It felt a bit silly to have a start date to our home education. We’ve always been aware of our surroundings and the world around us.
Learning doesn’t, and shouldn’t, stop when you step out of a school room, so we had already spent the summer learning and exploring.
It’s why home education made so much sense to us: it’s what we were already doing. Observing. Learning. Absorbing ourselves in what we love.
Hopefully I’ll get a rhythm to how I post these (I even plan on doing a podcast soon, too). But for now, I’ll just jump in:
We’ve been studying bees and the beehive collapse for several years, and so it has made sense to observe and track the bees in our own yard and ecosystem:
I was sad that we didn’t plant any tomatoes this year.
But a few months ago I noticed a tomato plant growing from our open compost pile – along with several other tomato plants…and a pumpkin plant… and an acorn squash plant. All growing from the compost and compost seeds.
We ended up with an entire volunteer urban garden. In our compost pile.
It’s been a great study in seeds and horticulture.
And it’s been delicious!
Not-going-back-to-school photo
Some art books we loved
(sidenote: we’ve read a ton of books — I’m trying to figure out the best way to document those)
A cool project and activity book
We had a huge tree branch fall into our yard. We explored and played around it (and prayed the rest of the tree didn’t fall down too).
Painting is one of our favorite family pastimes.
We’ve gotten into space, space exploration, and time travel. This was a space/time travel helmet built for a friend.
We explored a bit of New Orleans history, which included some mini-Muffulettas (or Muffuletta-wanna-bes)
We watched the ISS pass over Birmingham.
(*sidenote: this was way cooler than I expected it to be!)
Tracking the ISS using the Skyview app
Declan turned seven, and he picked out and decorated his own cake (angel food cake, homemade organic whipped cream, and strawberries)
and learned to blow up balloons with a pump and make balloon animals.
His brothers and sister made him gifts and wrapped them with their own wrapping paper:
I had to throw in my favorite photos of the #4Kidz and I – when the older three got to meet Declan for the first time:
We decorated the white board, of course:
Abbie studied and made a Chinese takeout box
complete with handmade paper shrimp:
More of our compost/urban garden tomatoes – we all take turns going out and picking them
(there are a ton! If you want some, please let us know. Seriously!)
I’m still trying to get my footing in how to document our monthly roundup… This is new to me. I’ve played around with adding things to Evernote, but for now, this seems quick and simple since iPhoto dates everything for me when I import my photos.
It will serve several purposes: a portfolio, a reminder of how much we do and learn each month, as well as an encouragement to other families who are trying to figure out what can be learned and accomplished without a school house.
Let me know what y’all did in August and if you have an suggestions/links/apps etc for the topics of interest we studied!
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