Golden Ratio

Or "That Fibonacci Thing"?

While walking on a trail, we found these beautiful tree cones on the ground. My son takes a look at one and says, in a breathless, awe-inspired voice, "Ohhhhh, it's a giant Fibonacci thing!" My smile was felt all the way through to my toes. It's definitely one of those moments where you feel that all you are doing is making a positive difference in your child's world. And you are reminded that they actually do listen when you're talking.

We also revisited Newton's Laws of Physics while visiting an amusement park. These explanations came in handy when realizing why we didn't need to worry about falling out of the restraints on some of the scary rides!

National Parks and Geocaching

School On The Road

We decided to take a longer trip for Thanksgiving. I planned to make the most of it and printed out tons of activities for the kids to do. I didn't bring the math books, but I did bring some mapping activities, word puzzles, writing assignments and more. Long story short, we didn't do most of it. We were too busy doing other

activities. So, I'm not sure how other families study "on th

e road" but it didn't seem to work too well for our family. Maybe our trip was too short (two weeks) to find time for worksheets. We had an activity planned for almost every day, so by the time bedtime rolled around, we were all exhausted. We did look at the maps, to see where we were driving each day, but the rest of our school work grew cobwebs.

School Happens Everywhere

However, part of our new found thinking is that school happens everywhere, not just in books. When we knew we were going to visit Muir Woods, near San Francisco, my husband looked on line and found a great activity for the kids to do while we were there. We printed the pdf Redwood Discovery a Quest at Muir Woods at our hotel and armed each kid with a pencil. When we arrived at Muir Woods, the ranger station had a "junior ranger" program already there. If we hadn't had our quest, I think we would have done their program. It's great to know that there are activities at national monuments to keep kids involved and interested. The junior ranger program was similar to our quest, it asked kids to find things along the way. However, you then turned in your sheets, and later, they send you a junior ranger patch. The quest, on the other hand, gave you a sticker at the end (if you figured out all the clues to be able to open the lock). It was nice to have immediate gratification for our hard work.

Geocaching is World Wide

Geocaching, a GPS based treasure hunt, has been a great discovery for our family as well. Whenever we are away from home (or even at home), and in need of something to do outside, we think of Geocaching. There are thousands of little treasures hidden all over. On this trip, we found ourselves in Golden Gate Park. As we explored the trail system in the park, we discovered three geocaches in 30 minutes!

Hiking or Playing Hookey?

Is it hookey?

Today was a beautiful day in town. Warm and full of sunshine. Friends, who are also making the leap into homeschooling, invited us on a hike at a local trail system. While the kids were exploring the shortcuts and throwing rocks into the river, I felt giddy and a little bit guilty. Were we just playing hookey? While the rest of the town's children were sitting at their desks, we were out enjoying what nature had to offer. In the end, we could adjust our schedule to go on the hike when it made sense (sunny and warm!) and do more "bookish" studies in the afternoon as the sun was setting.

Learning goes on ALL THE TIME, not just between 8am-2pm!

But even if we hadn't done any "schooling", would the kids have learned something that day? Would they learn math from a book? No. Writing complete sentences with proper punctuation? No. But would they have learned anything at all? Socializing with children of different ages? Treating nature with respect? Learning to enjoy the beauty of trees along a river? Learning why the river level was so high compared to the last time they were there? Yes. Yes. And yes!

Slow down!

The best thing we're doing as a family is slowing down. We still rush from time to time for one reason or another. We still get frustrated when the kids don't put on their shoes until the fourth time we've asked. But overall, we're changing our lifestyle to fit our newfound schedule and we're slowing down. So, on this hike, I found it nice to not compete with other families for space on this beautiful day. We adults had no other agenda, so we were not pushing to "get there". We were able to go at the kids' pace as they touched curious items along the way, asked questions, walked alone, walked together, and explored in general.