A little garden math

The joys of homeschooling!  We were spending a day harvesting cayennes and hot peppers in the garden, then relaxing by the pond in the back - when a little spontaneous garden math happened.  I love the possibilities of life learning, seizing the moment to explore deep questions when they arise, to learn by hands-on doing together in the daily activities of life.  For more inspiration about life learning, check out Life Learning magazine a great Canadian-published e-magazine by the same folks who produce Natural Life magazine.

Playful learning - alphabet book

We're making a homemade alphabet book with our daughter, using the idea from Playful Learning by Mariah Bruehl.  This book (and website) is filled with so many great project ideas!  Here are a few things around the house that our daughter chose to represent letters of the alphabet... we'll print the photos we took, and clip them together into a booklet for her to remember. 

Animal tracking with kids

We've recently been told that a fox has been seen in a nearby wooded area - and so we have been going on regular adventures to see if we can spot it's home.  With new snow on the ground it's much easier to track animals here in the city, and when we look closely we can find a surprising amound of tracks (the usual birds, rabbits, mice).  It's a good exercise in slowing down and honing skills of observation, even better when done with kids who get excited about discovering the smallest details.  We did find several nice hollows, logs and burrows, and at each place Maya left a small handful of dried blueberries as a gift (because you never know if the fox might be hungry). 

These fox searching walks led to us doing more research at the local library, and delving into other interesting links like this one for making your own fieldguide of your own backyard with kids or this one eco field guide for younger kids and then reading more about the very inspiring Forest Schools that are evolving all around the world, including this one that is organized by people we know who live near Thunder Bay. 

Even though we are an unschooling family that lives in the city (on a tiny farm, but still yes, it's in the city) we have a strong leaning toward outdoor nature-based education and hope to be able to tap into something like this with a group of other families locally in the future.