the power of friendship

Dec 31

Posted by: Rachel in: blog, homeschooling, me myself and i, parenting, ramblings, videos

One last warm and fuzzy (quite literally) story for 2008.

Perhaps I should have been “unschooled.” In my readings about homeschooling, I’ve become quite familiar with this term, meaning child lead learning. Teachers/parents make learning tools accessible to children and help them to pursue their own interests to the fullest on the premise that children have an inborn hunger for knowledge and will learn what they need to know in the process. So in other words there is no curriculum or lesson plan is used.

Well last night, I checked my mommy board (I hate that term) real quick to see the results of a friend’s ultrasound today (she was right thinking pink! haha) and I stumbled across this video someone had posted. The story brought tears to my eyes, but of course my -is this real- alarm went off. So where do you go when you need to check a story’s validity? Why Snopes.com of course! And it is absolutely true. I was amazed.

Alternate youtube video link

So on to the unschooling part. First I had to look up the story and read everything there was to read on snopes.com. From there I said “Hmm, this was in the 70’s, I wonder if Christian is still living?” So I looked up lions on wikipedia to see what their average lifespan is. Then Scott asked why Christian didn’t have a big mane in the video. So I continued reading the rest of the article, including information about the mane. Then I saw that the animal conversationalist involved, George Adamson, was killed, so I looked him up to read more about him. I would have liked to continue reading about his work and “Born Free,” but I had to go put Caleb to bed!