We were supposed to get in the garden this morning, but as we walked out of the house and looked up at the sky, we could see the storm coming; we weren't fifty feet from the house before the rain started coming and the thunder started rumbling, so weeding and harvesting would have to be put on hold.
Luckily, (I guess?) we traded a watermelon for three grocery bags full of fresh pears the other day with a friend and while they weren't overripe, they did need to be processed down. My wife is a fan of baking, eating a few and then putting the goods in the freezer for later. I don't mind this, but our freezer is quickly filling up with garden veggies and I prefer preserving things separately. (I'd rather freeze a bunch of pears and then make bread later than take up space in the freezer with flour, eggs, sugar, etc.)
For me the easiest thing is to peel them, chunk them, toss them in the crock pot and cook them down to make pear sauce which then gets canned. So that's what I did, but my son seems to have allowed my wife to rub off on him and was intent on making some sort of pear bread.
For us, it's summer break, but when you're homeschooling, you never really get a break, and this was one of those perfect “teaching moments,” at least the teacher inside me thought so. Latley, I've really been trying to embrace the unschooling thing. I have some hesitations with it, but it's summer, so why not let it ride? After all, unschooling provides the least restrictive environment, ever.
When my son asked if he could make some pear bread, I hesitated at first, but then said, “sure, go for it, but I'm not helping.” My son is eight and fully capable of math and reading, but we don't have a television, and it was only last year that I got a smart phone, so his computer skills are probably far below that of his peers. If he wanted to make bread, it was on him to find a recipe and follow it on his own.
It took him a little bit to figure out the Brave browser, but he eventually got it (he uses Open Office, a lot, so he's familiar with the workings of a pc), and found a recipe he wanted to make. So while I peeled and chopped pears for the crock pot, he got out all the ingredients he needed and started making his bread. Because it was an experiment, and the recipe made two loaves, I told him to half it, which made him do some mental gymnastics when it came time to divide ¾ cups in half, but he got it done. (I had to help a little with cutting ¾ in half, but only by asking questions.)
If we had a television, he could have been sitting, watching Paw Patrol or some other abomination all morning while the rain came down, instead, we got to spend some quality time together, learning, working on our own projects, making our lives and relationship better. I'm not sure I'd necessarily call this unschooling, but it incorporated a good handful of real life skills that will actually help him as he ages, and I get to have a few slices of some pear-coffee-cake-bread or whatever it was he made.