2007 Year of the Home School Adventure

Our New Year, 2007, begins our serious adventure into Home School.

We have had a great holiday. While in Townsville, Boy’s highlights were visiting the Reef HQ Aquarium (first picture), going to an omnimax theatre (I got seriously motion sick!!) and a day trip to Charters Towers (last picture).

We stayed with friends (Boy camped in their back yard, his tent is pictured.) and playing with the family’s kids was such a bonus for Boy. Boy was well behaved, no aspergers melt downs and removed himself from situations when he was feeling overloaded.

While at the aquarium Boy requested that, we build excursions into home schooling. Although we had already intended to do this, Boy took some ownership of his educational needs and began a planning process of learning. He is keen to visit the Aquarium again and asked to visit the Great Barrier Reef to see the fish and sea creatures in their natural habitat fulfilling their environmental roles. Our first two excursions will be just that: we will visit Green Island in the next couple of weeks and will head back to Townsville before the end of January.

I sense a unit of marine study coming on. Boy’s interest will make my job as facilitating educator easy to capture his curiosity and fully capitalize upon it. I am grateful that we live in a part of the world where we can easily experience everything that the Great Barrier Reef has to offer. A unit of Marine learning will not be book based but practical, interactive and based in natural learning tenets within its own environment.

Boy’s learning happened vicariously at the Aquarium. We spent the entire day there and took every tour and lecture on offer. Boy asked the presenters many questions and was always first up with his hand to show off the knowledge he had. Other visitors commented on his knowledge and boosted Boy’s self-esteem like a shot of vitamins.

The next few home schooling aspergers blogs will be Boy based. I will ask him to word process some of his learning to help others learn. His blogs will become part of his home school diary, evaluation and will aid the English program I am designing.

Please, if you have time, would you ask boy a question about his trip to the Aquarium so that it assists in consolidating his comprehension and learning, aides his memory and recall and further builds his belief in himself and home schooling.

Happy New Year to you. I have an inkling that 2007 and our start of full time home schooling is going to make for a very good year for us.

Related article on Supporting 2007 Children to Have a Happy New Year.