Educating With Serotonin And The Kitchen

I am really enjoying the challenge of education outside of repetition with a pencil and paper.

I find that though I love making and creating worksheets that are interesting for both Julz to learn from and me to teach her with, I actually am trying harder and harder to create a home based education that has little to do with worksheets.

I am really enjoying the challenge of education outside of repetition with a pencil and paper. For example, this week Julz is learning in a style of repetition and pattern making. The easy solution to her curriculum this week would be to find all the free resources for pattern worksheets on teacherspayteachers.com. Which there are very many lovely resources especially pertaining to Fall themes. I, myself, dowloaded this one and am enjoying it with my kindergartener.

However, children learn not just by repletion on a paper. Physical learning is a reason we chose to educate our homes. Worksheets are a great tool, but not the only tool.

I think every day you can come up with something new to use in your home based education routine to keep things exciting. If not every day at least every few days.

This week we have done a lot of routine curriculum as well as a lot of diverse experiences.

One of which is being in the kitchen. Fiona made bacon in the oven. She then used the rendered fat from the bacon to cook two of our farm fresh eggs that we collected that morning in a cast iron pan. This was lastly followed with toasting the sourdough bread we made the day before in the cast iron with the remaining rendered bacon grease.

There is a lot of new skills there. Collecting eggs, then using them. A relationship between our animals and ourselves. She then created a new way to use sourdough bread that we have made ourselves to be something not just for dinner but for breakfast. This is followed with the use of a cast iron pan for the first time with her dad. A tool in the kitchen most adults are not trained to use. You also have the oven, the stove, heat times and multi tasking. Life skills.

Julz has spent some time of her own in the kitchen with me this week. She loves to bake and we used bananas that were getting old on the counter and she gave them new life in her baked treat that we made and ate the same morning. She used dexterity skills to scoop and pout. She used counting skills, an introduction into fractions. She learned wet and dry ingredients. And a lot of this is nothing new, we have made banana muffins before.

This is a lesson in repetition. When she goes to learn fractions in her higher grades she will have a base knowledge with the application of baking and science. She will already have a cause and effect in lasting knowledge. Not to mention, that if they say to start training your kids to do chores when they are toddlers. I say you train your kids how to feed themselves as well.

PE this week has been spent outside doing archery and absorbing healthy doses of Vitamin D and serotonin.