Today was about as close to the Charlotte Mason Early years as a mom (or dad) could get. The Bug spent about 10 minutes on Starfall this morning for phonics/reading. This afternoon, we took off for a nature walk to the pond in our neighborhood. On the way there, the kids found animals and objects in the clouds and worked on this week's memory verse; "I am the vine. You are the Branches." John 15:5. At the pond we ran and played, looked for frogs, tried to catch a snake, and talked about the black storm clouds rolling in and that they mean it might rain. One the way home, I asked them to narrate this week's nursery rhyme (Jack and Jill) and we practiced inserting their own names in Jack and Jills places. We stopped to check out every grasshopper in the road and practiced our French vocab by saying 'bon jour' to ever single last grasshopper. Finally, we came home and the kids pretended to be grasshoppers in the grass.
I get the biggest thrill watching The Bug and The Cat learn through living. This allows them to be kids. No desks, no co-ops, no lapbooks... just gaining knowledge in the course of life. A true living education. I don't understand the parents who put their preschool age children behind a desk, whether at home or in a school building, doing workbooks and learning about people or places that have no bearing on these formative years. The best thing we can do for our kids is let them explore, ask questions, give answers, play make-believe, learn good habits that stay with them for life, get to know God, to let them know we love them, and to give them a solid foundation on which to become an upstanding human beings. What more could we possibly want for our children?
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