Biking at the Arboretum

The kids and I had so much fun at our local arboretum yesterday morning. We decided to head over there so M could ride her bike freely. It was a perfect day for a walk amidst the flowers and the trees and we had a nice picnic in the meadow.

It got me to thinking yet again how incredible homeschooling is. While many kids spend the schoolday inside, my kids are exploring outdoors, naturally learning about the world around them, and fostering their innate curiosity. I was imagining how it will be a few years from now when we go to the arboretum and M is busy researching various trees and habitats, while J is recording which trees he sees in a nature journal, and A is collecting leaves for her discovery jar. Homeschooling provides such an amazing resource for differentiated, child-led learning -- even in the same location-- that it will be so fun to see the kids develop and discover right before my very eyes!

Letters and Numbers

During J's nap today, M and I did some learning time. We went to IXL Math and worked on identifying types of coins, while we had the quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies in front of us to better visualize the coins. Then we moved on to counting various shapes up to 20. It's such a great math program, segmented by grade level.

Moving on, we printed out some ABC tracing pages and practiced tracing letters with our pencils.

Saving Schools

I finished an outstanding book called, Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning, by Paul Peterson, Professor at Harvard's Kennedy School. It was a fascinating read and provides further evidence that the only way to secure our children's, and our country's future, is to accelerate the advent of choice, competition and decentralization in public education. Professor Peterson also touches on homeschooling as the ultimate in parental choice. He is the editor of Education Next.

Interestingly, Peterson discusses in the book how Horace Mann, considered the founder of universal public education mainly to "civilize" the poor Irish immigrants to Boston in the early 1800s, homeschooled his own children...