The thought of sending my kids off to a classroom to sit at a desk all day makes me cringe. I love the learning that happens throughout the day, all around the house and yard. Here is some of what went on in my house yesterday:
We played 3-letter word bingo, I designed the game for Jumping Spider, who is learning to read, but all the kids enjoyed playing. Honeybee has been telling me she wants to learn to spell, so I offered her a spelling workbook. She did one page, but decided she got better practice at spelling by working on the book she is writing. She’s discovered she actually knows how to spell a lot more words than she realized, just from all the reading she does. She will ask me if she isn’t sure of a spelling, but she almost always has it right. Honeybee also worked on some multiplication worksheets I made for her, she is learning her 5 times tables.
While Honeybee was working on her book, Jumping Spider and Ladybug were in my bedroom drawing and cutting. Soon they came and asked me to come see the toy store they had made. There were paper dolls, dinosaurs, houses, a pickup truck, and even a castle for sale. We got out some money and practiced figuring out prices and adding up coins.
Later in the day we decided to make bread, and the foaming yeast gave me an idea so I got out our microscope and the kids helped make slides for it by putting a drop of water with yeast on the slide and putting a cover slip over it. then we all had fun looking at the yeast through the microscope. I have a microscope camera that sends the image to my laptop, so we can all see what is under the microscope at the same time. We had fun looking for yeast cells that were dividing.
No desks. No lesson plans. Just a lot of exploration and learning.
