offroad learning

If homeschooling is a journey, than curriculum is your roadmap. You make your plan, gather your books and head off towards the destination:June. And the completion of 4th, 6th and 8th grade for your students. You follow your weekly schedule, read the allotted chapters and take occasional tests and thus, you smoothly travel through the weeks.

except...

Life is a bumpy road! It throws curves, and some drunk redneck shot that yellow sign all to bits, so you didn't slow down quick enough, and now you are careening around on just two wheels! Life has these big potholes called Illness, Moving, New Baby, Half-Marathon. Big yawning holes that are necessary but get in the way of your travel, and can easily impede your progress. If you stop school all together the students get bored and antsy and start picking on each other and bothering you (you, who are trying SO HARD to get well, pack boxes, nurse an infant or run 3 more miles!)

So they need something to do, and you'd prefer it to be something productive so some learning takes place-even if it isn't memorizing Roman history-something to keep those neurons firing and their brains from turning to oatmeal before you can get back to the curriculum!

This is my "emergency road kit". Throw this in your trunk for when you need it. You will, trust me! I call it plearning. They think they are Playing but you know Learning is going on.

Go to the Library and STOCK UP. Here's our rules:

ONE "twaddle" book-that is a book that has no meat in it, written junk food, if you will. For our boys, this is often a Star Wars book, or a Calvin and Hobbes comic, or a Pirate of the Caribbean "junior novelization" (please! that is SO not a novel!) but it is what I refer to as dessert, and they can read it after they read the good stuff. Then they get to choose as many "other" books as they want. I usually have a list I add to the pile with, books that are suggested by excellent resources, but that the boys might not choose because they are usually old looking, without the bright colors and cool titles they are drawn to. It's fun though to see, how if it's laying around, and I don't ASSIGN it, they always end up picking it up, reading it and loving it. Sam finally believes me when I say "I think you'll like this. Just taste a few chapters and tell me what you think?"

Go ahead and let them get DVDs. Now, I am pretty strict about TV consumption, but when life gets chaotic I make exceptions. I feel a lot better about this option when it's an educational DVD. We fill up the Netflix Queue and go get our limit of 6 at the library and to watch a video on a Tuesday morning? It's a real treat. We love Drive Thru History and Shakespeare for Kids and we sometimes get a few old Classics (anything Disney with Don Knotts is funny but the boys join me in loving Frank Capra directed oldies!) and today the kids are loving the video Oodles of Doodles, with a cartoonist teaching simple art. This will have them quietly filling up notebooks with creativity, ALL DAY LONG.

Get out the board games. This is Alisa's idea and it's great! They are laughing and competing and joking and not realizing they are learning spelling (Boggle, Scrabble) math (Sorry, Yahtzee)and even that old idea, capitalism (Monopoly) Josiah loves games and can play all day. His brothers are less interested and I have been known to bribe them to play with their big brother. Puzzles are great, too!

Send them outside. I think playing outside is necessary, everyday-even for us adults. Being in the midst of Gods creation, smelling the air, running through grass, noticing how the seasons changing? That is an education, too, and I would wager it is more important to a well-lived life than the greatest offerings of books. However, I raised a bunch of book-lovers and reap both the pros and cons. They would curl up in chairs and read all day, so I often have to kick them out. I do this without remorse, because we had a housekeeper who didn't necessarily like children. She wouldn't allow us indoors from after school until dinner and I would've told you, then, that I was bored to tears and desperately wished to watch Scooby-Doo, like every other 5th grader. Yet now I count those 3 years as some of the richest, for my imaginations wild growth during those long afternoons of climbing trees, building fairy houses and laying in the grass studying a grasshopper. So I trust that they will thank me, as adults. They whine but receive no mercy. Not because I don't like children, but because I so, very very much DO!

"I'm bored!"(so get creative)

"Can we come in?!" (only if you want to scrub toilets, instead)

"I'm cold!" (run around, then)

"How much longer?!" (it isn't dark yet)

Life gets bumpy-but don't stress over the interruption to your homeschooling. I have found all the lurching and hanging on makes you appreciative of the smooth terrain you took for granted, on ordinary days.

We are planning to get back on the road October 20th, but in the meantime, we plearn on!