When I started on the home education journey, I envisaged lots of project-based learning, and we started out that way. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always continue that way. I got involved in a co-op, and found that a lot of my energy was going towards that. And then I started a job, started to panic about the state of the world, and somehow lost track of the life I wanted to be leading.
So, I’m now prioritising the things I want to be doing to lead the life that I want to be living, and part of that is doing quality learning with the kids, not just tick-box learning. We had a chat. Which might have been a bit of ‘right, now we’re going to be learning some stuff, mum’s got a new idea’ and a bit of ‘you will come to some form of consensus, whether you like it or not’, but primarily, ‘yay let’s learn about ships (my eldest) and submarines (my youngest)’.
In the past two days, my youngest has already designed and built a submarine using a peanut butter jar, a straw and lots of hot glue. It filled up with water, which then came out the spout as planned, and there was glee. I have a strange feeling he has now put a ‘tick’ next to the ‘studied submarines’ box. Ha, I think not.
While I’m going to be planning for the next couple of weeks, and have already taken a heap of books out of the library here’s a list of things I think we’ll be doing:
- Navigation and cartography. We’ll be drawing maps, and plotting co-ordinates. We’ll have treasure hunts and scavenger hunts, and using a compass.
- Learning to sail. Obviously.
- Experiments in flotation – how do we make it float? How can we carry it? How does it dive?
- History of stuff in water – I’m thinking Kon Tiki expedition, Viking long-boats and German U-boats.
- A log-book of life on the water. It might be a role-play type thing, I’m not sure yet.
- Rations. Learning about scurvy. Planning a garden that can be carried on a houseboat.
- Excursion to a tall ship.
And I think that will do until we run out of steam on this. Join us on the journey!
