Saturday 24 November 2012

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.

8 comments:

  1. This sounds so exciting! Good luck on your journey. Can you recommend any blogs for ideas please?

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  2. sounds fascinating...can't wait to read more :)

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  3. Rach

    Kate @ an everyday story: http://aneverydaystory.wordpress.com has an amazing blog for toddlers/ preschoolers.

    Lori's blog: http://project-based-homeschooling.com/camp-creek-blog

    these are my current favorite 2. I'll let you know when I find more.

    Meg: I'm happy that you are still here

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  4. glad to hear it’s working for you :)

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  5. Dear Neptune,
    I've been tuning in to your journey with your son and wondered if your research included the book "Raising Cain: Boys in Focus" and the PBS companion film "Raising Boys"? I have not read the book nor seen the movie, but would like to. PBS has a portion of their site http://www.pbs.org/parents/raisingboys/ devoted to the subject. I'm wondering too if you've felt that boys learn differently than girls. The book and its author Michael Thompson note studies whose results showed that boys learn by doing and need to be active. Our primary method of educating children in the US does not allow that nor does it allow boys to just simply be boys. And also so few male teachers and role models exist for boys in most schools.

    I'm curious to know your thoughts.

    BB

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  6. I am really glad to see you back and blogging again :D I feel like we are in this together, although X and M are a little older, but still discovering it all together. I am really happy to have you back xx

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  7. Bronx: I have to agree that boys do see to learn differently, at least mine does. Yes yes and yes, on the role model, on the way school works, or don't work for boys, and how it doesn't suit their needs. I wouldn't mind as much sending M to school. I think she would do great. But X, there is no way. School is not able to fill it's need, nor let him be who he is.

    Thanks for the book info, I will check it out for sure!

    Kate, geez thank you! I have to admit that you are a few step ahead of me, and a big inspiration too. Thanks for blogging! And for following!!

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