One of the reasons that I enjoy and value home education, is because everything that we do can be a learning opportunity in many ways. We don't have to split learning up into subject areas or ignore personal growth in favour of academic subjects. Implicit in the "subject areas" of organised curricula is what you value. It could be argued that, in a mass schooling setting, "mathematics" has a value, but "relationship building" does not. This is where the Early Childhood Education curriculum in NZ is a step ahead of the curriculum for schools, or at least how it is delivered, because it implicitly values relationship building and protecting both mental and physical health of the children. It's frustrating to me that, in my country, normally when a child has turned 6 (by law, or 5 in common practice) they transfer to a community without parents, where they are expected to meet academic targets first and foremost, and must less emphasis is placed on developing interpersonal skills, or protecting a child's personal emotional growth.
My kids attend the local Playcentre so they can meet people, make friends and use the facilities like, puzzles, blocks, playdough and art supplies. Playcentre is a network of parent run cooperatives in New Zealand, offering childcare and early childhood education by parents in the local community. It means that I can be there in a kindergarten-like environment with my kids and let them be in the company of other children and supportive adults. Playcentres receive funding from the Ministry of Education which means that they have to meet goals and be accountable to the Ministry, deliver the NZ Early Childhood curriculum (called Te Whāriki - said "fah-ricky"), and meet early childhood statutory regulations, to receive funding from the government.
This is both helpful and limiting. One of the points of Te Whāriki is to help educators identify what learning is going on when kids play, and a way of accounting for it on paper. It can be limiting to have other people set your objectives for you, but it's also helpful in that it provides a point of view, or lens through which you can identify facets of children's progress, and direction.
I'm currently thinking hard about what the four Principles of Te Whāriki mean to me, and how they can be used to identify and plan children's play and learning opportunities. Today my sons and I did some holistic activities. They learned and practiced all sorts of things by doing one or two activities. I challenge you to find activities that aren't holistic, because I think that all human experience affects us on many levels. Two different people could have identified an entirely different set of growth opportunities as they watched what was happening. This is one reason I really value having a co-parent. As Obi-Wan Kenobi said: "you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view". Looking at things holistically is a practice of unpacking how your values are reflected in an activity. I'm sure there are plenty of things I haven't identified in how and what my children learn that other people would pick up. As they say "It takes a village to raise a child".
Today my boys did a jigsaw puzzle of Voyager of the Ancient Mariners. They encountered a sea serpent, compass, the equator, the international date-line, and the look of maps, the locations and sounds of the names of different continents and countries, and discussed how the map wraps around, and in the days where people explored with ships made of wood, there were no planes or cars. A. looked at Ferdinand Magellan's ship and said it looked like the ones he saw in the cartoon "The Mysterious Cities of Gold" (a story set in 1532).
The boys also did different tasks so they weren't in direct competition, practiced speaking at appropriate volumes, took turns, problem-solved, practiced conflict resolution, catagorised and sorted pieces, recognised patterns, matched like shapes, used their fine motor skills, and persisted until the task was complete. My children have in no way mastered their use of this skill and information, but the more they interact with it and use it for their own purposes, the more they will retain and use, and the more they will learn which things interest them, and which are irrelevant and boring.
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