First Week of De-School

I tend to just dive into work, but with one more visit from relatives and other things going on, it didn’t seem like a good idea to start in on regular math and writing and so forth last week. Then again, I hate when we have our “Box Day” and then we don’t actually use anything for a couple of weeks because, you know, life.

I decided instead to break out some of the fun stuff and take a few field trips. It worked out well and I think it got all of us into a better frame of mind for school. Is it possible that homeschooled kids need some deschool learning now and then? We’re constantly doing stuff that’s out of the box and our daily school looks so different from kids in most brick and mortar schools. Yet I still found we needed a week of doing something different every day to break that sense of learning as sitting down at the table. Routines are good, but so is breaking away from a routine.

Our “Box Day” celebration was anticipated for weeks beforehand. Its the day we open up all the fun school supplies and get to see the new books. This year there were lots of dinosaur books.

We played more games this week. The Husband played Appletters with us on Box Day morning.

We had family in town so we visited the monuments, including Einstein, where we had not been in awhile.

We’re studying dinosaurs this year! Also, grandparents treated the kids to a visit to this cool climbing gym where all the walls looked like different crazy things to climb.

We played with the Zometools and did some of the introductory lesson plans.

We also had a chance to see our co-op friends, we went to the Museum of Natural History to play with the fossils, Miles played in a marimba concert, we cuddled to books on the sofa and raided the library for a tall stack of dinosaur books, and tried our hands at math problems with no numbers (more about those in a future post). Overall, a very good week.

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