One thing I never imagined doing was home-schooling our children.
It had come up in conversation that at some time our kiddos might reach a point where they were interested in finishing high school at home to have more freedom in their schedule.
But, the actual day-to-day teaching of all 3 kiddos and possessing the sole responsibility for their education. Whew! That was not on the radar.
We have lots of reasons we decided to make this choice after moving to Mexico. Each family has their own ideals and priorities regarding education and so that choice is different from family to family. If you have specific questions, I’ll do my best to answer them. But I try to keep this blog from turning into a forum for my personal opinion and keep it informative and just share our experiences.
Is it working?
Yep.
One thing I do miss, though, is the group learning from the classroom environment. There are benefits to a group of 20 kiddos all reading a certain piece of literature and discussing what it meant to them. Or a fun science project that has kids in teams to see who can come up with the most interesting way to prove a hypothesis. Or the sharing of comments and experiences of life.
Please do not misunderstand, our kiddos have a great amount of time spent in social settings. And they are so at home with people of all different ages and races and backgrounds.
I just miss the momentum of working on a project in a group setting. The joy of exploring a topic and learning something new is contagious.
So…
…I came up with an idea.
We are going to have a project we all work on for each month. It’s not for a grade. Just for fun. And each person can study it from their own unique perspective -since we have a high school student, a middle school student, and a little school student.
Each school day the kiddos will spend a minimum of 15 minutes pursuing the topic of the month. It can be working on a power-point, finding something on pinterest.com, reading a biography about a person relating to the topic, finding an interesting video. Pretty much anything.
It gives us something to share at the dinner table or in the car while riding. It gives the kiddos interesting material for conversation with others. It keeps their horizons broad. It nourishes the life long love of learning and exploring we are working to inculcate.
This month we chose the…
RENAISSANCE
- artists abound
- math and science flourish
- there are many familiar things today that originate from that time
- a lot was happening socially, religiously & politically
- plus, it’s just an era of beauty -who doesn’t enjoy the benefit of adding some beauty to the day
The reason for sharing this via the blog is that there are other families that might like to join in the fun. If you find something interesting, please share. Then, maybe we can accomplish the “group learning” thing.
What did you find about the Renaissance that you did not previously know?
What is your favorite thing about the Renaissance that you would like to share?
Do you have any recommendations for the kiddos to check out?
Any ideas for future topics?
I will encourage my kids to participate in your topic! We are going to a Renaissance Festival next week. So we will take pics and other stuff to share from that too. Great idea!
That would be awesome Jess! 🙂 We have enjoyed it so far. Part of the reason the works of art from that time are so amazing is the interest the artists had in math and science. They wanted their work to have more depth and perspective. Pretty cool to be able to tie all those different aspects into a single era.