training up a child

when the girls and i go out, our interactions with strangers run fairly predictably:

#1:  are they twins? no, 14 months apart <smile>
#2:  to chloe:  how old are you?  <three fingers stuck up>
#3:  do you go to school?  no*
*lately, we have a variation on the answer to #3:  i don't go to regular school, but i go to CHINESE school. 

a seemingly harmless question and one we've certainly been asked before, but all of the sudden this month, i'm remembering those mommy friends a year or two ahead of us who bemoaned the need to justify their unschooled preschoolers.  it might be my imagination, but after a chance acquaintance mentioned a preschool homeschooling curriculum she was using for a 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 year old, that familiar voice piped up - c'mon, everyone's doing it.

am i doing enough for chloe?  do i need to be more intentional?  more structured?  am i letting her run wild?  am i missing a critical window?  questions, doubts, accusing, unsettling, somewhat paralyzing.  after an afternoon spent reading reading reading about preschool curriculums, a friend of mine sent me a link to Ambleside Online, a free curriculum based on Charlotte Mason's philosophy (1).  she has this to say about the years before formal schooling (2):

". . . the chief function of the child--his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life--is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses [...]  Tommy should be free to do what he likes with his limbs and his mind through all the hours of the day when he is not sitting up nicely at meals. he should run and jump, leap and tumble, lie on his face watching a worm, or on his back watching the bees..."
 "...Health, strength, and agility, bright eyes, and alert movements, come of a free life, out-of-doors, if it may be, and as for habits, there is no habit or power so useful to man or woman as that of personal initiative. The resourcefulness which will enable a family of children to invent their own games and occupations through the length of a summer's day is worth more in after life than a good deal of knowledge about cubes and hexagons, and this comes, not of continual intervention on the mother's part, but of much masterly inactivity."

aha!  resourcefulness..  it's been fairly recently that i've felt the need to go out and look for things to do, mostly to expose them to some different things and of course, to provide the all-important occasions to run and jump and hop and bounce.  we've always been pretty content homebodies, and i think it's because this resourcefulness is a strength of theirs.  i have yet to meet two other toddlers who can happily (more or less) play by themselves for hours, literally.   part of it, i'm sure, is the built-in playmate, but those two little brains come up with some pretty good stuff.

so i'll leave you with a few of these invented games and occupations through the length of a rainy week..

it's the 'cover the stool with two blankets,
wear your hat backwards, step down and
kick the box' game, patent pending, c.nicholson

we have daily variations of 'pay aweas' [play areas]

 

woohoo, in the bucket!



'that's daddy!'

hallways made for racing

and windows made for.. climbing



rainy day picnic

the wheels on the laundry basket go round
and round

not sure why relocating a meal is always such a hit, but hey

(1) an intro to Charlotte Mason from amblesideonline.org: 

Charlotte Mason was a British educator who believed that education was about more than training for a job, passing an exam, or getting into the right college. She said education was an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life; it was about finding out who we were and how we fit into the world of human beings and into the universe God created. But this kind of thinking was pretty much eclipsed during the 20th century by demands for more exams and more workers. In 1987, Susan Schaeffer Macaulay wrote a book called For the Children's Sake, which reintroduced parents to Charlotte Mason's methods and philosophy, and it started to gain a foothold with a new generation of homeschoolers.
Charlotte Mason believed that children are able to deal with ideas and knowledge, that they are not blank slates or empty sacks to be filled with information. She thought children should do the work of dealing with ideas and knowledge, rather than the teacher acting as a middle man, dispensing filtered knowledge. A Charlotte Mason education includes first-hand exposure to great and noble ideas through books in each school subject, and through art, music and poetry.

(2) excerpted on amblesideonline from Charlotte Mason (Volume 1, Home Education)