"Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know."

As I watched Opeie doing his work today, sprawled across the kitchen surface, I chuckled to myself thinking maybe a classroom environment with chairs would be more comfortable? Obviously, I don't actually think that. This world of home education has been amazing for so many reasons, one being having the flexibility to learn wherever he chooses. Maybe learning Symmetry on kitchen work-tops boosts productivity? who am I to question Opeies practices.

Today was one of those awesome, effortless home-schooling days, we had planned to visit a place called Venus Pools which is a great place for bird watching. We were going to take paints and canvases and make an artistic day of it. During Seth's school drop off though, the sky was thick with fog, it was freezing and poor Opeie was looking a bit peaky and dark around the eyes (we've all been a little under the weather lately). So we decided to head back home into the warm and curl up on the sofa reading books. After a few books, we made our way to this custom kitchen top chaise Lounge and as I cleaned the kitchen and prepped lunch, Opeie learned about symmetrical patterns and then we covered a few pages of number bonds and times tables.

The great thing about the way we learn at home is that to break up any academic work we are doing there is no end to the amount of creative things we can do in between. A lot of them being general tasks around the house that need doing, which aside from being creative also teach great life lessons. As much as we want Opeie to be a well educated and creative grown up we also want him to reach his adult years knowing how to do things that will benefit him, like being able to cook and look after himself. Today's fun task was prepping tea for when Seth came home so that we had plenty of time to be doing something fun together. Seth's tea time request was pizza, so It was Opeie's and My job to make the dough.

The remainder of our afternoon we talked about all the things that we want to do during our home-schooling fun and Opeie informed me that we wanted us to have some singing time which I thought was an amazing idea as he sings to himself all day long, making up the lyrics that he doesn't know to his favourite country songs, so I'll be printing out lyrics for us to learn as part of this learning adventure. This self-guided motivation is exactly what we want for Opeie and we'll embrace all of his ideas if we can.

And then it was time to put on our jerseys and grab our sticks for hockey time, the perfect end to a perfect day of home education.