accidental learning

Strange how you set out with one intention, only to be led all the way down another path.

Husband has been away, leaving me alone to manage four children, a house and all the in between bits for a couple of weeks. Today we've been looking at a map, with the aim of tracking Daddy's European Adventure and reading a bit about each country he visits. I started off with a Dorling Kindersley Atlas and a selection of Disney stories from around the world, kindly donated by my little sister.

I didn't expect Huey, Duey and Louie to teach my children a great deal about Germany but I was wrong. After reading a rather far fetched story about Uncle Scrooge buying a crumbling castle on the outskirts of the Black Forest, my children knew about German cuisine, some basic German language, what the German flag looked like, the Brothers Grimm, I could go on....

Then Od opened up the Atlas, and in the very front is a two page spread of flags. We got no further. Od had that look in here eye.

"We are going to make these" She said with quiet determination.

Out came wooden kebab skewers, paper, colouring pencils and within the hour, I had the Flags of the World, all in my kitchen. Mb took a shine to the Ivory Coast and wanted to know where it was on the globe. He read up and informed me over lunch that the Ivory Coast was one of the few African countries with money and did I know that Ivory was from elephants?

Daddy's European Adventure was forgotten about, and Flags become the all-consuming topic of the day. They wanted to know why that flag, what the name of it was, where the country was on the globe. Some questions I could help with, some I had no idea at all.

Later on we were in traffic and the kids were idly staring out of the car window when there was excited shouting and Look! Look! There are flags! A Public House, in honour of the World Cup has strung up a whole stack of flags outside. There is Portugal! There is Iceland! There is Brazil! Conversation sprang fourth about how the Saltire and the Icelandic flag can be confused, except one is multiply sign and the other adding. Look, there's Maths right there too!

I thought of all the effort I have put into activities in the past, the planning and organising and how some of them have had as much success as a lead balloon, how the pressure of expectation has may be made them fall flat. Today I had no idea how this was going to pan out. I was too tired after a week of running around to organise any thing much and yet, here we were, at the end of the day with heads full of new things, and an excitement about how to implement this newly acquired knowledge and make it some thing more.

That, my friends, is home education.