transitioning to a project based homeschooling (or Reggio inspired learning)

During the deschooling period we went through, I had many days and night of thinking.  I had to reorganize my thoughts, my believes and my vision of things to suit the life we want to live and make sure that we are moving towards our goals.

One of the first and most useful thing I did was to define this, our goals.  As parents, as persons as a family, having an idea of where we are going makes the travel a lot easier, and the chances to get lost along the way less significant.

After many discussions, we decided that the most important values we wanted to instil in our children was the love of learning, independence, responsibility (for themselves, theirs acts, and their learning...amongst all things), creativity and respect and knowledge for the world and it's living creature, whether they are people, animal or else.  There are many other things we wish or them, but this is the basis.

I toured a lot of blogs during this time, and read intensively on many educational philosophy. I think we are lucky as homeschooling parents to have so many choices and so many resources to help educate our children.  And I am glad to have had this mountain of possibilities to choose amongst or at least be influenced by in order to find our right learning philosophy.  Many of these philosophy were very interesting and sure have their good and not so good sides.  But not all of them were in line with OUR goals, and so having setting those beforehand was really useful in not feeling overwhelmed in the process.

Truth be told, we will not follow blindly any curriculum or educational methods of any kinds.  We will always make sure that the choices we make are in line with these goals I have mentioned before, and also make sure we are comfortable doing it.

With that being said, project based homeschooling is one of the philosophies that resonated them most with us, and what we wish for our children.

For the last few days/weeks, we have been working hard at implementing project based homeschooling in our lives in so many ways.  X is very excited about it, and really so are we.  Reggio inspired learning is not the only type of learning that is taking place here, literature based learning is taking up the other big chuck of our days.  But since I have learned, in the last few weeks, that it is WAYYYY better to implement things one at a time, the Reggio part is taking up most of our energies right now.  I will work on implementing the literature part better after we are set with this first phase.