simple learning

I've discovered that homeschooling is not complicated. Its essential ingredients are simple. Time, healthy relationships, community, and wisely chosen freedoms. When we homeschooled previously these things were not so readily available to us. I was driven to follow a particular recipe, not able to improvise. I was too concerned with how our learning looked to others, with wanting my girls to measure up. Now I'm finding that the recipe for learning comes instinctively to me, and what works each day is different. We make it up as we go along.

Homeschooling is the trip to the art gallery we took the other week. It's learning the violin, and experimenting on the piano. It's the impromptu flax weaving session my Auntie Celia gave the girls and their cousins when she came to visit. It's the mess in Isobella's bedroom that always involves several books lying open, and whole worlds created on floor. It's the full set of 1980's children's encyclopedia I bought from an op shop the other year. It's the pictures we painted while we were reading "The Borrowers" by Mary Norton.

Homeschooling is the beautiful and user-friendly handwriting programme we use. It's us all doing the dishes together, when we can. It's riding bikes. It's the swimming lesson, the gymnastics class. It's the maths curriculum that works with Isobella's brain, not against it.

Homeschooling is the blog we started for Greer last week, and the blog that Isobella has been doing sporadically for over a year. It's the fun touch typing lessons on the BBC website. It's starfall for phonics. It's Paddy and I working from home as much as we can, and Isobella coming in to the office the other day and asking "when can I start working in the business, Dad?"

Homeschooling is me not having to rush around like a mad thing in the mornings trying to get us all out the door on time. It's the freedom I have to get on with my day, after the hour or so of focused table-work that is our morning rhythm. Then whatever the girls do in their natural self-directed manner, with me close by for support, whether it's playing or reading or researching or creating, is all good. It all counts.

Homeschooling is the freedom we have after trying school twice, that we know now home is where our learning happens best, and that we are in for the long haul. I have long range forecasts, rather than driven short or medium term goals. That's freedom. Homeschooling means more time for me to write in the mornings, if I've gotten up early, and it means more headspace for me to write at that desk in my mind as the day goes on, if I haven't. It means setting a pace for our days that suits us all. It means peace.

Homeschooling is the library. It's the beach. It's the zoo and the museum, when we get there. It's going all together to the preschool music and movement class I help run and watching the girls play with the babies. It's seeing Isobella smile, noticing how much more confident she is, how settled and happy in her own skin she is. That's homeschooling.

It never felt like this when we did it before. There were too many agendas. We never really got confident. It was like riding a bike with trainer wheels, too scared to take them off, but always a bit wobbly.

This time there is no agenda.

pause

I took the girls down to the beach yesterday in the late afternoon. The tide was out and the air was full of sea birds circling, searching for food. I sat watching them for ages. There was a strong breeze coming off the water and the birds were coasting down and back up again, around and down and back up again. The big girls were playing separately, but I heard them both singing about being a bird. I want to fly in the sky like a bird, way up high like a bird. 


We stayed down there for nearly an hour. Everybody just kind of sighed and settled down. As if our brains all let go and started coasting. We fossicked about, we day dreamed.

It was a gift to us though, because we wouldn't have got it if we hadn't changed our eating pattern a week ago to eating our main meal in the middle of the day. We've been eating dinner at lunch time since the beginning of Lent. It was Paddy's idea, and it seems to have stuck. We're so lucky to all be at home at lunchtime most days. So yesterday at five o'clock I was down at the beach, instead of rushing around trying to get dinner ready. It's another tweak to our rhythm, and it works.

When we got back from the beach the girls played outside while I did the dishes and got their tea ready. The big two rode their bikes up and down the driveway while Abi ran beside them yelling "ready set set go!" I stood on the deck watching them for a while and saw Greer come racing down the driveway at top speed, grinning from ear to ear. It was that kind of face that means this is the best thing in the world I could be doing right now and I am happy happy happy.

I see that face often, more often than when she was at school. Sure she was proud of herself at school. There were times where she would go up a reading level nearly every week. She smiled about that. But it wasn't the same smile as the one I saw yesterday as she raced down the hill with no training wheels, the wind whistling past her face and her bare arms.

I'm doing a secret experiment with Greer. I'm not encouraging her to speed ahead with writing and reading, I'm letting her set the pace. She does one thing from the school cupboard in the morning while the candle is lit, her choice, and after that she is free, more or less. We read together every morning, there's violin practice, and plenty of helping to be done, but I'm not forcing her to sit down for more time than it takes to finish one thing in the morning.

I've been watching her, waiting to see if she will get bored, and I'm amazed that she hasn't. She enjoys the work she does first thing, and often carries on at the table doing colouring in or something else quiet after she's finished. She's good at violin, and she's learning to wash the dishes, taking turns with Isobella to either wash, or dry and put away. And then she slips into playing seamlessly. Her babies need plenty of looking after. They get changed and dressed and fed and walked in the toy stroller. They get packed in a back pack to come to the beach, along with a bottle and a few books to read if they get bored. And then when the babies are sleeping, or playing happily, she's outside in a flash, on that bike. It's bikes and babies that make Greer smile.

We're not getting the end of day madness we used to get when she was at school. She's not ridiculously tired every night at dinner time. I haven't seen any of the defiant outbursts that seemed to happen just because.  Because I've been trying to be good all day and I'm home now and I just won't. She's setting her own pace.

This is the beauty that finding our own rhythm is. This is how we get all the pause we need. The moments of letting go and coasting, of fossicking and daydreaming. This is the kind of time we are rich in.