Relaxed Homeschooling: Taking Advantage of Environment

My kids get bored easily. Do yours? A week of work pages, reading and recitation had left mine with a glazed over look in their eyes and groans when I mentioned beginning lessons for the day. Inwardly, I chided myself, “Look what you’ve done to them! Where is that relaxed love of learning you like to talk about and be inspired by?” Now, to my credit, I’m not always a work page sort of homeschooling Mama, but a new foster child and an upheaval in our schedules had made it an easy road to take for a while.

The day was sunny and in the peak of autumn beauty. My kids were aching to be outdoors, could I really tie them to chairs and pencils for the afternoon and feel like I was accomplishing learning?

While they ate lunch, I came up with a few fun outdoor lessons for that afternoon.

For our second grader, Andrew, who is great on math, not so great at reading, and holds a flame for history:

1. Please make me two leaf rubbings.
2. Choose and identify two leaves.
3. What uses, if any, did Native Americans have for the trees these leaves came from?
4. If you and your siblings each made a pile of leaves with twenty leaves in them, how many total leaves would be piled?
5. If the wind blew away half of them, how many would be left?

I gave him a verbal run-down of the assignments and he quickly answered the math questions and took off to work on the rest. He brought me an apple, maple, lilac and dandelion leaf, identified and told me about each. The last I saw of him, he was being an Indian, making use of all the leaves for one purpose or another. This I love. When learning sparks the imagination, I’ve done my job. Later during quiet time, I plopped him down a stack of books on plant life and Native American life and we were set for the day.

For our fourth grader, Annaliese:

1. Please make me four leaf rubbings.
2. What makes leaves change colors in the fall?
3. If your brother built a leaf pile with one hundred leaves and a quarter of them blew away, how many would be left?
4. If you added half that amount to the remaining pile, how many would you have?
5. How many would each sibling get if you divided them up?
6. Select and identify four leaves.
7. Are any parts of these trees useful or edible? If so, tell me how.

Annaliese is my artist and after she answered the questions she knew, she took off with art supplies and a plethora of leaves and worked on a leaf rubbing inspired art project. Later on I supplied her with the books to look up the answers she didn’t know. She brought me an apple leaf, maple leaf, Jerusalem artichoke leaf and a lilac leaf, identified them and told me the uses that she knew of for each one.

For Aiden our kindergartner:

1. How many squashes are on the front porch? (30)
2. Identify two varieties for me.
3. If there were ten squashes and we ate six of them, how many would be left?
4. Please make me some leaf rubbings.

His lesson will be complete with a talk about how all those different squash came from one kind of seed (cross-pollination last year) and helping me mix up a batch of pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. He’ll do the measuring and mixing.

You can apply this formula of relaxed unschooling to any environment and age! I’ve been thinking how applicable it will be next time we visit our zoo, to send the kiddos with a scavenge hunt list of items/animals to find and questions to answer about them. Soon we’ll be settling into half a year of snow and ice and that looks to be a fun opportunity for lessons outdoors as well. I see famous sculptures replicated in snow and Native American snow games in our future!

What about you? How can you incorporate some environment based relaxed lessons into your day?

Hannah is a relaxed homeschooling mama of five. Her and her family are big on the outdoors, big on family days, and big on making memories in everyday small ways. She loves handcrafts, iced lattes, re-arranging furniture and counts falling into bed exhausted a sign of a really great day. She and her husband make a home in upstate New York with their energetic children and a menagerie of animals.

Tags: autumn, boredom busters, changing seasons, Fall Activities, leaf rubbings, outdoor study, relaxed homeschooling, unschooling

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