An Educational Experience: Learning in the world around you

When I was a kid, my homeschooling mom would find every possible way to engage us in learning. Whatever we did and wherever we went it was an “educational opportunity”. My cousins, who were also homeschooled, would join us on some of our learning experiences and we would laugh at our shared circumstance of a ‘field trip to the supermarket’. We thought it was silly but after I grew up, had a family, and began homeschooling my own kids I began to see the brilliance of my mother's plan. As children, we were learning all the time and didn’t even know it! Learning was fun because it was interactive, we were not just sitting with a textbook trying to cram useless facts into our brains, we were experiencing those facts applied.

Don’t get me wrong, we did have some textbooks, but my mom wanted to know we understood what we were learning so she gave us ways to apply it. Household activities were intentional. She would have us prepare meals or bake cookies - That’s fun but it’s also math and science (not to mention the valuable life skill of being able to feed oneself). Playing a board game was developing cognitive skills and the ability to follow directions. Yard work was phys-ed. Creating our own game or building a treehouse was engineering, teamwork, and problem-solving. Even over our school holidays or snow days the learning didn’t stop; spending all day figuring out how to build an igloo was a series of trials and errors in mechanics. 

 We lived in a rural area of Massachusetts but the big city of Boston was not more than an hour away. We would take trips into town and watch street performers - that was a lesson in physics applied! We would take walks down Mass Ave. and Newbury St. and compare the old and new architecture. We would go to the waterfront to learn about ocean tides and urban sea life. Boston is rich in history and steeped in the arts - museums are everywhere and if you were fortunate enough to have a Boston library card (or knew someone who did) you could get free passes to many of them… but those museums were not where we did most of our learning. 

We had a large family and a small income so my mom needed to get creative. A trip into the city with five kids was expensive (even if you had a free museum pass) so those trips were “special” field trips. But they weren’t the only field trips. There were paths in the woods behind our house so we would go on ‘nature hikes’ to learn about the local flora and fauna. A run to the grocery store became a lesson in consumer math; comparing unit prices and keeping track of our grocery bill as we added things to the cart. Figuring out the sales tax was a tricky one!

One of the most important things I learned from my mother was that learning could be fun and the opportunity to learn was everywhere. As it turns out, it can even be found in your mailbox! Fun mail is a great way to incorporate learning into daily life. Adventure Letters is an educational resource but it makes learning fun by incorporating stories, puzzles, jokes, pictures, and more!  Because of the way my mother taught me - because learning was part of everything we did - I became a life-long learner (it didn’t end at graduation) and I am able to pass that on to my own kids.