A reason to love unschooling...

Damien and Ariana turned 10 and 12 this last week, and from Grandma Dawn they got a card with the same number of dollars as years they have been born. They were both very excited and counted out all the money they have stashed around the house (theoretically all the money should be in their wallets, but they are kids), including missing money that they hope to find someday. Damien then asked, "who is on the 10-dollar bill?" this sent him off to the picture of all the presidents to see if he could find the mystery man. I commented that I didn't think "he" was a president as did Ariana, and once Damien had satisfied himself that we were right he moved on to the next step in solving the mystery. I asked him who the man was and Damien sounded out Hamilton, so then we looked him up online and read all about him for almost 20 minutes. My deficient public school education left me with no knowledge of Hamilton, but over the course of trying out different styles of homeschooling, I had seen a documentary and had a little knowledge of who Hamilton was. Damien and I talked about Hamilton's character quite a bit, since he was a rather impulsive man who could have spared himself a lot of suffering if he had learned to control his temper. Damien found it particularly interesting that Hamilton's oldest son died in a duel at the young age of 19. Since Damien struggles with impulsive outbursts, it is interesting that he honed in on that aspect of Hamilton. Our discussion led us to talking about the infamous duel with Aaron Burr, Mr. Burr's character and whether Hamilton really missed on purpose or not. With unschooling you never know where a "lesson" will take you, and I love the freedom to go wherever the kids lead. If I had planned this lesson (or if I hadn't managed to shed most my teacher training), I would have focussed on learning more about the history of money esp since Hamilton was Treasury Secretary, and maybe gotten into who the other men were on the bills, but I don't think I ever would have thought to talk about the good and bad aspects of Hamilton's character.