Today was the day. The more official feeling start to our homeschooling/unschooling days. We have been on this path a long time, but today was the first day of school for kids in the area, and this year is A's Kindergarten year! We considered both planning something special and not making a big deal of it - after all, we are doing what we have always been doing. I needn't have wondered what to do. This morning, G gave A a hug and said Congratulations! You are a home kindergartener. They did a little la-la-la-la song, hugged and danced around - and promptly asked what we were doing today.
A has been digging through a Home Science Tools catalog for things he wants to do. He loves "projects". He bought a venus flytrap over the weekend and is charting it this week. Each morning he counts how many are open and how many are closed, so he can track that insects are being eaten, and how long that may take to digest. We also caught a small fly on the deck and plopped it into an open 'flower' and the super rapid closure of the plant to gobble that little fly up actually startled the boys - A jumped and looked at me wide-eyed. This is going to be fun!
He has also been interested in worms and soil. So, today we started by digging in the yard and moving pots looking for worms. After finding several, we came inside and read a few books we have from the library, and then returned to the yard for a second look. The boys identified parts of the worms, touched them, saw their burrows under our pots, and shrieked as the super fast aggressive worms practically sprinted across the lawn (so what if a shoe is in the way? just go over it!) to find a pile of leaves or loose earth to crawl back into when we let them go. We have a LOT of worms in our healthy chemical-free lawn. Very exciting. We then put our hands into some worm castings - as I had bought a bag just yesterday for fall plantings. Oooh.The boys then went to dig and rake the soil to see if worms were in our vegetables too. We dug and broke up soil, made rows, planted more spinach, radishes, and some greens, covered them and watered the soil. Under the tree they dug some holes and filled them with water to see how fast the water drained. Digging and making a LOT of mud on a hot day is fun and a good excuse to wave the hose around a bit more liberally. The boys decided we have some clay in our soil as it is dark, heavy and clumps - so earthworms are especially important!
We did a lot of other fun things today - by noon A was saying, wow mom, we have done so MUCH already this is great (kind of like every other day!)! The next few days we will continue to get dirty, look at worms and soil...and tomorrow, we build our own wormery!
A few good books:
Wiggling worms at work
by Wendy Pfeffer
Garden wigglers : earthworms in your backyard
by Nancy Loewen
Handful of Dirt
by Raymond Bial
