Planning our season

This essay by a new homeschooler about her Learning Plan Meeting with her four year old daughter is one of the sweetest things I've read this week.  It brought back our early days of homeschooling so vividly.  When we first started homeschooling Sarah was 3 (we'd had her in preschool for a miserable 9 month experiment, and I needed some sort of gentle rhythm to our days to replace the rhythm school had forced on us, and needed a homeschool philosophy to prepare me to answer the constant questions and challenges from strangers, friends, and family, otherwise we probably wouldn't have officially started homeschooling until a few years later).

In those early years we "played school" every morning -- we'd sing a few songs together, then we'd each pick out one or two books for me to read aloud, and then we did an activity together -- an art project or a science experiment or a game.  Slowly, slowly over the course of the next 3 years, we started planning things out a little more -- first by each picking one subject we wanted our Playing School time to focus on for a week at a time, then for a month at a time, and finally for the whole season.  The last few years she's worried about covering the basics and so I put together a curriculum each season, and would bring it to her for consideration and approval.  Usually something in history, something in science, some sort of math and spelling, and something extra -- maybe history of classical music, maybe mythology, maybe a tour of some literature or some world culture.

Starting last year, though, as we immersed ourselves in the school, she wanted to let go of having a plan for the first time in our homeschool relationship, and to just learn through living.  I've been impressed by both the research behind that approach and the results I've seen in the unschooled teens I've known.  But it is still one of the scariest things we've ever done.  Still, trust the captain, trust the crew.  Wait, no.  That's something else entirely.  :)  But honestly, I trust my kid, and I trust human nature to be what it is -- curious, creative, inventive, exploratory...  So I took a deep breath, and another, and put my money where my mouth was.  And we had a really great, laidback year, in which she did only a handful of traditionally academic stuff but learned a whole lot and matured in leaps and bounds.

This summer when we talked about whether we wanted to play school, she said that because she hadn't done much academic stuff this year, she really wanted to go back to playing school in the mornings, but in a nice, laidback way.  So most weekday mornings we've sat together, listened to a little classical music, then she's read some history, spent a few minutes telling me about what she'd read, and then she's done some math -- either reading Life of Fred to herself or doing some Khan Academy videos.

This afternoon, inspired by the article above and by the looming start of the school year, we had our Season-planning meeting over tea and croissants at our favorite cafe.

Sarah's overarching plan:
- keep doing the laidback Playing School approach we've taken this summer
- do more independent research and learning -- studying her own interests at her own pace, accountable only to herself, outside Playing School time

More specifically:
- continue focusing on history and math
- try out Aurora's science videos and either order one of her classes or start reading The Story of Science again
- have a gentle intention of one field trip a week (LSC, Montclair Art Museum, AMNH)
- make a point of spending some time connecting as soon as we get home from school on M and W
- make a point of working on her room, making it somewhere she enjoys being
- more time gaming
- more time with friends (E&S, cooking with O, Hetalia sleepover with B&S, lunch and movie with P)
- more baking (pavlova, triple chocolate chip cookies)
- activities: DIY club, Country Day, Girls' Discussion Group, Art class, Team Challenge, Documentary Discussion Group, the RPG