Tupp: You know..... I think you're right about not being all "MUSH! MUSH!" about school, all the time. Truth be told, we're pretty well on schedule. I think I'm feeling OK mainly when we're working ahead, in anticipation of another crisis. That isn't working as well for the kids.
It's just not possible to control everything.......
and is likely harming our school experience so.......
::breathing deeply::
Thanks for the advice: )
Lighter
Lighter, it took me a really long time to become more relaxed about home ed. I think partly it's because we want what's best and we want to get it right, and partly because most of us are raised on timetables and nose to the grindstone. When we started out we had a timetable, I spent hours picking out activities and things to work on and looked for an educational perspective on everything. But what I really started to notice was how much better our minds were functioning without the distraction of having to do a certain thing in a certain way at a certain time, if that makes sense? It was as if a lot of what we were doing was being done to prove we were doing it, rather than really taking the time to absorb it and really understand.
He was playing this afternoon, making ramps for his cars and setting up crashes and roadblocks and so on. And on the surface it looks like play, but as I watched him I saw him checking and altering angles to change the effect the ramps had on the cars, he was altering the speeds and weights of the cars to affect the outcome, he was swapping around different materials for them to crash into in order to create certain things he wanted, and all the way through he was doing a sort of racing commentary in the background. He's learnt all of that through playing with cars, I haven't had to teach him any of that stuff, yet he knows it now through experimenting and just doing his own thing in his own time.
So yep, a more relaxed approach is often possible but I think our brains can be quite resistant to it at first! xx
