Today was one of those "I love homeschooling days!", one of those days when what you believe in theory begins to happen in practice. 

We've homeschooled for 3 yrs and every since I was introduced to the philosphy of "relaxed learning", "identity-directed" or "lifestyle of learning" homeschooling, I have known in my heart that this is what is right for my children and family.  Yet, it has taken me these three years to really start to release some of my old thinking and embrace this new way of thinking about learning.  Well, today, I saw some of the fruit. 

My oldest son (almost 9yo), asked me to buy him a small notebook.  When I gave it to him today and asked him what he was going to use it for, he said he wanted to take notes, like a reporter.  I casually mentioned that if he wanted to, we could work on a family newsletter.  He has watched me do a newsletter for a moms group I belong to.  His eyes lit up!  He immediately began to interview his brother (5yo) about his first Pee-Wee football practice tonite.  I watched him carefully write out a few more questions (with very neat handwriting and working very diligently on spelling), then preceed to write out ideas for a couple of stories.  This is the kid who can't seem to come up with one sentence on his own for captions for his own drawings!   I went about my own business, only giving direction when asked (which is very hard for me!).  It was so exciting to see how his interest in a project or topic motivated him to work on skills or knowledge by his own choosing, not mom's pushing. 

While all of this was going on, my 5yods was using the Cuisnaire Rods to build a model of our downtown skyline, complete with all the major sports arena's (he's an avid sports person).  After building it, he commented that he had to move the stadium away from the rest of downtown because it was closer to the lake, not close to some other buildings.  I laughed to myself as I was just contemplating using some worksheet activity to introduce him to maps and instructs the child to draw a map of his room, or his neighborhood.  Here my son was doing it on his own, in 3-d no less! 

They happily engaged in their activities for over an hour.  I was encouraged and inspired to keep believing in this relaxed learning/delight-directed way of learning.  As of today, I have just relaxed a little bit more.