Afterschooling

Today was Carbon's first "real" day at his new school, a small Sudbury model school that is basically group unschooling. He loves the school so far, and it seems wonderful to me as well.

But I'm still not ready to hand over my childrens' education to someone else. In fact, I don't think I would ever, as a parent, be ready to let anyone other than my child step in and take over for me. I think parents are ultimately responsible for their childrens' educations, and that the family is the primary educational unit. This idea is shared by homeschoolers and by afterschoolers.

Afterschooling means that during the afterschool hours families focus on furthering their childrens' educations. Today we did our afterschooling bit, and it looked like this:

3:30 - pick him up from school, and then drive home listening to The Lightening Thief on audiobook.

4:00 - snack and pack

4:45 - swim class

5:30 - drive to Costco, listening to The Lightening Thief again.

6:00 - Costco shopping, eating samples, and grabbing hotdog meals for dinner.

7:00 - Home, and the afterschooling begins! We read part of the new issue of Cricket magazine, did a couple quick addition wrap-ups, read La Ropa and did a game where I sent them off hunting for clothing items in spanish, which finished up with a command to find "pijamas" and put them on.

7:30 - The kids watch The Blue Planet while I make them some popcorn. They keep watching while I work on signing us all up for a community walk to combat hunger and poverty.

8:15 - bedtime stories: Storm in the Night and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

9:00 - both kids go to bed listening to audiobooks