Planning, executing, reviewing and reflecting on formal home learning sessions can become, if I put it politely, pretty tiresome.
Sometimes, it is great to seize the moment, and the learning opportunities in every day life.
As a family of five with no income and an ever dwindling bank account we are big fans of the common picnic.
This week, in the build up to Flossy’s birthday, the contents of picnics became the topic of hot debate:
What makes the perfect picnic?
When is a picnic a true picnic and when is it leftovers?
What would you put in your picnic if you could have anything?
Can we make a picnic right now and eat it later?
So, of course, we planned picnics.
The girls designed what they would like in their picnic boxes, Flossy with illustrations and Freya with annotated diagrams. Then we set about making them. THere was lots of incidental learning about carbohydrates, proteins and fats, some talk of the food pyramid, vitamins and minerals and some adult intervention about balanced diets 🙂
The resulting picnics were packed and transported to a new place of interest (another deserted beach) where they were consumed and evaluated…. verbally, apparently without the bribery of the food, there was little incentive to write any more… Either way, it was a great learning experience, some life skills, knife skills and packing skills were learnt and, the picnic wasn’t made by me. Success all round!
