Heidi

1) rememebering our evolution from "classroom" to "kitchen table"

The details are boring and make way too long a post. Let's just say,
looking back at how we moved the classroom from one room to the
other, adjusting bedrooms to accomodate the classroom, and after all
was said and all was done...everyone doing their work at the Central
Location of the kitchen table. Why? Because, it was way more
comfortable and more natural to be at a place in the house where we
could be together easily. Even when it was just Abbie
being "educated" it was no fun trying to keep the babies out of our
hair all the time, as we had to when we were "doing school" in a
classroom.

If learning was easier and more natural outside of a home classroom,
I figured out recently, who is to say that putting them down in front
of workbooks and texts and math problems is better AT ALL? Why not
let all their learning take place naturally?

2) Watching Katie and realizing she knows SO MUCH MATH, with almost
ZERO formal instruction in that "subject." Subtraction she figured
out completely on her own. And I am not a math person. That really
boggled my mind, and convinced me of things that I'd read in Holt and
Gatto, and frankly, in Robinson Method homeschooling literature: the
brain is capable of learning, and the "teacher" is needed only when
the learner asks.

3) realizing that my kids have way more knowledge than myself, not in
areas where I had been "teaching" them, but in areas where they've
explored on their own, based on their own interests. I will never
know as much as Abbie about sharks, and I don't want to! L

I'm sure there's more, but that's enough for now.

HeidiC who is deep into her own deschooling process