We spent about two weeks preparing for a Market Day at our homeschool co-op. During those two weeks our home buzzed with quiet industry and focus. The experience yielded valuable lessons in ordering, inventory, budgeting, pricing and perseverance. The actual event was a success: her hand-painted wooden families and gnomes were a hit, and his sweets sold quickly as soon as lunch was over. Now she is exploring the possibilities of opening an Etsy shop, and he talks of new recipes to try.

During the Market Day festivities, a fellow homeschooling mama asked me how we manage to fit creative endeavors into our school days. I explained that, when given this sort of opportunity to practice and refine real-world skills, we basically abandon most of our formal lessons and throw ourselves wholeheartedly into the project at hand. In other words, teaching my kids how to earn a living sometimes trumps first conjugation pluperfect tense. I suppose that wraps up my homeschooling philosophy in a nutshell.

*“The aphid is a stupid little creature which lives by thrusting its bill or sucking tube into a stem or leaf if a plant, and thus settles down for life, nourished by the sap which it sucks up[…]

We three step outside our front door and walk down a paved path to a bridge that spans a small trickle of water, banked on both sides by honeysuckle. They pick small bunches of the flowers, then s[…]

Moments later, at the dining room table, we open the thick book and search the index in vain for honeysuckle, then cicadas, but then settle on reading about our most recent house guests, ants. The[…]

We took the train into the city on a cold Friday morning. Union Station was gothic, beautiful and quiet in the early hours of the day. I sipped hot coffee and the children shared a cinnamon sugar pretzel in the white tiled food court. We walked across the street and into the National Postal Museum inside the Old City Post Office.

We spent the next two hours moving back and forth through two hundred years of history. I lost myself in lives lived and lost, my mind filled with their stories. The international stamp collection is stored in a wide wall of skinny vertical display cases, and we thrilled to the variety of sizes, shapes and colors. In a gift shop bin my son found a fat and heavy plastic bag labeled “OVER 500 STAMPS FROM ALL COUNTRIES INSIDE!!” His eyes were bright with excitement so I had no choice but spend the $7US. He held the bag tightly in both hands during the entire train ride home.

He sat down at their work table, made a hole in the bag and turned it upside down.. We watched the stamps spill out of that hole, big stamps, small stamps, all colors and countries and soon the pile covered much of the table. Over the next two hours we sorted stamps together, found countries on our world map, talked about how countries sometimes just dissolve and form new countries, and made many little piles all over the table. We each picked our favorite stamps from the whole lot–how lovely is the butterfly and those mushrooms?

The next day while he was at a friend’s house I sewed a stamp pile organizer of sorts, a temporary place to keep his piles sorted and visible until we devise a more permanent way to display his new (instant) collection. While the stamp holder isn’t as colorful as the last organizer I made, the green makes a lovely billiard-table-ish background for his treasures.

As predicted, the record player is getting a real workout. What is surprising–but probably should not be knowing this boy and girl of mine–is that most every selection they make is classical. I’ve raised them on a steady diet of jazz, classic rock, and cheesy 70’s love songs, but there is no denying their visceral hunger for strings, piano, brass. Mozart was his choice one afternoon this week, and the sounds of the quintet filled the first floor of our house.

I’m hoping to begin this book with the little ones as soon as we’ve settled into our new dinner–>cleanup–>schoolwork–>bedtime routine.

This is where my children spend their days learning, only Daddy does the teaching now. They like to listen to Bach while they study. Or so I’m told.

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.” — Ray Bradbury, on writing

Writing is one of the most important components of our homeschool. I want my children to enjoy their journaling, narrations and compositions, and in my experience the feel of one’s notebooks contributes to the overall appeal, or lack thereof, of the work at hand. The standard, black and white marbled covers of their history, science and language arts notebooks not only threatened to make dull work out of a task that should be meaningful and pleasant, but also threatened to trigger one of my migraines. I covered them up with bits from my fabric stash: hers are covered in a petite Japanese print, his are covered with a bold graphic Ikea print. Their notebooks are now personalized, soft, comforting, ready to receive.