There have been several wonderful questions in my inbox about organic learning, and I will work on answering some of those next week. In the meantime, I thought I'd post these photos of one of the projects we did yesterday. This is a good example of the way organic learning flows, meshing one or more "subjects" together naturally and seamlessly.
Yesterday we were still reading about the Mayflower voyage. We were discussing the harsh life in the New World. The time period was the 1600's. The instructor's guide had a section that talked about art during that time period, so I read it aloud to them. We learned that stained glass was an important craft in Europe during the 1600's. The guide gave a suggestion for an art project making "stained glass" with tissue paper. But, being a spontaneous Mama, I decided to break out the old crayons instead and make a different kind of stained glass.
Ideally, an old cheese grater is best for this, but I didn't have an old one and didn't want to sacrifice my good one. So, I pulled out an old knife instead and grated it the old fashioned way. I grated 6 different colors, while the boys gathered the other supplies that we would need.
They each took bits of shaved crayons and placed them on a piece of wax paper.
Keep the crayon shavings away from the edges (or else you will have a mess when you apply heat!). This was what T chose to do:
And this is what D did:
When they finished putting their crayon shavings on the wax paper, we covered it with another piece of wax paper on top.
Then Mama applied an iron on low/medium heat just enough to melt the crayon (this melts quickly...check it so that you don't burn it). Just a few touches with the iron melted all the crayon shavings.
We let them cool for a few minutes...
Meanwhile, the boys chose a shape to draw onto a black sheet of construction paper. They each chose crosses, because they thought it would make a good shape for a stained glass. You could make a heart, geometric shapes, etc.
Then they cut the cross out of the center of the black construction paper.
They glued the cross shape over the top of the melted crayon, centering the colors in the center of the cross..
After it was glued, they cut the extra wax paper around the edges.
Placing it on the sunny window was the best part!
I LOVE multi-colored things, so this seriously made my day. Really, isn't this great?!
Prettiest site...a stained glass window overlooking Texas Hill Country...
And here's how learning keeps flowing from one place to the next. Remember, it started with reading about the pilgrims in the 1600's...then discussing stained glass art in Europe during that same time period...then making stained glass windows out of melted crayon. Then we headed back to the learning loft and pulled out our Book of Time (basically a timeline in a book), where we keep record of people and events that we learn.
D and HB take turns writing events in this book. This was HB's day, so she opened it first to the 1100's and recorded information that we had read about a man name Theophilus who wrote a book about how to make stained glass in the 1100's.
She then flipped to the 1600's and recorded the fact that creating stained glass windows was an important craft in Europe during this time period.
With organic learning, there are often no arbitrary lines between "subjects," just as there are no lines between things in real life. Instead, there is very often a flow from one thing to another. We center everything around history...going in order as historical events happened. With that as our point of reference (our beginning point), we then mesh in math, art, music, science, Bible, everything as it applies. Sometimes this happens because of a suggestion in the instructor's guide, and at other times this happens just because someone gets an interest to dive deeper into something we talked about. Either way, it's a very natural, organic flow...not a subject-by-subject, box-by-box style of learning. There is an interconnectedness between all areas of learning, which makes it all make sense. Not to mention the fact that it's interesting and fun.
And, yes, to answer one of your questions...yes, we do have times when we pull out math books. I will cover that next week.
