homeschooling and Enki Education

(To the left, the boys show off the planet Saturn that they made out of purple playdoh -- they had already made The Sun, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter out of other colors, and were on their way to making Uranus, Neptune and poor little neglected Pluto, which they still refuse to believe isn't a planet despite current scientific categorizing. This was not a planned activity -- I had just handed them a box of playdoh and left them alone for a half an hour, this is what they came up with.)

One of the things I most want to post about on this blog is homeschooling our boys. I've been dying to homeschool my kids decades before I ever HAD kids. Before I even married The Map Man. The homeschooled kids in my classes and environmental camp groups, and the Homeschool groups I did museum and nature center programs for, convinced me long ago that homeschooled kids have a big leg-up on their public-schooled peers. Their quest for learning was stronger, their exhuberance at the introduction of new material was contagious, and the confidence with which they carried and conducted themselves was nothing short of massively impressive. That's what I want for MY kids, I always thought.

So it's no surprise that from the time J was the size of a pin head, I've had our homeschooling plans in place. I've long been a fan of John Holt, and had already read most of his books before even getting pregnant. Unschooling made so much sense to me, so I never even considered looking at any specific curriculums -- I had my mind pretty much made up as to how our kids' education would develop. But when J was just a few years old, I realized that for our particular kid, we were going to need a bit more structure. I welcome you to read my other blog for more details as to why that is, but I started looking for a curriculum that I thought would both support the things we were already doing with J, yet still give us enough flexibility to let Zoo Boy decide whether or not he wanted to be a part of it all. And something that mirrored child development, didn't put too heavy an emphasis on academics at the K level, was environmentally kosher, and leaned heavily towards hands-on discovery-based learning. What we found was Enki Education.

I've posted about some of Enki's philosophy and how it jives with our own on my other blog, so rather than being redundant, I thought that I would just link you to those posts:

For the reasons we chose Enki Education for our family, read this.

For information about Enki daily rhythms and how we incorporate that with our family, read here.

You can read here about transitions and why we sing through them.

And this is a place you can read about why a young child's most important work is pretend play.

I wrote about what Enki has to say about the important topic of Sensory Integration here.

And I also wrote a bit about Enki's stance on viewing electronic programming, as well as my own take on that topic, here.

An important part of the Enki daily rhythm is rest time, which I talk about here.

And finally, if you want to see a sampling of our "preschooling" Enki activities, you can go read here or here or here or here or here.

That ought to keep you busy enough for one day....