Typically....

On any given day, you will typically find our kids participating in a variety of things from reading, playing games (video games too), watching any array of DVD's (including many educational ones), making their own lunches, helping with cleaning the house or picking up and caring for the yard, appreciating nature, digging for bugs and watching caterpillars break forth from their chrysalis, cicadas breaking free from their larva stage, fossil hunting, adding more special rocks to our rock bed, looking at items under the microscope. Crafting, studying numbers and using the abacus, writing many note cards, even doing copy work, and creating untold amounts of lists to check off throughout the day. Hanging out at the library, enjoying quiet time, playing with friends, riding bikes, walking through the city, or through the woods, playing in the pool and learning to swim on their own, engaging in endless conversations with people of all ages, studying how words come together through various letters and their sounds, practicing reading aloud, or memorizing bible verses as part of their units for Daisies and Royal Rangers. You will find them grocery shopping and helping to weigh items and count items, scan items and bag items. You will find them tinkering with many things like their bikes, their toys, many nature items in order to fix or enhance them or make new games and create with. They will often be engaging in many role playing games that they themselves have made up, or telling various stories or singing many songs that they have made up, you will also find them blogging when it suits them. You will find them making forts out of anything possible, creating their own languages, and counting their money, and working on puzzles of all sorts. And yet, they do all of this with out any demanding from us, they do this because they are inately curious and they enjoy doing this stuff. They do it on their own time table, there is no time settings for this stuff that they must learn and practice, and most importantly it is not "busy" work! And yes, we do join in all the time especially, when they invite us to do so. I am sure I left many, many things out because there is just so much that they do, but I will leave it there because I am sure you get the idea...we are learning all the time. We just learn in the real world. Enjoy a sampling (actually a barrage) of pictures from our daily lives.

"When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else." -Eleanor Roosevelt











"Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners." -John Holt











"The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I didn't exist."" -Maria Montessori











"The Possible's slow fuse is lit by the imagination." -Emily Dickinson











"Since we cannot know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to lean whatever needs to be learned." -John Holt