Ecology of Homeschooling

I love this classical homeschooling blog I found on Ragamuffin Rosie's sidebar. It is a combination of LCC and Ambleside, and she designs beautiful forms. I just love beautiful forms. And she looks very orderly. I love order.

This year looks like it's shaping up to be more on the classical side of our continuum and less on the unschooling, learning as we go side. It's interesting how our balance seems to change from year to year, though of course, there is a continuity as well. I used to think this was a weakness, but now I see it as a longterm strength -- like the way our forest ecology outside will shift, well, naturally, according to the severity of the winter or the dryness of the spring or various other factors. One year we'll have lots of wildflowers, another year an abundance of squirrels. Natural things adjust and adapt. It's only industrial type things that maintain a sterile, uniform pace.

I don't think it's a contradiction to love order and also appreciate variety. God's Creation has both, and so does the liturgical year and family life and so many other things.

Well, that's probably enough posts on here for one day. The kids are still outside filming and the house is rarely and strangely quiet right now.

Blogging as a Product?

I am a lot like Molly describes herself. Even to the lapbook -phobia. When I think calmly about why I can't do lapbooks, it comes down to (1) my slight weakness in executive function, ie, details. (2) the fact that lapbooks have that schooly feeling to me. I think the second item is a mis-categorization. I think I am imagining some bright twaddly classroom where all the kids have to cut out, fold and glue the same (educational) thing. Probably, if we really did one we would have fun (see, just talking about it helps me let go a bit).

For my the lapbook-phobia even extends to "notebooking" and for the same reasons. I think there are legitimately people who aren't very rewarded by "products" -- see Apple Star's post on The Death of Show Me Work.

And again, there is that executive function difficulty. What's the best way to organize a notebook? What if we do it and realize we wanted it different? I get paralyzed.

Anyway, I was thinking that blogging might be a solution to this. For me, it's been a good way to try things out and rearrange them in different ways without a fixed, solid result --which is a plus for me.

Right now I am just taking pictures of things that get done. ... and jotting notes about it on here. But I was thinking of asking Kieron to start his own blog for the specific purpose of recording learning. He might like the idea.... or might not. But it's a possibility.

I was thinking that it would be a lot easier to take photos and write descriptions of things in e-form, and then we would have the option of printing it off if we wanted to. Anyway, just some ponderings -- this is my place for pondering as well as writing down what we actually did!