There seems to be a thought that home education happens during the week (okay this is normally what I hear from non-home educating parents) but it doesn’t. Yes the kids and I do activities during the week, yes we work through Maths and projects, we read educational books and watch documentaries, we visit museums and go to workshops and the kids have their “physical” activities. Yes all of that does happen Monday through Friday. But it also does not stop because it is weekend time. In fact I often start Monday feeling like we did a lot over the weekend.
What do I mean? Well we often end up baking or working on art projects over the weekend. It just happens like that.
The photo above was yesterday’s baking where she had to change the proportions of all the ingredients – lots of Maths working with fractions and decimals – all on a Saturday. But it worked, her calculations were correct and the biscuits were yummy.
The kids don’t stop reading their books just because it is weekend time, fiction and non-fiction if they are enjoying a book they still read it over the weekend which means questions still get asked and we still spend time trying to answer those questions. Just yesterday I saw my daughter on the couch with her dad and a dictionary looking up some words from her new book she has been reading. Likewise if we are busy watching a documentary series we often continue watching it over the weekend and again that means the questions still get asked and in fact if it is weekend time and their dad is around he tends to ask questions about the episodes he missed so there is often a lot of explaining by the kids.
We often plan our “field trips” for weekend days so that their dad can join us. Honestly we actually just like having him with us on our adventures to different places and I find it often helps because sometimes the kids want to split up and go to different areas so when he is with us we can do that and we can allow one kid to spend as long as they want in one section while the other goes exploring somewhere else (I have one kid who likes to read every sign in order at museums which means the other kid often gets frustrated waiting).
In fact my kids learning does not stop if I leave the house. Yip. (Talk about bursting any bubble I may have had). Last weekend was a great example, I happened to meet one of my mom-ed mum friends on Saturday morning for a kid-free morning. We had a blast but so did our kids. Both sets of kids were at home with their dads. When I enquired about hers she told me when she left the house they were busy watching clips about the Incas and when I arrived home I found out mine had watch an aircraft investigation episode with their dad and then they worked through what went wrong with the plane (mechanical fault, they explained the detail to me and how it was uncovered – talk about a puzzle). They had also been out in the garden digging up the potatoes that they had grown and had made plans for a trip to an aircraft museum for the following day (which was an incredible outing).
But the point I am trying to make is their learning does not stop just because it is weekend time and it does not stop just because the stay-at-home-educator has a morning off, it is never-ending.
ofamily learning together 