Embree has been asking for a day when she would get to decide what we did in school. For those of you not involved in homeschooling...child-led schooling is often referred to as unschooling. We had planned a trip to the Cincinnati Art Museum and to see sweet Theresa today, but the weather caused us to postpone that trip. That left us with a nice snowy day at home and me with no plans. So, I decided to let Embree have her wish. We had a totally unschooled day (except for the reading I insisted upon). It was a pretty interesting day...though I think she ran out of ideas at about 3pm and then there was a great deal of pining away for the XBOX! But that had to wait until 7pm, as usual!
First, we made pancakes for breakfast using our new pancake writer (thanks Granny & Pop!).
A flower
A bee
Brice enjoyed the pancakes!!
Then we made molasses candy in the snow (like Laura Ingalls in Little House in the Big Woods)
The candy didn't solidify as expected, but Embree made us all molasses snow cream for lunch.
We all took a little time to play trains with Brice.
Then we made molds from recyclables, filled them with water and various treasures and glitter glue and set them outside to freeze. Tomorrow we'll free them from the molds and build an outdoor ice sculpture (pic will follow when complete.).
Ice mold with orange peels.
Ice mold with two fighting Bionicles.
Ice Molds with Christmas balls, sea shells, candy, cinnamon sticks...
Then we headed up to the classroom for an hour of reading and drawing,
followed by a few hours of work on our incredible mural of Martin Luther King, Jr. to start our study of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement. We all helped (even Reeves!!) and we are all pretty proud of it!
After lunch we finished hanging the mural, played more trains, and painted with Brice. A neighbor dropped by with a gift basket filled with the fixings for pear gingerbread upside down cake, so we made that too. We put on a pot of black-eyed peas and some brown rice for hoppin-john for dinner and went outside to play in the snow and wait for Daddy to get home.
...and cold fingers.
I am happy with this day. It was a perfect wintry day to just follow our noses. I need to make sure we have the opportunity do this more often. It's good for our souls and good for the kids to have some say in our day. Guess it's Reeves' turn next. We'll be eating apples and playing DS all day, I'm sure!!
Hope you have the opportunity to follow wherever the path leads...sometime very soon!
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