What Learning Looks Like at Our House

We worked all weekend to get our Christmas stuff put away. My plan was get everything back to normal then spend Monday Planning our school work for the month of January. The plan was to start school Tuesday.

But....

The kids were annoying each other. It had been too long since they had a structured day. Break was over as of Monday morning :)

No one was thrilled with this revelation. Well, except Megan. She goes along with any and all school work.

We sat at the table in our school room and were immediately amused by the birds at the bird feeder. So funny! Then we started identifying them. After we watched for a while, I pushed our school table over to the window. We haven't brought up the ottomans yet so it was perfect there. I thought they'd do their math while being amused by those birds and the work wouldn't seem so much like work. But they had other plans....

 Doesn't it look like it should be a great set up??

 But this is what happened:

 Can you see his math book right beside his sketch book?? Yeah. It was completely ignored ;)

 My mom got Nicholas a bird drawing kit for Christmas. They used it for identifying and also read about color blending.

 

 We call this a "bird study" ;)

And here's their little distraction:

 Can you believe how fat that little guy is??

 Megan painted this bird house back in the summer and we put it close to our feeder this fall. It was so fun to watch birds actually go in and out of it! Megan said she was very happy that the birds like pink too :)

 There bird-obsession didn't end there. Yesterday, I was presented with more art work:

Nick's:

 Megan's:

 Brandon's:

I think they all did a great job! And you know what? It doesn't bother me that they didn't do a bunch of "book work", we spend enough time doing that. Learning that is inspired by curiosity is the best kind! It reminds me of how blessed we are to be able to educate our kids at home :)