Our Unschooling World Today

Ryan just out-of-the-blue asked me what the first country in the world was. I called my dad who was a history major to see what he would say. After we talked, I told Ryan that the first civilization was Mesopotamia, now known as Iraq. We looked it up on a map and saw where Iraq is in relation to our country. I also told him that we are at war in Iraq to which he responded, “it’s a good thing we can’t hear the war.” I have to tell you that the conversation that spawned off from here really surprised me. We started talking about why we are at war in Iraq, which frankly I don’t really know the answer to anymore. Iain asked if we’re fighting for our freedom in Iraq and I said no. “Why are we fighting then?” out of the mouths of babes…. I gave an explanation and I’m not sure it’s a good one but what I told him was that there was a man in charge of Iraq who was bad to his people so we were fighting to give those people their freedom. He asked if we were still fighting that man. I told him that no, he had been killed in punishment for being a bad leader. Iain wondered why we’re still fighting so I gave my best guess on that. There are still people who believe in the same things as the bad leader so we have been fighting against those people to help the good people in Iraq to remain free. Honestly I don’t think I have given the war in Iraq that much thought since it began so here’s hoping that my response was somewhere in the neighborhood of accurate.

A few minutes later, we heard some classical music on TV and the boys wanted to know what it was called. Apparently, they had heard it in a Mario game as well as on an episode of Little Einsteins on Disney. We went to a website called www.kickassclassical.com and there were clips of the top 100 most famous classical pieces of music. We listened to several until we finally landed on the one we were looking for, “A Little Night Music” by Mozart. This was cool because I was able to tell the boys how he had written a lot of music when he was a child and they were pretty impressed by that.

So, a lot of the day was spent playing the Wii and messing around with Legos. Then for about 2o minutes we had some intense conversation about the world and classical music. Living life this way is SO cool. Connections happen when you least expect them.