The Beauty of Home School

There are so many ways that you can go about homeschooling your child(ren).  You can go the traditional public school curriculum done at home all the way to unschooling.  We are happily somewhere in the middle.  Most days we get through the 3 R's and the rest of the traditional fare and just call it good.  Other days we may focus on only one subject or topic.  Most days we are finished before lunch, sometimes its is an all day venture.  The latter of those two generally occurs when one or both of us are in a not-so-good mood.  We make family trips a long field trip, learning about where we are going, stopping to check out the area.  It may just be one long PE trip too.  We try to use every opportunity we can to teach.

Today we went very nontraditional, at least by today's standards.  After Elijah took care of all the birds, he went with Jeff to install cabinets.  He didn't do any installing himself but he did clear the floors so the cabinets would sit level.  That's a pretty important step.  When he got home, we decided to make some lip balm.  I had the idea a few weeks back to do this, then I got an email from a friend who had started making it to sell.  They have a small apiary and I had even thought of asking her what she had planned to do with the beeswax.  (You can buy from her here.)  I started to just give that up, but decided it would be fun to do to give as gifts.  Also, if you have several dozen tubes of it around the house it increases your chances of finding one when you need it ;-).  I digress.  Anyway, I went ahead and ordered some things.  Elijah thought it was really coll last night when I was making it, so today we made some more.  It was math and science with a little economics thrown in.  I made some that I figure isn't a girlie flavor, Chocolate Mint.  Wow, did we make a lot!  I figured it would be about 15 tubes, try 23.  Good thing it turned out pretty well because I'll have enough to last at least a month now.  I really can't keep up with lip balm tubes :-{

Measuring precisely

After lip balming we decided to play a little Trivial Pursuit.  This is the first edition game, so even the most recent questions are over 25 years old.  He actually did quite well.  He knew what tree are traditionally grown in English churchyards (Dangerous Book for Boys taught him that), how many years are in "four score and seven" (he remembered me telling him how many years are in a score and went on to calculate it from there), and what a West Indies steel band is playing as an instrument (We've been to Tobago 4 times and that is where they were invented).  It was pretty fun and he learned that sometimes a guess is as good as knowing.




Combining Trivial Pursuit and checkers, I think?

It was a pretty fun school day.  I bet most of his friends didn't have nearly the same fun.
Oh, in case you didn't know.  Yew trees are traditionally grown in English churchyards,  87 years, and oil drums are used to make the steal pan!