Take a walk on the wild side

Friday

It has been recently reported that today's children can suffer from Nature Deficiency Disorder, not so in our house. Today we saw a second visit to Nyman Gardens and loved it all over again. Bean and Pumpkin made me read all the signs they could see on trees and plants and where the plants were from (really must brush up on my Latin) and we felt and smelt and observed and described and hid and climbed and fell. (Asher fell out his first tree.)


We shared our lunch time with a Robin and two field mice, all of which were less than a foot away from us. The mice running around in the hedge row behind the benches we were on. The boys spent about 15 minutes watching them and I had fresh satisfaction and delight in our choice to home educate. 






















Our house is full of collections of sticks and leaves and cones and seed pods and various other natural findings. I can remember David Attenborough once talking about the importance of collecting things. In fact Nyman's Gardens itself is a huge collection of plants from far and wide. So our house may be full of odd bits and bobs but it is the beginnings of great discoveries.


Pumpkin has spent a lot of time with Plum today, holding her hand, singing to her, cuddling her and playing 'boo.' I love watching the boys relationship grow with each other and their sister and am glad that the transition from two to three has been a smooth and natural one for them all. 


The drawing is one of Bean's, it is the Horsham Museum. The bricks are a skate park built by Pumpkin. Bean also asked me to write "all the numbers" so he could copy them. As a teacher I was always quite apposed to giving the children worksheets of numbers or letters to copy but in the spirit of 'unschooling' I dutifully wrote down the digits from 0 - 9 for him to copy. Sometimes I think it's me that needs de-schooling, not my children!