Wagon on the Prairie

Yesterday I had a lovely moment of confirmation. And a gentle urging to be careful regarding any boxed curriculum. I need the freedom to create.

You may notice that we’ve not actively done our Prairie Tuesday in a few weeks. I’ve let it die down a bit to give Michaela a summer. School will be starting up again for us in August and I want her to run and play and not have any school to worry about for some weeks, even if it is fun school that we do.

Yesterday Michaela disappeared into her room for quite a long time.  I had no idea what she was doing.  She could have been playing with the bunnies, drawing, reading, or just playing.  I had no idea.  I was busy working.

She came and got me later and said, “Come look at what I made.  It’s for Prairie Tuesday.”

She had put together a covered wagon from things we gathered up at our last Scrap Exchange visit: cardstock pieces for the wagon, straws for the axles, bottle corks for the wheels. 

I was so impressed with her creativity.  I didn’t tell her how to do this!  I didn’t even tell her to do this.  I was happy that she had been thinking over things we had studied.  It was confirmation that she was feeding on ideas that we had talked about in our schooling.

I was also impressed with how she used these ideas she had gleaned about pioneer life.  The little bracelet draped across the front of the wagon?

“And mama, this is peppers drying.”

I was reading yesterday in A Charlotte Mason Companion.  (Yet again.)  I was inspired.  (Yet again.)

Charlotte urges us to give children a regular feeding of ideas through sweeping tales of history, wonderful inventions and discoveries in science, lives of great men and women, stories that radiate the moral life as well as paintings, plays, Psalms, poems, symphonies–and everthing else wonderful we can think of. She says these ideas are the children’s very bread of life.

How I love that our reading of Laura and Mary on the prairie has translated into a little girl who made a covered wagon and hung on it peppers to dry for later use!

This is the essence of what school is to me at her age. It’s why I’m so hesitant to box her in.

Lynn