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Erin's Homeschooling
[pre-Kindergarten year][Kindergarten year]
[Grade 1 Year] [Grade 2 Year]
[Grade 3 Year]
| Erin is six and has been officially a homeschooler since this past September, when kindergarten started at our local public school and she was not there. However, we do little which looks like schoolwork and this is not likely to change much. We are what are referred to as "unschoolers", which refers to our interest-based approach to learning. We were led to unschooling by Erin who took her learning into her own hands at an early age and at an astonishing rate. |  |
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Erin's been a bit of a renaissance kid this year so far, dabbling in all sorts of vastly different areas. She's touched on American Sign Language, French, impressionism and cubism, acid-base chemistry, music theory and composition, Klondike history, skating, mathematics, philosophical questions, medieval times, myths and fairy tales. She did a stint as a library volunteer this past winter and learned to reshelve books alphabetically with accuracy. |
| Erin has begun taking piano lessons this year. Her violin repertoire has all been learned by ear, but with piano she is learning to read music. She's enjoying the music theory, and also the chance to have a serious teaching/learning relationship outside the family. She's just beginning some RCM Grade 1 repertoire and is doing very well with her first hand position shifts and Alberti-bass patterns. She learns by ear easily, of course, and even enjoys her technical exercises. She has a couple of friends who happen to be studying with the same teacher, and the peer relationships have been a real bonus. Her violin work continues in spurts. She's finally made some good gains in basic posture, is barrelling through Suzuki Book 2, has moved her bow-thumb in and ditched her fingerboard tapes. She's looking forward to this summer's Suzuki institute in Waterloo Ontario.
We've recently been exploring a wonderful book by Kim Solga called Discovering Great Artists which has led us to art projects using the techniques of famous artists. Erin has enjoyed Q-tip pointillism and many other ideas from this book. She's also been exploring collage and paper sculpture in a self-directed way, and is always popping out of her bedroom with new construction-paper creations. |
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  | Erin continues to read precociously. Typical of her reading these days is the Harry Potter books. For a time she was absolutely insatiable, reading a minimum of two novels a day. She's read close to a hundred novels (and countless shorter books) since last fall, most of them two or three times. She still enjoys reading picture books aloud for her younger brother and sister, and devours non-fiction too. We visit the library at least once a week and scour used bookstores for anything which will satisfy her appetite. Here's her Booklist of some of the novels she's read this year. Recently she's been doing a bit of writing, something which she's starting to grow into as her handwriting and spelling improve. Her prose has recently taken a leap in complexity, and more closely matches the complex grammatical structure of her speech.
Erin gets a fair bit of physical activity at home, both indoors and out. She loves skating and biking, and our driveway circle makes a lovely cycling course. She encounters science all over the place... living in close proximity to the natural world, taking an interest in her own body, checking weekly on the tadpoles at Summit Lake, caring for her tropical fish, testing and managing the aquarium chemistry, asking questions about the world around her. Conceptually her mathematics is quite advanced, (she is able to do basic multiplication and division and add basic fractions) but she's also still developing her speed and facility with addition and subtraction. |
| All sorts of nifty bits of learning come Erin's way as she lives her life. She never stops asking questions about the physical world, history, politics, the natural sciences, culture and sociology, philosophy, religion, the people she meets and the places she goes. Recently a routine drive to her piano lesson turned into a long discussion about the industrial revolution and the ethics of child labour. Yikes! Look out world! |  |
