My blog has been quiet lately, but not our little people! Summer is hot with catching tadpoles and frogs and caterpillars and hoping the ones in the tub in the girls’ room turn into butterflies. Snacks are always in season, but the quantity seems to skyrocket in summer. We are reading and being read to and knitting and begging to learn how to sew and cooking and swimming and trying to master the cartwheel. At night we sleep hard.
We have just finished up homeschooling first grade. Next year we will have a second grader and a kindergartener and a busy three year old climbing on the school table. We homeschool classically and maybe someday I’ll write more about that. But here’s a little snapshot of what I’ve been mulling over lately:
“The musical … education was an education in wonder. […] The musical education was not primarily or exclusively about instruments and singing. It studied all the subjects inspired by the Muses (from epic poetry to astronomy) in a pre-critical manner.” – Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition
There’s so much I love about this.
An education in wonder. Wonder. It’s so much harder to teach than math facts.
In an interview I was listening to, Christopher Perrin said something about schole (restful learning) being experienced by children when they get caught in a good story or out in nature.
In The Liberal Tradition, Clark and Jain explain that during the “Grammar” stage in education, an age where young students delight in imitation, a classical education includes things like:
- physical training
- singing
- memorizing poetry
- acting/imitating
- drawing
- sculpting
- learning the deeds of great men
- reading great literature works
- experiencing and observing the natural world
We’re not super formal about this, but we’re taking a stab at it. We’re working more of it into our lives than we did before.
As so often is the case, it’s starting with me slowing down and being curious. It begins with me noticing, delighting, and being filled with wonder at the fact that something magical happens to worms —completely hidden from our eyes — and they emerge from their spun chambers with wings.
“At least once every day I shall look steadily at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things about and around me. […] I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their ‘diving, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic’ existence.” – Clyde Kilbe
Happy summering!
