to the humans in our lives - for instance, I'm the exact same height as the average standing female gorilla!), social structure, and the dangers they face.

The J-Rex was surprised to realize that humans were the only predator of this non-carnivorous animal and that shrinking habitat, not hunting was the main threat to their population.  We talked about her career goal of being an "animal helper" and ended up looking Dian Fossey and discussing how she managed to help bring world-wide awareness to the plight of the gorillas.  The J-Rex learned the importance of not only being a good scientist but of also being a good writer in terms of being able to help animals.

proudly displayed on her art wall

Somehow, we managed to fit all of this exciting exploration into a half hour, but we didn't really want to stop when it was time for yoga. Then I had an idea: Wasn't there some yoga position I do regularly where I hold myself in a very similar position to the way gorilla's walk? I looked it up in the J-Rex's Kid's Yoga Deck and it turns out that the position I was thinking of is even named "the gorilla!"  Now, the great thing about the Kid's Yoga Deck is that, beneath the description of each pose, it provides ideas for further exploring the emotion or image that the pose invokes.  In this case, it suggested several variations to the pose based on gorilla behavior and an art project consisting of drawing a gorilla family in the jungle.  How perfect was that? The J-Rex was able to solidify her new-found knowledge of gorillas through physical movement and imitation and then pull it all together with a drawing that she chose to spend most of her afternoon finishing.

She may forget some of the subtraction facts she practiced or the basic rules of capitalization we were reviewing earlier, but the J-Rex will most definitely remember the gorillas.  I know it's important for her to go back to the public schools - in my heart, I feel it's right for her at this point - but I also know that she and I both will miss being able to have these types of learning experiences as often as we have them now.  We may still do them on weekends or afternoons, if she doesn't have too much homework, but, in my mind, that will never be enough to satisfy our mutual yearning for this kind of learning.