Playing During "School" Time

Perhaps it wasn't a bad idea after all to let my five year old son, Gyasi, spend his early homeschooling years building intricate robots from paper boxes, designing web pages, producing comical movies about his six sisters, or digging up rocks, bugs and other organic matter in our backyard.  Twelve years later, Gyasi, now seventeen and soon to graduate, will use the skills he acquired during those "unschooling" years to compete next weekend in a national robotics competition.

As a working, life-schooling mom of seven,  I just didn't seem to have enough time in the day to instruct Gyasi in a lot of formal lessons.  At a young age, he was determined to become a famous physicist, although this has since changed to computer scientist.

 In those early years, I worried less about getting enough "schooling" in and afforded my children opportunities to do what they love---exploring, building, designing, and creating.

After a few hours of "table time" lessons in math, grammar, and writing, we spent our afternoons in what we called, "productive leisure time", when the children were able to "play" engineer, doctor, banker, social worker, seamstress and more.  Today, my youngest spends her productive leisure time playing Minecraft, the popular, technologically-advanced video game used by educators across the nation to teach science, history, and language.

I am content that several of my "unschooled" children are not only honor roll students in college, but have a life-long love for learning, know how to live and not just make a living, and more importantly, use their God-given gifts and talents to enrich the lives of other people.  I would not trade my precious memories of our productive leisure time together in the backyard for the highest SAT scores, scholarships, or salaries in the world! Now that several of my children have left the nest, I cherish those memories even more and am often saddened that the time went by too fast.

On April  3-5, Gyasi, and his childhood buddy, Tumie Hurd, also a lifeschooler, will compete with their Robotics Team in the Chesapeake Regional FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) at the University of Maryland, College Park.  Their team is an activity of the Patriots' National Society of Black Engineers Junior Chapter. Patriots is a local organization that has operated minority STEM summer camps and other programs for over 17 years.

 The FRC is the Nation's top engineering challenge for STEM students.  The students work with mentors and instructors several weeks leading up to the competition to design, build, and program a robot they hope will win the competition.  It is an outstanding program that allows students to use their engineering and computer programming skills in practical applications. While Gyasi and Tumie acknowledge building the robot for the competition is hard work, the prospects of their robot winning keep them motivated.

Next week's competition, expected to attract a crowd of over 20,000, promises to be fun for the whole family. It is really quite mesmerizing to see the student-built robots strutting their stuff like hyperactive, colorful peacocks in the competitor ring before the large crowds and judges.  The robotic teams operate the computers remotely from a distance, holding their breaths and hoping it will perform as programmed.

If your lifeschooler likes to spend his productive leisure time building, designing, constructing or playing computer games, he will definitely enjoy the FRC Robotics Competition. And you need not feel guilty about letting him "play" Minecraft or other video games during "school" time; He might just use his gaming skills to develop an award-winning computer application later in life.

Do you ever feel like you are not getting enough "school" time in with your little ones?  Are you concerned that you aren't doing enough to prepare them for standardized tests?  I'd love to hear your comments.