Friday, July 17, 2009

Homeschooling and Why

No, I am not going to explain why I am homeschooling - not tonight anyway. (did you check the clock? - okay it's wrong - it's actually 11:28 pm) But I will say that I am once again very excited about educating my children at home! I just had a few ladies in and we watched a video about Charlotte Mason - relearned some fundamentals about "The Gentle Art of Learning" - Charlotte lived over one hundred years ago and was a big influence in changing the way they were doing school at that time (in England) - before her time they were very much about the drudgery of school - math drills, grammar lessons, memorization - and she would say that none of these things are wrong in their own rites but she would introduce things like math manipulatives, reading "living books", narration, nature study - helping the child to really gain a love for learning by having the opportunity to connect with some of the "Great Minds" - the greatest Mind being God (the Bible) and then from there writers like Robert Louis Stevenson or Charlotte Bronte, inventors like Bell and Einstein. Nothing grieves me more than the tendency for any child over grade 1 or 2 telling me that their favourite subject in school is Gym or Recess - WHAT??? What happened to that love for learning that they had in Kindergarten??
That is just one reason why I homeschool.

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