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1:11:00 PM EDT
homeschooling in nature
Man’s heart away from nature becomes hard.
-Standing Bear
I was just noticing that most of my latest entries do not deal with academia, but with Nature. This time of year, it is so intoxicating to be outside and immersed in the Spring that we tend to let book work slide. The girls are still learning a great deal, but not necessarily sitting down and doing a lot of formal education.
I suppose that there are different ways of looking at an education and the value of an education. I believe that my primary goal as a home educator is to stay out of my children's way most of the time. They possess an innate curiosity about the world and seemingly inexhaustible questions. As long as I can facilitate their learning and experiencing life, they are being well educated. I sometimes push and shove them in some areas--forcing them to learn the multiplication tables, how to eat dinner without chewing with mouths open and arms on tables, how to do the laundry--but often I just stand back and watch.
They bring home an injured garter snake, I go look garters up online and start feeding information to them: garter snakes hibernate in huge balls of snakes. The males emerge first from hibernation, so our injured snakie friend is probably a male. They eat slugs and worms. They are not "garden snakes" or "gardener snakes", but garter snakes, like the garters brides wear at weddings. The best thing to treat the injury is apparently betadine and triple ointment. See how much more active Aires (Tabitha names it) is when he is warm? Make sure the heating stone is plugged in. They love to soak in water. They like to catch minnows and eat them. There are she-males who pretend to be female!! Garters are often preyed upon by house cats--keep Green Eyes well away from his cage. I know he is sweet, but he was born wild and it is not fair to keep him a prisoner after he heals up. See that opening? Snakes have an opening called a cloaca. That's where both the sex organs and the excretion organs are. Male snakes have forked, pronged penis-like organs called hemi-penis. And on and on...
I learn more than they do.
Click here: More on Garter Snakes talks about the she-male garter snakes....they mimic females and males swarm over them to try to mate...
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I have a wonderful little book by Suzette Elgin called the "Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense." In her preface she describes the typical five year old. She'll have a vocaulary of several thousand words, an insatiable curiostiy, you can't shut her up and if you're lucky she may already be learning to read. Then the round hole school system gets ahold of all these square pegs. Since you are home schooling I'm assuming you are trying to avoid what ususally happens after that.
Jackie -
And a wonderful education they're receiving! Oh to be that blessed! Lisa
4/16/05 11:20 PM