Our Home"schooling" philosophy....

.... is a little less "schooling" and a little more "living, playing, discovering, and discussing". Especially during the pre-k through elementary years.

Here are a few of the philosophies we adhere to regarding how we teach our children:

Why we regard playtime as essential:

From Publishers Weekly:

" Alarmed by the current trend toward creating baby Einsteins, Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff urge parents to step back and practice the "Three R's: Reflect, Resist, and Recenter." "Children learn best through simple playtime, which enhances problem solving skills, attention span, social development and creativity." "Play is to early childhood as gas is to a car," say Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff, explaining that reciting and memorizing will produce "trained seals" rather than creative thinkers. Creativity and independent thinking, they argue, are true 21st-century skills; IQ and other test scores provide a narrow view of intelligence."

Book excerpt:

"Play is a central component in children's mental growth. Play helps children make meaning in their world, it helps them learn about themselves, and equally crucially, it helps them to learn how to get along with others. Yet it can be difficult to resist the trends of our achievement-oriented society when we're faced with the choice of allowing our children more downtime or signing them up for the latest class, sport, or activity. Let your child take the lead. Child-directed games will pique interest and learning. When we make play into work by controlling or limiting it, our children lose interest, and we lose opportunities to bond and to imagine with them. We need to strive to find the delicate balance between providing props for play and directing play in our homes and in our classrooms. If we are going to present our children with an art project, we need to make it one where the children determine how the end product looks. We might find that they are capable -- when they are the leaders -- of going well beyond what we thought was possible. A good thing to remember is that it's the process that counts, not the product."

We love the Charlotte Mason philosophy on learning, you can find her bio and her teaching methods here. A quote from her that I love: "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life". How her teaching methods will translate into our homeschooling life- we read, and read, and read and learn about animals, history, other cultures, science, and more. Getting the most out of reading at our children's ages will happen through Five in a Row, unit studies in which I will explain more in our "plans for the school year" post.

We also look to a personal mentor and widowed mother of five who has singlehandedly homeschooled her kids for the past nine years and heads up an awesome homeschool ministry and this website http://www.lodestaronline.com/.

Another aspect of our homeschooling we are passionate about is teaching our children about God, the love he has for them, and all about His word. As scripture says about God's words; "Teach them to your children, and talk about them when you're at home or away, when you lie down or get up." Deuteronomy 11:19. We strongly believe that we are to be the main teachers and ministers to our children, not Sunday school or church. Both of those have a vital role in our children's spiritual development, but God states that we are to be the main teachers of His word to our children, and not to leave the responsibility solely to the church.

These are a few of many of the resources and philosophies we have tapped into during our homeschooling journey thus far.

We love implementing these teaching styles and ideas with our children, and most of the time we don't even notice we're doing it. And the kids definitely don't!!