My name is Michaiah Alsbury I live in Missouri with my parents, siblings, chickens and cats.
This is going to be my first blog post ever!
Today I’m going to share a little bit about myself. Born in May, 21, 2011 at home in Vacaville California, I’ve been homeschooled all my life except for preschool and never even stepped foot in a public school! I hope of becoming an author and fashion designer.
Lots of kids my age have just started homeschooling which is a huge movement in our culture. This is one of the reasons I am going to post about once a week to talk about what’s so amazing about being able to experience unschooling.
What do I do for school?
This is a question I get asked a lot by friends who are homeschooled but not unschooled. Unschooling is where you get to choose what you want to learn and how you want to learn it.
Every morning I wake up at 8:00 – 8:30, eat breakfast, and then we do morning basket which is where my mom reads the Bible, poems, and famous books like The Hiding Place.
Then we do one lesson of math on the computer. Then we decide if we would like to write a journal entry or write a letter (we can do anything that is writing related). For the rest of the day I can do whatever I want for school. I take typing online (I love Nitro Type!)
During the school year I go to co-op one day a week. Oh, and I have chores every day!
What do I do in my free time?
Well, when you are unschooled you have an endless amount of free time. Usually I draw, make doll furniture, read books (I’ll also be recommending favorite books but that’s another topic) because the most important thing about school is experiencing real life.
I play outside with my siblings and write random sentences that I come up with for book ideas. Being able to do so many things is a blessing in my life. I always come up with something to do. That usually happens at bedtime so I toss and turn till morning brimming with craft ideas. My mom lets me go on Youtube to look up craft ideas for thirty minutes at a time.
Sometimes having too much free time leaves you wondering what next? If I get bored and I tell mom she’ll give me something to do by unloading the dishwasher. So I’ve learned to keep quiet. (My mom says it’s good to be bored, which I think is quite the opposite!)
One of the best things to do when bored is to stand on a stool and rifle through the books (since I have a pretty big book shelf). Usually I’ll come up with one of my favorite books. It’s not much of a cure for boredom but it works for me.
Since we live In Missouri my mom has to track our hours each day in a notebook so that’s why she and my dad are developing this app for people who live in Missouri to keep track of hours. In Missouri you have to do a thousand hours of school a year. So sometimes we have to go outside to count as PE and my mom tries to find any activities that we do to count as school such as baking or sewing because it includes skills in math. (You can get updates on the app here.)
(This is a picture from three or four years ago. But you can see that I don’t like unloading the dishwasher.)
Blogging
A couple of weeks ago I was wandering through the house thinking of people seeing my writing and wondering what would they think? So went I upstairs to pester mom about it. I flopped down in the nearby recliner and started babbling about how only the family could see my writing and they said it was good because (obviously they were my family!)
Then my mom said: “How about you start blogging?” Now one of the reasons I had come to talk about it was to leave a clue that I wanted to be on social media and hope she picked up on it. She said no social media. But writing on a blog would be fun, good for school, and a great way to share my writing.
“Thank you mom!” I said, leaping up with a new inspiration. Maybe if I became super good at blogging she would fall onto her knees and declare that I was the most wonderful blogger and hand me a phone saying “You must be on social media!”
Then I knew my practical mom would never do anything so dramatic, plus it’s not good to be on social media when your brain is still developing.
I’ll be posting once a week about school projects, books that I am reading, and craft ideas.
Hope you guys like my first blog post! Here’s a post my mom wrote about how we unschool (for the parents).
– Michaiah
