August 9 - 24

I've had  a few questions over the last weeks about homeschooling from various people - why? what about testing? will we send them to high school?
I find it very hard to explain without coming over all airy-fairy or defensive because homeschooling is such an integral part of our lives.  It comes naturally to us, as naturally as breathing and eating. We don't question how or why we do those things, we just do them.  It's the same with education - in a rich environment and with gentle guidance, it just happens.
P and I want our girls to grow up to be self aware, self confident and in charge of their lives.  By allowing them to choose what they want to learn and when and where they want to learn it -  free from coercion and pressure, we believe that they will become the people we hope them to be. In their own time.

 Here are some pics from our day today.

Yesterday we set up this experiment: to see what effect food colouring has on white flowers.

This morning, the flowers were red,

blue,

and yellow.  Then we put the red and yellow flowers into the blue water, and the blue flowers into the red water, and waited a few more hours.  There was no change in colour for  the flowers placed in green water.

While waiting for the flowers to change colour, we did some reading. Building words with R...

.. lost in Harry Potter's world.

concentrating on Headsprout whilst eating an orange.

Eventually a change in colour!  The yellow flowers became orange,

and the red ones turned purple. Success!

 As for testing and high school, we see no real value in placing kids in a stressful position to find out what they know. If they know it, and they know they know it, and we can see that they know it, why test them? And that's the great thing about home educating - every day we see them growing and learning and applying new skills.  Why on earth would we want to send them away every day for 8 hours and miss out on that? And who would do the lunchtime dishes??