Homeschooling, week one

The kids' "village" out on a peninsula at the nature reserve. They each made their own shelter, a community fire pit, and two flat rocks for community meetings (out of the picture).

 We officially started our home/boat school this week. I've been researching different curriculums and strategies for so many months now so I'm happy to finally stop thinking about it and actually start doing it. The most useful resource I've found has been fellow boat-mom Kate Laird's book, Homeschool Teacher. Her adage: "unschool when you can, teach when you must" resonates with me and I've looked at different curricula with that in mind. After the failed experiment with schooling at home during the pandemic last spring, I had a good idea how our kids wanted to learn. Structure but freedom. Worksheets but creativity. Cute and fun was interpreted as gimmicky.

We're starting with Math Mammoth, Brave Writer, a family read-aloud book for history that offers activities and research ideas, and a science book with easily accessible at-home experiments. The kids seem to like Math Mammoth because of its structure and straightforward worksheets. There are no cute clip-art pictures nor fact sheets trying to double as coloring sheets. It's just straight-up math work that they can focus on and complete in about 30 minutes a day. 

I'm really excited about Brave Writer because it presents language arts as a holistic subject. We won't just sit down and learn about adverbs and pronouns. We'll read good literature, together, and weave language lessons into the readings. The idea behind Brave Writer is to turn your home into a language rich environment so language learning is happening all the time. There is some structured daily work and lots of ideas for monthly writing projects, but the premise is to surround the kids with good literature and draw lessons and inspiration from daily life. Sort of unschooling, sort of Charlotte Mason, very loosey-goosey and flexible for individual families. 

Schoolwork with friends.

Matilda's week one schedule.

The local history museum, Vadsbo Museum. It was small, but had a good selection of historical items from the town industry and residents.

The town library. The librarian was creative with the system and managed to get me a library card, and we spoke Swedish the whole time. 

Our school day starts immediately after breakfast and so far lasts only two hours. The weather is gorgeous so we've mainly been outdoors the rest of the day. Within five minutes we can be at the library, the grocery store, a nature preserve, or an indoor swimming pool. The town has an outdoor art exhibit set up in the town square so we've been casually looking at the paintings as we walk past. I don't tell the kids it's school, but they're definitely learning. We've been geocaching and I make the kids be the leaders on our walks. We've been here for almost two weeks and I'm confident that they could find their own way to the library, the grocery store, and the town square. 

Geocaching.

Painting some of the treasures we found out in nature.

And then I moved the painting station off the boat. No paint on our new woodwork and cushions, thankyouverymuch.

So week one of homeschool is in the books. It was more successful than I imagined. I'm ready for harder weeks, but at least we've started off on the right foot!