It’s been a week since we returned from our holiday (which I plan to write about soon), and we’ve come down with the Something-My-Child-Caught-While-Exploring-Germ-Covered-Surfaces bug. As a result, we’ve not exactly gone swinging back into our usual routine, but kind of limped close enough to wave dispiritedly in its direction.
And yet, even while we’ve been doing what I thought was not-learning, my kids have been busy learning none-the-less. In between the seemingly endless Pixar movies and Spot videos, we’ve managed to watch our way through a Richard Hammond documentary exploring the Miracles of Nature – how the natural world inspires engineering marvels like water-proof coatings for phones. And the documentary on Catalyst about looking for lost twins to our sun. They’ve also been learning about polynya near glaciers in Antarctica that help penguins to find food.
They’ve been creating their own kitchen, baking their own pretend food, or memorising song lyrics from movies. (Listening to J singing ‘Eby ting is tawsum’ is quite a treat.)
They’ve also been drawing and designing their own homes after watching a few too many episodes of ‘This Old House‘ and calculating the square metres in each room design.
They’ve been creating their own city with a massive train network using our wooden train-set with occasional drawing update to the design.
C’s spent 5+ hours working on Dragonbox and discovering new ways to manipulate algebraic expressions. (‘Look Mummy, it took me 164 moves to do a 4 move problem!’)
They’ve explored logic puzzles on cool maths games about how to move around mazes to feed mice, and paint with ninjas (One of J’s favorites).
When they retreated to their bedroom, they built Lego, or read books, or drew pictures of imagined city-scapes.
And that’s a few quiet days. Really. While I’ve shivered under blankets in between making sure they’re fed and clean and not dribbling too much snot on every surface.
It’s kind of cool and a little scary to realise my kids really don’t know how to not-learn.
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