Favorite Resource - Use Posters to Strew!

I really loved the Charlotte Mason quote that "education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life."  It made me think about how to create home that provided such an atmosphere, discipline and life.  Already, though, when my kids were very young, I was providing a home atmosphere that stimulated learning without me even thinking about it.  We went to the library often and read books.  We kept books on lower shelves or in one of those plastic milk crates, so that they could look at them when they wanted.  I bought those magnetic letters to go on the fridge so they could play with them while I was busy in the kitchen.  We got a globe to put in our family room so we could refer to it when wondering about oceans and countries.  When my kids drew a picture, we'd hang up on the wall somewhere.  So quite naturally, the home's atmosphere developed one that encouraged learning.

With unschooling, you can just take it to the next level intentionally by using your walls to strew information and knowledge you want your kids to be exposed to.  I did it very piecemeal.  We had a teacher supply store for many years and maybe once a year I'd go there and wind up getting a poster of some sort.  We had one of parts of speech, one of basic math formulas and I'm sure we had others that I don't recall.  We also had for many years a home made parts of speech poster.  Maybe the other one got torn or something.  We had a graph we'd done of the times tables up for a while.  We had a print out of the top ten most common grammatical mistakes for a while.  We put up flashcards of the presidents (still up!).  But you can be a bit more organized about it by buying some like this.  These posters cover arithmetic, science, geography, history, etc.  A pretty good deal!  You can use them for years, rotating them on and off your walls.  We used the fridge and the doors to our pantry as our main place to display stuff like this.  You don't even have to say anything to your kids.  Just put it up and leave it alone.  If it is in a well-trafficked space, it will get looked at and each child will absorb it to whatever capacity they have at that moment for that particular knowledge about that particular subject.

Our presidential flashcards are still up.  They aren't in our kitchen but downstairs on the cabinets in our basement.

And if you are the type of person that really doesn't relish decorating your house like a classroom, you can put this visual strewing in other places like the bathroom (Read Cheaper by the Dozen for inspiration!!!) or on bedroom doors or in a playroom or the upstairs hallway.