Week One: On holiday!

I won't lie. I was a little smug about how we spent the first week of school lying on a beach while all my friends whose kids went to public school were tearing their hair out getting their kids to and from school all day.

One of the big perks/reasons we decided to homeschool was that we could actually afford to take a family holiday in the off season, so we spent our first week of school in Tofino on a beach. It was fantastic and relaxing and filled with great learning opportunities even without any set schedule for "school hours" or "school projects." It should have been apparent to me that week that I wouldn't really need to worry about using the copious amount of Montessori material I had ordered and then regretted--Theo would learn plenty without my even trying.

Nevertheless I tried to introduce a very little regular learning while we were there-- to great resistance. At the time I put it down to his being distracted by the beach and the novelty of cable television. He was bored by the Primary Phonics workbook I brought along for him and hated colouring it in. This surprised me a little because he normally likes school workbooks and had been bugging me for weeks to try this one. I had expected him to like it even better than the usual ones we got from the grocery store because it was more focused-- 26 pages on the concept of short "a" instead of 2--and the pictures he had to colour were comparatively smaller. He was bored out of his mind and I got him through about 3 pages that week by helping him colour.

We got a lot of other learning in though. We talked about tides and how the moon's gravity causes high and low tides. We talked about how the foamy white water is the break water and what an undertow was. We found hermit crabs and sea urchins and sand dollars. The kids did lots of outdoor play at the playgrounds on the resort and in town and Theo must have spent about 4 hours standing in the surf every day. Greg dug a HUGE sand pit for the kids to play in (we were visiting with friends there as well) and we did a little hike on a cloudy afternoon.

We expanded on their "culinary education" as well. I was fascinated by a book about French parenting called Bringing up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman, in which the author talks about the many differences between North American and French/European approaches to the various struggles of parenting. One of those struggles was food. For the French, food is a crucial part of their children's education and they consider it important for children to try all kinds of foods in many different forms. French parents provide their children with as many different foods as they can in their early years and French children are expected to try a little bit of everything they are served rather than simply clean their plates. Unlike most North American children, French children have a very broad palate and behave beautifully at the table as well. Food is an adventure to be enjoyed properly at every meal--not just stuffed into their mouths while watching television.

My children have never been picky, but until we put them on a French eating schedule (ie no snacking) we found it difficult to get them to sit at the table long enough to learn any table manners. We stuck to the schedule while on holiday (an advantage to renting a cabin) and I continued to serve 2 and three course meals. In addition to this, we felt that because we were on vacation in a fishing town our children ought to experience a little local cuisine and try a new food: fresh caught live crab! They not only enjoyed watching me cook it in the pot, but enjoyed the novelty of cracking them open. They weren't entirely sure they liked the crab but they ate more than a few bites and Georgie tried dipping it in the melted butter (Theo doesn't see the point of dipping). So that was a fun "culinary experiment."

All in all not a bad first week of school!