Seasons of Life Education

We are a homeschooling family who loves to explore life's adventures and opportunities. 

We choose not to "school" in the conventional way. We do not have textbooks, we don't "do school" every day in the sense of sitting down and doing lessons. I try to incorporate learning into our lifestyle, making it a natural, everyday thing. So when you ask the kids "what did you do for school today?", they are not going to be able to say "we learned about ....

We wake up in the mornings and decide what needs to be done for the day.  Since we are involved in many projects and volunteer work that we create our homeshool around our many activities.

We also try to live simply and find many ways to include our "home based activities " in our homeschooling.  We love to garden, and have created a container based garden for our back porch.  With this activity we have created a garden journal, create charts, explore garden catalogs, do internet research, and are discovering ways to create many herbal products such as flavored oils and vinegars, and include many herbs in our international cooking.

We enjoy scrapbooking, and like to include this hobby in our many activities which include our Flat Travelers school projects, our volunteer work, our social studies, and creating our own personal scrapbooks.  These are also good to have on hand for creating your portfolios as well.

We share many interests such as reading, computers, traveling with friends, clowning, and various sports activities.

We believe that everything in life is an opportunity for learning.

When you are participating in your daily activities learn to turn them into educaitonese terms for your portfolio.

Examples are:

•  scribbling on the wall with crayons can be "exploring color and texture using various media" hey that's Art!
• Helping with a trip to the grocery store covers reading, writing, math, money, technology, nutrition, consumer issues,
• playing outside with friends, can be sports, physical education, studies of skateboarding, hockey etc depending on what sports you are involved in.
•  Creating scrapbooks can be language arts, art, social studies, etc
• Cooking can be language arts, home economics, science, math etc
•  To the average person, it's just a trip to the grocery store. In educationese, it's a whole curriculum! Oh and don't forget that social skills are in there too - waiting in line, interacting with the deli clerks, cashiers, other customers, etc.
•  And, if your grocery store is like ours, they have those FoodShare type coupon things at the registers so you can contribute money to help the local FoodShare/Food bank programs which can become a whole discussion of things like hunger, homelessness, economics, etc.
• A trip to the mall adds in map reading skills as well (so you can find the nearest bathroom QUICK!)

There are so many ways to have fun while learning.  Have fun exploring your community...

Go to the local natural foods store, travel through history while visiting the local musuem, explore wonderful family history while sharing time with an senior, build up your strength while playing sports, travel around the world while reading a novel, become an artist while painting, build construction while creating a log cabin, learn about horticulture while farming.

All of these are projects and activities that are fun and yet can be termed "educaitonal" and they are all just part of living life.