I'm falling in love with this lady's philosophies of education.
"What a loss have those children who are not brought up to the gentle art wherein the eye is satisfied with seeing, and there is not greed of collecting, no play of the hunter's instinct to kill, and yet a lifelong joy of possession." -Charlotte Mason
"The boy who is in the habit of doing sensory daily gymnastics will learn a great deal more about hte beetle than he who is not so trained." -Charlotte Mason
I love her infatuation of learning and how Science is based on the outdoors. Hours are spent outside observing, collecting, making notes, referring to field guides and identifying, the worship of God through creation, illustration observations and drawings, notes under/around drawings and nature notebooking instead of this.
"Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God." -George Washington Carver
"Once you have heard the lark, known the swish of feet through hill-top grass and smelt the earth made ready for the seed, you are never again going to be fully happy about the cities and towns that man carries like a crippling weight upon his back." -Gwyn Thomas
As our family went out this morning to a local shopping store, our son darted off in the street (unaware of cars around him) to follow a bird splashing into a puddle. He honestly just wanted to observe the bird, watch him and splash along with him, but he couldn't. We were too worried about him being struck by a car.
As city-dwellers, it's amazing how often we are constantly going against the grain of the child's natural instint to explore and learn in nature. Granted, it is important to learn to be attentive of things around you and watch for cars in a parking lot. An important lesson to learn, but it just got me thinking of how much we hinder our kids of natural learning.
Independant learning of exploring, then documenting and drawing, making notes about what was learning, finding Scripture/quotes/poems/fables to associate that drawing with and then turning to guidebooks and good written text (not boring textbooks) to take it a step further in comprehension. We slather their hands with hand sanitizer and giving our cautious "Be careful"s as we're out and about. Oh, to just let them explore. Oh, to just let them 'be'.
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