unschool monday :: colouring

Now we've considered ourselves unschoolers for a while... Let go of the school mindset that held our thoughts on what was educational and kept us focused on that... We've come to regard what we do as living. Learning is just one of the natural benefits of living. So we look for ways to enjoy our time together. Then sometimes we marvel at what we've learnt in the process, just as we marvel when Tiny Owlet acquires a new skill... Sometimes we just marvel at how much fun we've had together, following our owlets ideas and our own.

Over the last few rainy days, we've been colouring. Just for fun. As a way of spending time together. We coloured our favourite colouring book, but then Little Owlet came up with an even better idea. Each of us drew a picture. Then we swapped and coloured in another's picture. The owlets are loving playing with colour and loving that their colouring skills (and patience!) are improving... They loved seeing how each of us has a different drawing style. They loved that we could each take a picture and colour it and the picture they could see in their head may be different to the one now on paper. The transformation when a different person added colour was amazing to us all. Best of all, they loved the respect we had for their artwork as we coloured carefully. And they showed our artwork the same respect, so that we were all artists together. And of course, the conversation flowed on a number of interesting and random topics...

What did we learn? Perhaps patience, tolerance, art appreciation, flexibility to change, colour theory, collaboration... And a million other things related to those random conversations we had along the way...