Outside Learning- Small and Simple Things

A good friend of mine recommended reading the Original Charlotte Mason homeschooling books. So I started reading one. I really enjoyed the 15 pages that I read before I got distracted onto something else. ( I'm still reading them Lazy...I'm just reading them slower than you are) But I have been implementing what I read in those 15 pages....that's half the battle right?...applying the things you've learned. So every day this week we have spent our afternoons for hours and hours outside enjoying the world around us.

Our first outdoor enjoyment day we drove around for a while, got lost and couldn't find a great place to hang out so we ended up at the elementary school down the road from us....I know, I know...of all places to go, an institution I totally disagree with :) But if you go there in the summer all of the other people are avoiding that place like the plague so it ends up being a great place to go and have some peace and quiet. The kids played and played and played until they got hot and then they came to join me under my tree. And so we tried out some of Charlotte's outdoor activities. They found something that didn't belong....not to hard. They found something that didn't belong that was beautiful....a little bit harder. And finally they had to find something that was useful...It took some of them quite a while to do this one....but it was because they were putting a lot of time and effort into it. So we came home with a jacket that had been burried in the dirt, a thoughtful child brought me a some water from the sprinklers...pretty usefull, but we didn't bring that one home, and lots and lots of garbage, and a few things that are only usefull to smallish type people but not to mommies, so those promptly went in the garbage too....we'll we did our civic service for the day and picked up 10 things of garbage off the school lawn. Unfortunatly and amazingly there is still many more days worth of things left to pick up....luckily no one else will be there for 90 more days so we might go and enjoy it again.

Actually what I really liked about the whole experience was the learning and discussion that we had each time they brought something back...why they picked that, what they noticed, where did they find it, why it was usefull to them. It is nice to learn from small and simple things.