Day Four: Home Schoolers!

On Thursday we had home schoolers!  It was so much fun!  I loved it.  I taught with Ryan.  We had seven children and four mothers.  Instead of being at the learning center we were at the Farmstead.  We weren't sure how far we were going to be able to go because we didn't know what the ages of thechildren  in our group would be.  Part of it was difficult becuse I had never done Exploring Nature at the Farmstead before.  I didn't know as many things that were in the area we were in, and didn't have as many really cool things to show them.  Or at least ones that I knew would be there.  Lucily, this wasn't much of a hindrance.  The children we had were very independent and they found lots of really interesting things.  We saw a rabbit, a turkey vulture, a squirrel miss it's branch and fall out of a tree, two candada geese and their goslings, and red winged black birds.  We took them to the bog, which they loved.  Because the children had so much energy and were so enthusiastic we were able to take them all the way to the bird observatory.  It was a lot of walking but they did great.  Even our two four year olds!  The mothers let us do pretty much all the teaching and facilitating.  They made a lot of comments about how glad they were that the kids were being given the opportunity to just explore.  Because of this, Ryan and I didn't do as many acitivites and spent more time working off of what they found on their own.  I think that everyone was getting hot and tired towards the end, but we all stuck it out and enjoyed it.

The only negative thing about this day was that there was one little boy in the back who was constantly behind us with his mom, and he didn't want to participate.  He didn't want to do anything with the group.  I felt bad for him because he was missing out on so much.  I hope that he got something out of it on his own.

It was amazing to me how independent, knowledgeable, and well bahved these home schoolers were. They were so creative too!  It was really great.  It made me wonder what we can do in public schools to keep children creative, without keeping them at home.