For 3 years, as we went about our days, free as birds with no school schedule to keep and very little in the way of traditional schoolwork to wrestle over, I learned a fundamental truth about how my children learn:
Children learn all the time. From everything they do, and from everything the people around them do. They trust themselves to learn, they know when to keep working at something and they know when it’s not interesting enough to keep at it. Given absolute freedom, children spend their days learning about the world around them and about the things that fascinate them. When something is interesting or important to them, they don’t stop working at it until they’ve mastered it.
In those years, we did no workbooks or worksheets, no handwriting practice, no phonics or formal math. We certainly counted, measured and weighed as life required us to do; we read a lot. I mostly read aloud, though Max also loved going to the library and choosing books to read on his own. Our read-alouds were as varied as I could make them–historical fiction and non-fiction, science topics, even some math-related stories. We also followed their interests: we ordered a set of caterpillars so we could watch them transform into butterflies. We planted all kinds of plants and collected insects. And we joined a homeschool group.
The families in the homeschool group opened our eyes to so much more–museum activities for little kids, the observatory, electric circuit kits to play with. We took field trips, beach trips, and we hung out at each others’ homes. With them we put on plays, met for weekly park days and planned celebrations. Max did a lot of writing in those years–mostly in the form of a blog he kept for our family and short stories he liked to write and illustrate. And we cooked together, all the time.
Then when we went to the beach, the shoreline was positively covered with bright blue man o’ wars which are related to jellyfish … They’re pretty amazing–if extremely dangerous–creatures. Well, for one thing, they are actually each a colony of four different organisms that all depend on each other for survival.
https://noueihed-homeschool.blogspot.com/2009/03/beach-day.html
Looking back, that was one of my favorite periods of time. We lived on the same block as our extended family, and the kids weren’t looking outward yet–they liked playing with friends but they were still young enough that our family unit was our main source of connection.
Soon, though, Nabil’s job would launch us on a new, more adventurous phase of our homeschooling days. We moved to Abu Dhabi.