Life is a Highway - it’s the journey, not the destination

;)

Or something like that anyway. What I love about HE and the way we’ve been doing it lately, (through books, using Charlotte Mason and all that jazz) is the way some things just mesh together and the ‘hooks’ it gives the kids quickly have other things hung on them.

Dunno if all that makes sense But this past month or so loads of stuff have come together through no contrived unit studies or even thought on my part (which for me is very good, I’m a bit too controlling I think sometimes!). Today we’ve been to the museum in Sheffield. It’s just across the road from the Childrens Hospital which we were at for the kids eyes, but normally when we go to the museum we’re all a bit tired and fraught. Today seemed to be a bit different. The kids spotted a new exhibition on our first trip in (we were early so had a quick scoot round before our appointment then came back later) which tbh I thought looked boring for them. It was about Yemen and the people who came to live in Sheffield from there. Anyway, we went in and looked at the photos on the wall and the displays. Alex found a drawing bit with some pre-printed house outlines and the idea was to decorate the houses like those in Yemen which were quite colourful. She set herself up to do it with no coaxing and spent about 30 mins colouring. ALex doesn’t really do concentration much so it was quite impressive. Marcus came and did some too and although he didn’t spend quite as much time he spent a good lot of maybe 15 mins drawing. While they were doing that I looked at some books on a table and sat down on a sofa. I showed M the books, one was Ali Baba and the 40 thieves and while we were waiting for A to finish her colouring we read it. We’d been introduced to the 1001 Arabian Nights from the Ambleside Online Composer Study section which this term is Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. I downloaded this cd a few weeks ago and listened to it when we were in the car, so this tied it all in with that. M also picked up an audio book of the 1001 nights and recognised the ‘arabia’ part. We looked at the maps on display and spoke about how close it was to other countries we’d looked at recently in the Story of the World book. It all seemed to fit in together and brought so much more to this small exhibit that I would have dismissed myself. It actually doesn’t sound much written down I don’t think, but I loved the fact it was all so natural. If I’d said let’s do a study on the Middle East and took them to it on purpose I’m sure it would have been a dead loss and deadly boring too.