Learning is a Journey
I found the following reflection of our homeschool day on my computer as I was cleaning up some files. It is from April 2015. What an awesome reminder of how kids’ interests develop over time, and how time is precisely what they need to be able to explore and revisit these interests and ideas.
One year after this reflection was written, my children embarked upon a four to five month study of birds that they initiated completely on their own. It started on the very same day that they discovered a bird nest in the potted plant right outside our front door. I watched as they became bird experts and made decisions about what and how they wanted to learn. In fact today, my daughter still has bird feeders and bird houses set up in our yard and bird watches constantly. What I had not remembered, is this experience described below an entire year before. I am grateful for the reminder!
Sometimes people ask me to show them videos, pictures, or plans of what I do with the kids in homeschool so that they can get a sense of what it is like. I know that the majority of time, what they are looking to see is what kind of “direct instruction” is going on. However, it remains to be an uncomfortable question for me because whatever moments I am sitting down with the kids working on a particular skill or concept (like this morning, we solved addition equations on the abacus and I helped my daughter to write a letter to a friend to congratulate her on the birth of her new baby), is not the part of “school” that I think is most valuable. In fact, it’s not really school at all. Our life is school. Our interactions, conversations, and experiences…that’s when the magic happens.
We went for our usual walk this afternoon. My daughter and oldest son were both on their bikes and I was pushing the babies in the stroller. At one point my daughter was up ahead pulled over at the side of the lake beckoning her brother to hurry and check out what she had found. There on the ground were two extremely large feathers. She was amazed saying that she had never seen feathers that big before. She held one and he held the other and they pretended to flap their wings and flutter around like birds. After a little while, they politely traded feathers with each other and fluttered around again. She hypothesized that these feathers were from hawks. We had actually just seen, moments before, some hawks flying overhead. When my son exclaimed, “Look at the eagles!” she quickly corrected him saying that they were hawks. I asked how she knew that they were hawks and she began to describe things she noticed about them.
She asked me if the feathers were from a hawk and we talked about the kind of research we could do to find out. She asked if we were being paleontologists. That led to a wonderful discussion of words and ornithology. My son, two years old, practiced saying o-r-n-i-t-h-o-l-o-g-y really slowly as we talked. He wondered out loud if hawks had teeth. Elated that I said we could bring our treasures home, our discussion turned toward how and why feathers were used for pens. They excitedly planned out how they would try to write with the feathers they found.
I felt so good as we walked/rode home. Right there, wrapped up in that one hour, was all the science, social studies, and language arts that you couldn’t muster up sitting inside at a table. Being led by the kids’ interests is how I love teaching. Sure, it requires follow-through and a little legwork sometimes, but we are having fun. My inquisitive five year old will remind me that she wants to write with her feather and possibly ask me for help with her feather research. We’ll look for books about birds and feathers on our next trip to the library. If interest hasn’t died down, I might see about taking a trip to the local Audubon Center for Birds of Prey. And who knows where that will lead…
