The Super Adventurers!!!

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Learning can only happen when a child is interested. If [she’s] not interested, it’s like throwing marshmallows at [her] head and calling it eating.
Katrina Gutleben

August has decided on a name for our flexi-homeschooling day.
THE SUPER ADVENTURERS!!!
Decided isn’t quite the right word, as, like with many kids, she hurled out the superamazingawesome adjectives without much apparent deciphering (like her team name– the Amazing Forever Winners Ever!!!).
I like how she made us (mom and kid team) the subject rather than the activity (homeschooling). This is accurate since we do make or break the day together, and the word choice sure is optimistic (her), which is needed for those of us whose little minds worry about things (me).
We have other news, too. We first based our day around work sent home by August’s teacher (see my last blog pos “I’m a Flexi-Homeschooler”) but, that desk work was the source of much struggle (Booooring!!, according to August) plus the work sent home began to peter out anyhow (teacher has enough to do, understandably).
So, we decided to approach our day in our own way. This is a luxury I am happy to take, as mentioned in the previous blog post: not every parent can take a day a week of unpaid work, and not every teacher gets to work one-one-one with a kid. Might as well make the best of whats we’ze gots.
I do a lot of research (into everything), most often while in the bath with a glass of wine, which is where I was last Tuesday night worrying on the eve of our weekly Super Adventurers’ day. Listening to a few podcasts on UNSCHOOLING, I found the approach to be really liberating. Why not make learning easier by starting with things Gussie (August) actually wants to learn about? To get really radical, how ’bout trusting August? I mean kids are born with such a desire to learn about things– with ALL of their senses– that they eat them.
The added advantage of this method is that it doesn’t require me– who’s first job is to parent– to become someone else, i.e. a professional teacher. She didn’t really like me like that, I’d discovered.
Instead, I would facilitate her interests, muster up all the creativity and possibility I could (which made things super fun for me!). This way, we get to learn together, using our curiosity as our drive with the old idea of life as curriculum; world as classroom. Now that sounds brave, much more worthy of the Super Adventurers!!!
It doesn’t mean abandoning conventional schooling altogether- we will fit in curriculum items without even noticing– as they arise and on an on-demand basis.
The next morn’, as we’ve done all along, August and I started our day at Guelph Lake Nature Centre, watching the birds at the feeder by the lake. I asked her to pick a topic, and we flew from there…
Subscribe to read my next post (with pics, video and an entry from Gussie) to see how our super adventuring went!

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