Every Day Is a Learning Day, and Life Is Our Classroom

Every day is a learning day, and life is our classroom. Do not let yourself get stressed out thinking that your students have to be working from a book to be doing school. Learning is also found outdoors, in everyday life, and many other places. You can count all that as schoolwork. There will be days when your students may want to do double workbook pages to make up for the time they’ve “lost” in doing outside activities, but do not think they have not learned from those activities. Even if we were kept away from our books, we were still learning very important lessons.

Life seldom follows a “routine.” In my opinion, homeschooled kids have a distinct advantage over their government-schooled peers by seeing first-hand that life is not the same day after day. My students and I once canceled our plans for an “Engineering Day” field trip to engineer a dam of bricks to divert the backyard’s melting snow away from its chosen path into our basement. It was definitely not “routine” and a very important lesson — both in saving the contents of the basement from a flood and in how to persuade water to take an alternate path. Any skill valuable in life is a subject worthy of your time to teach: laundry, cooking, comparison-shopping, auto mechanics, home repair, car-buying, button-sewing & mending, etc.