The Right Brain Club Commences...

As homeschoolers, sometimes we get bogged down in details:  the details of curriculum, the details of planners, the details of our daily routine. I confess, I can and am bogged down many times by all of the above. I lose sight of the big picture: the love of learning, the love of creativity. I just want to plow through "THE LIST".

Don't get me wrong. We are having a pretty good year thus far. However, this morning I was craving more; especially with my two girls. I decided to take some poetry, creative writing and nature study outside. We were going to explore some rabbit trails no matter what!

Now call me a romantic, or just call me plain crazy, but I had this vision of  Louise May Alcott or Anne of Green Gables...or something of that nature. My daughters and I reading and writing poetry...life would be grand! Sigh... can you just picture it?  The sun shining, beautiful fall colors, birds chirping, the wind whispering through the trees....

Well? First...the girls thought that I had lost it. Period.  Second...once we did get outside, we needed stools and sitting on old logs from the woodpile that may or may not have had mice wasn't part of this deal. Third...Mice...or an active imagination by a twelve year old.

I was about to lose it! I was tempted to head back in the house, throw some workbooks at the girls and call it a day!  How could my well laid plan that I envisioned go so awry? Nevertheless I plugged on calmly, ignored the whining and got down to business. This agenda wasn't about lists or how many pages were done in math. I honestly had no end goal set to my vision. But this was something I wanted to do.

Once we found our secret place, the girls lightened up to my crazy idea. We each picked and read aloud a few seasonal poems from a few books we have. We discussed what we liked or disliked about these poems, and then we went ahead and tried to brainstorm ideas on writing our own seasonal poems.  For one solitary hour, the universe aligned and I could see all the poets smiling down on us...

The moral of this story? I'm sure we've all heard it as homeschoolers! Keep calm ( when you can) and carry on. These are the moments your children will remember. Who knows? They might even remember a line you read from your favorite poem after you lost that crazy maniacal look from your eyes, and it'll end up being their favorite poem too.