I just want to share a fun homeschooling idea I did with my kids one afternoon. For me, this is what homeschooling is all about, taking what each day has to offer and make the best out of it. My children are too young to officially start homeschooling, but I of course raise them the same way now as a will continue to do once they are school age.

One ordinary warm and rainy day I was on my way to the playground with my children when I decided it was going to be too wet and slippery for them to play there (the rain had started to pick up).

Dressed up for playing in the rain, we changed our plans and decided to go for a walk and look for puddles. We called it the Puddle Walk.

With three kids, I constantly have to divide the attention and my time between them as fairly as possible. The oldest child walks next to me and the younger two are strapped into our double stroller. We did not have to walk too far until the ones in the stroller were sound asleep. This gave me the opportunity to give all my time and attention to my oldest son.

It was a wonderful and very rare opportunity so we made the best out of our walk. As we walked and looked for puddles to jump in we found lots of interesting things we now finally had time to stop and look at. No impatient kids screaming in the stroller. My son could stop and pick as many sticks as he liked. He has so many questions and today I had time to listen and answer to all of them. I was also able to just be next to him and listen to his thoughts and ideas. One example is when we found some leaves and he placed the leaves in a water puddle. Normally, I would stand further away with my other kids and just watch him. But now I learned his ideas behind his actions. He was wondering if leaves could float in the puddles and placed them in there to find out!

Fortunately I had brought our camera and was able to take some pictures. I really think repetition is one of the most important parts of learning. So to make sure we don’t waste and forget all that we learned that day, taking pictures is a great, fun and very helpful way of remembering. There are lots of things you can do with the photos later.

Depending on how good your photos are and how many you took you could paste them on poster boards and put up temporarily on your wall, you could pick out a few special ones and frame them, or as I did with mine make a book with them. Since we talked about so many things during our walk, I wanted to write them down. Our whole walk had been a perfect story so why not make it into a book?

We spent most of our time on a bridge, throwing leaves, sticks and rocks into the stream beneath us. We observed what happened with the different items and talked about why the rocks made a splash and sank to the bottom while the leaves floated away so quickly.

Now our book has become a bedtime favorite all my children enjoy, especially the oldest one.

A little from our book:

Saving Jojo is my self published children’s book I both wrote and illustrated. As a mother of three, I want to share my values on life with my children. I could not find many good books that showed compassion towards animals. Yes, there are tons of books for children about animals. I have seen countless books about happy animals at the zoo and in circuses. It is time for a change.

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