small wonders

I've been wanting to post more about our homeschooling, and I get a lot of questions about homeschooling and Enki and how it is all going, but I've been feeling unsure about how to record it here. I realize I am not going to be able to post about everything we get up to (though I am ever so glad there are bloggers out there who do this- I learn so much from their days!) but I would like to record a bit of what we are doing at home, so I am going to attempt a (semi) regular post here about homeschooling life as it unfolds for us. 

Ari is in grade 1 this year and since we have been inspired by Enki Education for many years, this is, of course, the educational philosophy that is guiding our days now that we are entering the elementary years with him. Enki has been such a gift to our lives over  the years, giving us a wonderful, wholesome touchstone and framework to guide our family towards what is most wholly us.  When our children were babies and toddlers, this meant that we chose to slow down the pace of our lives,  to spend as much time as possible together and to choose simple natural materials for our home and playthings.  We aimed to spend time together in the natural world, to have a rhythm to our days that our children could depend on, to limit media exposure and to always be looking to see if the choices we were making were nourishing to our children and to our family as a whole. Now, as parents of a preschooler and a elementary student, this is much the same, only now we are adding the "official" Grade One learning to our days, and at this time, the Enki materials seem just right for us.

This is our first year working with the real academic material, as we tend to agree with Enki (and Waldorf and many other education models,) that children are ready for focused school work once they are 6 or 7.  The academics for Enki first grade is grounded in the understanding of the developmental issues a child of this age is working with. Six is a huge time of change for most children as they move out of early childhood and into a different sort of understanding of the world, where interactions and relationships start to become clearer and more important and the child starts to see their own experiences as separate and their own. I remember from my days as a music teacher always being amazed just how different a classroom full of Grade Ones felt compared to a classroom of Kindergartners.  There is such a profound shift that happens for children at this time, and with Enki we are always trying to keep our eye to this big developmental reality as we offer Ari the materials. So the stories and activities that we use will have this developmental mood at their heart.

So now, we are working with these ideas, and what this means for our day-to day lives will take a good many post to cover, but I can say that it is feeling good. Our days are full of stories and songs and time outside and books and playing and learning, just exactly as I had dreamed it would. Of course it does not go smoothly all the time (or even most of it!)  but it is feeling like the right place to be for us right now and we feel blessed to be able to spend our days together learning and growing. It is good.