Messy Business

Homeschool is messy business. There is really no getting around it. Well I suppose that I could obsess about tidiness, but I've tried that and it doesn't work. I just spend all my time following around my kids picking up the trail of stuff they leave. It drives both them and me nutty.

So it gets messy, and my kids learn. The actual reading, writing, 'rithmatic part of school is relatively neat. But I'd say that is where a small portion of the meaningful learning happens. For example, I made M flash cards with "sight words" (e.g. the, and, to, I etc.). She's doing really well, and in a couple of weeks she's learned close to 30 words. So the other day I got out M's sight words, but she said, "No mom, today I'm going to teach you." She ran downstairs and got a hand ful of oddly shaped green construction paper cards with words she'd written on them. In her free time she made her OWN sight word cards (spelled perfectly) and she quizzed me. She also left a whole bunch of little green construction paper scraps all over the playroom floor. But I know M has really learned when she teaches back to me, and that is worth a little bit of green paper scattered on my floor.

I mentioned in my last entry that we are reading a book called MyFather's Dragon. Yesterday the boy in the story encountered an angry rhino. Guess what Bub was pretending to be today. Yep. He was pretending to be a rhino on a shape hunt. It always surprises me how the kids incorporate what we are learning during our official school time into their creative play. And I think that it is during their creative play that the internalize what they are learning. It becomes theirs and they learn it forever. Unfortunately, its messy! My 3 year old rhino/boy also got out all the shape books in the house and spread them out all over his sisters' room.

Just because my house gets a little messy does not mean I'm a bad mom, or even a poor housekeeper. It just means I'm a good teacher.