Girl Gone Domestic

“Wisdom begins in wonder.”

Socrates

While our homeschooling experience has its fair dose of phonics, math facts, and handwriting practice, the majority of our time “doing school” is spent discovering whatever we feel led to explore.  It has included nature walks, pickle making, watercolors, terrariums and Pipi Longstocking.

Children are natural learners, from the womb.  I believe there is little need to interfere with the process.

I have found that the difference between this relaxed approach to learning and the more traditional way, is that children retain what they learn when they are learning about things they are truly interested in.  They are not just regurgitating facts they were forced to learn for tests & quizzes.  These forced facts tend to be easily forgotten unless they are put into practice in daily life.

“…no matter what tests show, very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used. The things we learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, nonschool parts of our lives.”

 John Holt, How Children Fail

 “A child only pours herself into a little funnel or into a little box when she’s afraid of the world—when she’s been defeated. But when a child is doing something she’s passionately interested in, she grows like a tree—in all directions. This is how children learn, how children grow. They send down a taproot like a tree in dry soil. The tree may be stunted, but it sends out these roots, and suddenly one of these little taproots goes down and strikes a source of water. And the whole tree grows.”

 John Holt, Learning All the Time

“Furthermore, most children will find greater satisfaction and demonstrate greater learning from things they make and do with their parents or other people than from elaborate toys or learning materials. And there is no substitute for solitude – in the sandpile, mud puddle, or play area – for a young child to work out his own fantasies. Yet this privilege is often denied in our anxiety to institutionalize children.”

 Raymond S. Moore, School Can Wait

“We should help parents understand the overriding importance of incidental teaching in the context of warm, consistent companionship. Such caring is usually the greatest teaching, especially if caring means sharing in the activites of the home.”

 Raymond S. Moore, School Can Wait

“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”

Albert Einstein

“It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Neither comprehension nor learning can take place in an atmosphere of anxiety.”

Rose Kennedy

“The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.”

Thomas Merton

“Education is the process in which we discover that learning adds quality to our lives. Learning must be experienced.”

William Glasser

“…my object is to show that the chief function of the child–his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life–is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses…”

 Charlotte Mason