Since I was a wee little blondie when the going got tough, I would pack my red apple suitcase, all the animals from my kingdom and go on a journey. In my mind there were no limits to exploring the wonders of the world. In real life there were a few obstacles. At the age of thirteen, one of the first educational disappointments was the fact there was no way a girl from Croatia is gonna be an astronaut. It didn’t bump me too much once I realised, I should be awesome in maths and physics for it anyway. Tests we did as guidance for secondary school said my talents are languages and my best option would be anything travel related. Now, that made sense. Language school it is! No maths, no chemistry, no physics, no biology. I was super excited until the school year began, when I realised all those subjects were on my list for the following four years. Instead of getting more fluent in English and other languages I spend most of those years fighting hard to get decent grades in subjects there were just of absolutely no interest to me.
This illogical system was just the tip of the iceberg of what was wrong with the schooling then. Twenty years later I’m not a wee blondie anymore. I have two amazing, ultra-curious shining stars, who are absorbing the world around them with dedication and interest. Same dedication and curiosity I have when there is something I want to learn. It amazes me over and over again what they remember when they are doing something they are ‘into’. It seems effortless. It is effortless.
We moved to Scotland in 2012. We didn’t plan to stay longer than two years, but plans change. Although I was very much against boys starting school at the age of not even five (in Croatia children start school when they are 7), we though re socialisation and learning a second language this would be the best option. It backfired quite quickly, and within few months’ smiles were replaced with frustration. My son who could spent hours in his artistic creations started to lose interest for everything, it all started to feel more like struggle then like thriving (word we repeatedly heard once he was in ‘the system’). The system, even though different than our Croatian one, was again failing the children. I will be free enough to say it is failing even more with every new day. The world is changing from minute to minute and, in most countries, the educational system is not keeping up.
As homeschooling is not legal in Croatia, even taking this into consideration took some serious braking of cultural conditioning. But the more I was reading and learning about it, the more real it felt, the more it made sense. So, we took the leap of faith.
Terms that resonated with me the most where World Schooling and Nature/Forest Schooling. Learning through experience and spending loads of time outdoors in nature are without doubt my number one priority. However, at first, we decided to follow the curriculum more or less strictly to tick all the boxes. As if that would make home-schooling proper. I can now without doubt say it was fear of doing things differently and fear of failure. Defining a failure here as the chance of our children not being educated enough to go back into system if they choose it at some point in their lives.
After dragging ourselves through curriculum we would go out and get to learn from nature and in nature. That ‘ticking of the box’ part was just a bit too off from the start. They could talk/read/listen about Harry Potter and JK Rowling on repeat. They would memorise details I didn’t even notice. We invented games based on trivia from the books and movies. But learning about Egypt from a book or video just didn’t get their attention. It felt like force feeding.
As I was getting ‘a bit’ frustrated re curriculum and defiance against ‘proper’ learning I came across John Holt’s book ‘How Children Learn’. And here we are – home-schooling the way children ARE learning, exploring, growing and having some very cool, cool, cool family time along the way.
Holt’s premise is that children are natural born learners. The best way they learn, and I couldn’t agree more, is on their own. We are here to help, when asked, but not to teach in classical form of teaching as this sends the message – I know more than you, and brings out feelings of inadequacies, failure, that will at some point end with child withdrawing or programming itself to learn for the sake of tests and grownups approval. Allowing them to learn and explore at their own pace opens so many possibilities, keeping that spark and thirst for knowledge alive forever.
I feel our role as parents is to be there when they need us and give them opportunities. With all going on in the world today, for me, opportunities are showing them the world. To best of our possibilities.
At the moment they love going places, trying out whatever comes their way (even if that includes eating a chocolate with grasshoppers), tasting, seeing, feeling… and when they do that, they are 100 percent in the moment and they learn from it so much. And ‘the world’ does not necessarily mean traveling around the globe – there are stories in every corner and step of our way, even when it’s a road we take five times a week on our daily walks. Every season, every moment of the day is different, and like children’s inquisitive mind that can change it’s point of interest in a second or stay with it for weeks, education is found where heart and mind wonder.
Here you will not find papers or games to help with teaching your children maths or spelling. We do not follow any curriculum. What we do offer are mere ideas that might help you seize the opportunity and flow on your child’s excitement into vast knowledge of everything around us. I am absolutely fascinated with what has now become our lifestyle. It allows me to see my children for who they are (rather than who I or educational system might want them to be), support their dreams (being a Lego designer hence learning Danish and exhibiting at EdinBrick) and ideas, plus the extra benefits of more than enough time to spend in nature, physical activities and good quality sleep, which in my opinion are keys to happiness at any age. As I mentioned this would not qualify as Homeschooling, but rather Wonder Schooling, following both their desire to know and that feeling of amazement and admiration when they discover something new. For me this is a place to keep the sense of wonder alive.