Practical and Conversational Learning

I find myself noticing that so much of our learning is informal, through practical, everyday situations arising which either leads to the acquisition of knowledge through necessity or through conversation. For example, Springy has known about the o'clocks of time for quite a while because she hears both C and I discuss what time we are leaving for somewhere or what time a meal is. She now has an awareness of half past and over the weekend started to ask about quarter past and quarter to. I don't tend to go into long explanations but when there is an indication that she is interested in something then I make the effort to engage with that. So now instead of saying it's nearly 8 o'clock and therefore you can longer eat at this time before bed I have started to say it's quarter to 8 (or nearly or just gone quarter to 8). That way, when she's ready it will just slip into her knowledge base.

We had the same today. We were shopping and I did a price comparison on some food and rather than overload her with the details I pointed out that I was finding out which one was cheaper by using maths and showed her the label. I didn't explain any further than that but the idea has been encountered.

I haven't listed all that we have in our garden in terms of fruit and vegetables. I tend to grow small quantities - to me the experience of knowing where food comes from, how to care for plants etc is a very important part of home education but I'm certainly not an expert gardener. Our raspberry canes look good this year (nettle mulch seems to have helped), we seem to have a lot of strawberries again, two blueberry bushes, a gooseberry bush (which isn't doing well - I need to move it), redcurrant bush (it looks like some little birdies have devoured the unripe currants because there were a lot), some dwarf runner beans, several varieties of potato (courtesy of the British Potato Council), leaf beet, tomato vines and courgette plant and lots of herbs (comfrey, nettles, dandelions, sage, rosemary, thyme, lavender, mints) and edible flowers such as calendula, carnations, and roses. We garden without pesticides and I like to companion plant. We often lose our crops to other lifeforms and I try not to mind sharing.