Learning in the Absence of Education
Essays on Homeschooling
© Beverley Paine
Index
Homeschool
Australia
A Day in the Life of a Child 'Damaged' by the Modern World
(continued)
The boys have been working on a map of an imaginary country. This map is twelve A4 pages joined together, and they have half each. They are putting the final touches on the map, which has taken about twenty hours to draw over nearly a week. Roger climbs up on a chair to blue tack it to the living room wall. The map is complex, with medieval villages, swamps, mountains, forests, islands, reefs, roads, quarries. Their mum remarks that it looks a lot like the map in Alan Garner's Weirdstone of Brisingingham series. They agree, and some discussion about books with maps in them ensues.The weather is nice outside so the boys disappear. Later their mum is invited to check out the village they have built into the side of a cutting down on the property. Little caves are houses for imaginary people, roads and steps lead to small huts made from carefully broken twigs constructed into realistic buildings. The village sprawls over two square metres. It took almost two hours to complete, raised from the ruins of the village built last year. The building process included an imaginary game, with several characters, and a break to play on the nearby rope swing.
Since the rope swing, the second to be erected, went up the boys have compared ability, pushing their bodies to the limit, pushing the fear back, constantly challenging themselves and supporting each other in their quest to fly through the air. Sometimes up-side-down. It is always a thrill to watch. They are aware of the dangers, of the pernicious nature of pink gums to drop branches. These kids like to take calculated risks. They are growing.
While mum is outside and they have her attention, they show her how well their recently made bows and arrows work. They puzzle over how to make the arrows fly straighter and mum suggests they try attaching nails to the end for weight. Fifteen minutes and two modifications later the arrows can hit a target at twenty metres. Later in the evening, when Robin is home from work, he suggests making flights out of feathers, but the boys don't feel it is necessary as their arrows fly straight anyway, if they fire them at a certain angle.
Lunch is well overdue. The boys investigate options and settle on making sandwiches. They eat them out on the verandah, watching the free range chickens, ducks and guinea pigs, talking about the Royal Adelaide Show they visited during the week. Mum is sending emails. After lunch Thomas asks if he can write to his friend. Once on the computer mum asks if he would like to write an article for the local newsletter about the show while it is fresh in his mind. Almost an hour is easily used up as he dictates his essay to his mum and then selects pictures from clip art, arranging them to illustrate the story, exploring the various options the word processing program offers to polish his article. In the end he has a very professional looking page he is proud of and which will be published and seen by his friends.
The rest of the afternoon is spent playing Solar Quest with mum, a board game which has taught the family much about the Solar System. It has come over cloudy and cold, so the planned gardening is put off until a nicer day. Thomas is keen to rejuvenate his garden under his cubby house, and to finish the garage for it, and build the petrol driven go cart to go in the garage. He does go out and water the six hundred tree seedlings for his mum though, just in case it doesn't rain.
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Excerpt from Learning in the Absence of Home Education: Essays on Homeschooling
© Beverley Paine, 1999
