School Hours

If there's one thing that I am learning , the more we travel down this educational path we are on, it is that learning can, and does happen at any time. As the chief educational facilitator in this family, I am learning that I need to be on call, and be prepared to be of assistance, at any time (as a rule, ironically, not  during usual school hours). A few examples follow to illustrate my point:

On Friday, 20:30, LadyLolo finds a Braille note from a friend in my room and decided that this is the moment at which she wishes to learn Braille. (I have some lovely twitter-pals, two of whom sent me packages that arrived from the US on the same day, full of treats. This however was about 3 weeks ago!)

All my goodies: Braille T-shirt and twitter-bird charm, Braille Starbucks gift-card, Coffe-beans, American coins for the kids to look at, and the note

She heads off to the bookshelf and pulls out "The Story of Inventions" because she has remembered that it had a section on Louis Braille and the Braille alphabet.

LadyLolo discovers her own resources.

I am called in to assist, because there are some characters in the note that don't appear in her book. I give LadyLolo a quick overview of important Braille punctuation, as well as an explanation of Grade 2 Braille. (At the same time, I myself get a bit of a refresher course!)

Saturday afternoon, around 16:40, SirBiggs is sitting playing a farming game (from Y8) on the laptop  at the kitchen counter. I am pottering about in the kitchen, tidying up, when he asks: "Mom, what do you add to 3830 to get 4150? And so an impromptu maths lesson follows, in which (in the space of 20 minutes) SirBiggs learns about using simple numbers in order to work out the type of operation needed, and how to do "long subtraction" with "borrowing". Incidentally, while we were still schedule- and curriculum-bound, the same concept took LadyLolo and I three weeks of torment (for me) and tears (for her) until it was properly grasped. This, I think illustrates the power of motivation in learning. When I asked SirBiggs what had prompted the question he explained that he had added a plant to his farm and his profit had gone from 3830 to 4150, and so he wanted to figure out how much value a plant adds in that game. The learning is easy because it's relevant, sensible and necessary in the context. Schools attempt to mimic this kind of "real life" scenario by using word problems, which leads me to share a tweet that appeared in my timeline earlier today courtesy of @kamz26. She writes: "Mathematics is the only place where someone could buy 60 watermelons and no one wonders why...". I HAD to smile!

Yesterday evening MissyGeorge and MrTepps were running around like this:

Who says socks, underpants and pyjama shorts can only be worn one way?

I am reminded again of the incredible creativity of thought that comes so easily to children, that adults appear to struggle to regain, and that is becoming ever-more crucial in our rapidly-changing world. I hope our children manage to hang on to their ingenuity and originality.