My Older Son is Blogging Now

A year and a half ago my son started a blog. After creating three blogs he didn't want to do the writing, when he started writing drafts, so the blogs sat unused.

Last week he asked to start blogging on one of the blogs. He's posted a few entries so far.

I'm considering this a good exercise in writing composition.

I feel like an unschooling parent regarding this project because my son has resisted and we've had power struggles over formal writing composition lessons. Yet in this blogging endeavor through writing short blogs posts, in the editing process I am teaching him elements of English grammar. He's relearning and practicing capitalization at the beginning of the sentence, proper nouns versus common nouns, spacing between words and paragraphs, and all the punctuation. Dividing up text into paragraphs is being covered. Lastly, the actual writing composition, moving from a first draft which is more like free flow writing into clarifying his thoughts by adding more details so that other readers will know what he is talking about is being done. For example if he mentions Halo I remind him to tell the reader it is a video game in the beginning of the post.

My son has his own Amazon Associates account so just in case anyone buys anything through the links inside of his posts or from linking from his sidebar he'll make a small profit from the sales. I don't expect this to happen too much but just in case, I want him to make his own money rather than mix up his sales with the commissions from The Thinking Mother.

Today he asked to add a photo to his profile and he selected which picture to use.

In case you are wondering I have not given either of my children much access to the computer. Unlike other parents my husband and I have not given them free reign to fiddle with our PCs. We fear they may crash the hard drive or erase critical programs like some young children we know have done to their parent's computers. So the last thing that my son is interested in and that I'm not pushing is for lots of experimentation with designing his template or making a custom template.

He is asking for a Site Meter to track his visitors and he'd like a world map tracking program like I use.

I am thrilled that he wants to blog and write in this way.

He was funny when he said, "Does writing for the blog count as writing composition for homeschooling?" I said yes. I had told him that in the upcoming year a major goal is for him to do regular writing composition and to really get to a point where he feels more comfortable with creating written pieces (handwritten or on the computer, I don't care which, I care about the composition process itself).

Let's hope his enthusiasm continues!

Privacy Issues

In case you are wondering my son is not using his real first name or last name. We do not reveal the town we reside in. He uses a pen name. He does not have the password for his account. I have to log in to Blogger for him. All his comments are on moderation so I will be the one to see them and approve or deny them in case someone is trying to contact him or if they are rude or post inappropriate content or send spam to his blog. I did not put his email contact on the blog. He actually does not use email yet but in order to create his own Blogger account he needed his own email account.

His Blog Revealed

In case you want to read his blog the one he is actively writing on is The Dragon Seeker's Reviews. His Blogger name is Dragon Seeker.

My Younger Son

Now my younger son wants to get in on the game. In the next two weeks I'll be spending time setting up an email with our ISP and a Blogger account for my nine year old son.

One Last Word on Non-Traditional Learning

So far this project is taking up a lot of my time! Sometimes doing things in the unschooling way can be more time intensive for the parent than simply administering a homeschool lesson.

When relying on the child's passion I think it helps for the parent to be available when the mood strikes and when the child is "on fire" to do the project. I'm trying to both be available to my son but also sometimes he must wait until I am available, sometimes he has to wait. I can't drop everything I'm doing in order to help him at the exact moment he desires. I won't go that far with child-led learning. (Such as the other night I was trying to get dinner made and things were cooking and needed immediate attention or they would have burned, so he had to wait until I was free.)

I am reminded once again that doing things "in real life" not learning always based on a lesson or using a curriculum can be more productive. I'm finding we went through many more concepts in the 45 minutes that I worked with my son this morning than a structured lesson ever would have "dumped" on the child in one sitting, yet my son was okay with that amount of new material or re-learning old concepts as he wanted the blog posts to both be published today.

It is more work for the parent sometimes. The concepts may be more erratic, not logically organized or thorough. In this way things are learned when they are needed to be learned and practiced when it comes up in real life (not in a predictable schedule). Anyhow this is what unschooling parents try to explain to non-unschoolers all the time but I think sometimes the others "just don't get it".