Boozhoo! It is quite the nerve-wracking time in the world right now. It may also be the time to reflect, slow down, and take that time that is usually spent running here to there and make it mean a little more, especially if you have tiny humans around you.
I've seen so many parents and caregivers jumping right into homeschooling. All jokes and hilarious memes aside, it really is a beautiful thing to spend so much time with children. Just because it's beautiful, doesn't mean it won't be stressful too.
The first few days I soaked in all of the extremes - from color charts to not even looking at your children and throwing them a fish stick every so often. Now, if you've read my previous blog posts or know me at all, I'm not about to color chart my life or my children's lives. On the hand, I really don't enjoy being entirely hands-off and disengaged. I am also a "trained educator". Now, I put that in quotations because even though I have my teaching license and I am qualified to teach 4K-8th grade - I believe that parents/primary caregivers are always the first and most important teacher of a child. They will know what their child is interested in, they will be able to see what works best for their child and what might not work - differentiation at it's finest! So, for however long I have at home with my children, I decided to start taking advantage of the chance to try out the kind of teaching that I am passionate about, which has the balance of color-coded schedules and letting children run wild.
Shaping My Perspective:
I have vented sporadically about my woes with mainstream public school techniques (basal textbooks, worksheets, standardized testing). I have had an abundance of conversations with wonderful educators during my teaching placements. Quite a few of those discussions were centered around these same issues. Children are being made to sit, soak in, and regurgitate information during an overwhelming portion of the school day. A lot of what I witnessed wasn't exactly the teacher's first choice (basal textbooks, laid-out curriculum/worksheets that all require one correct answer) but there are so many external pressures, such as standardized testing. There seems to be a lack of time, maybe support, and resources for alternative teaching methods in the schools I've seen and the teachers I've talked to. I found that a lot of the information in my teacher preparation classes all contradicted the basal textbook/worksheet curriculum methods. Instead, the college-course textbooks (written by educators, not corporations) focused on differentiation, hands-on, project-based work. It will forever absolutely astound me that our "mainstream schooling" doesn't always align with that.
Blurb on Outdoor Ed.
I fell in love with outdoor education my senior year of high school while attending one of my first college courses at Northland. If we take it further back - I fell in love with outdoor education from the time I could walk. I have realized that always being outdoors and living in a secluded area had me predisposed for a life-long love of nature. Now, when I was fishing in mud puddles with sticks (thank you Uncle Kenny for always being my fishing buddy) or climbing on the giant rock outside Grandma's or figuring out what kind of tree is the best to climb, did I know that I was working my cognitive, gross motor, social/emotional, mathematics, and scientific inquiry skills? No way! But, now that I am a "trained professional" in education - I know all of this to be true. I will not say that I have all the answers to all the learning, I am only a beginner.
So what is my plan for teaching at home?
I will continue doing our meaningful family routines that I have mentioned previously. I have started by bringing the kids outside a lot more than what I deemed myself able to do while I was a full-time, out-of-home employee. I am still navigating how I will add more "intentional teaching time". My older son is definitely how I was at his age and into the worksheets and one-size-fits-all learning. He has been into learning letters and letter sounds lately (because of the 4K curriculum exposure, so I'm not by any means saying it's all bad). I want to do more for him right now than just throwing a worksheet at him to have him trace the letter and color the pictures of objects that start with that letter. I am no way discrediting that method of teaching. That practice, as well as the supplemented lessons to support those worksheets, have him recognizing the majority of his letters and he is able to correlate those letters to sounds and then start making words.
My goal right now is to further enrich that knowledge with alternative approaches. I added a science journal to a portion of our outdoor time. Last night was the first "lesson". All I did was fold printer paper into a make-shift booklet and gave Mertell a pencil and one directive. He was to find 2 or 3 things that he considered interesting. We walked around the small bit of woods in between our house and the neighbors and almost instantly he found three things that intrigued him. He immediately started spouting off his observations of these objects. I barely had to do any open-ended questioning or prompting, his curiosity drove the entire lesson. I grabbed a book so that he had a sturdy spot to draw one of the plants he found that we didn't want to remove from the earth (another underlying lesson from this experience was after taking the needles from the tree for our journal, he would say, "miigwech, mitig" to practice mindfulness). He sat on the log next to the plant and drew what he observed, explaining to me what he was illustrating (without me asking). After he finished, we spent some more time out in the woods, looking around and reflecting back and forth. We made our way back to the house and he sat at our table and chairs we have set up outside. He climbed up and flipped open his science journal. I said that we could tape his pine needles to one page and write about them. I had him sound out and write the word "tree" and then repeat with the Ojibwe name "mitig". He drew his depiction of the pine needle and picked a spot on the page to tape it. I asked him how he wanted to describe his find in his journal. I gave prompts of the start of some tactile sentences (feels like..., smells like..., etc) and whatever else he wanted to add. He also observed that the branch (he called it the "bottom part") looked like the letter "J". Unprompted letter recognition in nature! Yay!
This is definitely a work in progress and I'm extremely interested in connecting with all of you to share ideas and see how everyone else is handling the situation presented to us at this time.
What is really going on in these pictures?
Awareness of nature, abundance of tactile experiences, and emotional regulation.
Incorporating writing, reading, and fine motor into the day with entries in his science journal.
So, there are no color-coded schedules hanging on my walls. If I end up throwing a fish stick at my children - I'll add a pack of crayons (and if I'm doing my job right, they'll know which one they should eat).
Miigwech for reading! As Ellen would say, Be Kind To One Another.
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