We come to the successful completion of another year. Many homeschoolers look out the window in May and dream of this day. The day to put away the pencils, shelve the books, and close the laptop. Although these next few weeks may signal the completion of an era, it is not the completion of learning. We never stop learning. In fact, the more that we learn, the more we realize that learning is a lifelong venture. Oh what discoveries will we make this summer! Discoveries of animals living in the woods next to the house, or patterns in the grass where we mow are lurking around every corner.
These discoveries although not book-centered, are made more special in balancing our text learning. It is in books that we learn about the life habits of the ground hog, thus opening the door to becoming scientific observers. Most homeschool parents understand this intuitively. We buy the animal nature guides and encourage our kids to look up the different birds they see. But do we end there? Do we encourage them to map out the lawn into a grid and perform a population test for bugs? Do we challenge them to calculate the height of a tree from its shadow using ratios? Or discover the irrational number π from the trunk of a tree?
We've spoken briefly about the mysteries of mathematics and the discoveries that can be made. Let's add some real life wonder and discovery of truth for the abstract concepts we've studied so hard!