Thursday, September 19, 2013

Maybe "unhomeschooling" is the way to go?

Things continue to progress.  I woke up feeling rather ill today so my husband took my son to his co-op classes.  So far, my son is enjoying the lessons at his school and I've really excited with what I've seen as well.  Last week, he came home with a bottle of pretend blood.  His class has been learning all about the body - brains, lungs, heart - and so they used candy and some lima beans to reconstruct the elements of blood.  How fun is that??  And it was a fantastic hands on activity I'm sure he'll remember for some time.

I've been thinking a lot about school and lesson plans lately.  Basically, I've been thinking about unnecessary they really are and I've been considering switching to a more liberal approach.  Liberal meaning that we don't sit in the classroom as much.  In fact, I don't even tell him that what we're going is school, but rather just let him play and explore and learn on his own, much like I did up until the beginning of kindergarten.  And to be fair, we still do a lot of that hands on, self directed learning.  But we also meet in the school room three days a week, sit down, and get to business.  Frankly, it's boring but effective.  After all, at some you just have to sit down and learn the proper way to the write the letter "p", right?

But I love how excited my son is about the world around him.  I love that we go outside and he can instantly get distracted by a the bird nest in our tree and start asking me all sorts of questions about baby birds.  That's so much more fun that sitting in a classroom.

I keep telling myself that this is a great approach for this age, but what about when he gets older?  Do we need to start sitting at the desk and focusing more in order to get prepared for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, ect. ect....If anyone does this sort of "unhomeschooling", what do your days look like?  I'd love to hear about it.

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