Learning Diaries: South America

Learning Diaries: South America

Thursday 18 June 2015

The house is currently in the grip of Latin fever: Keith spends his evening poring over books about Cuba and Mexico ahead of our trip, and thanks to a well timed football tournament, Alfie and I are in the middle of lap booking.

Never heard of a lap book? 

That's OK, neither had I until I became acquainted with the good folk at Homeschool Share at which point I realised that I'd actually been a fan of them since primary school.

Somewhere buried in the boxes of my school work is a project I once did about the human body. It was the closest I ever came to lap booking as a child and to this day it still ranks as the only single project I can remember doing. 

Isn't that nuts? 13 years of formal education and I can only remember one assignment?

This project was made up of pictures on top of pictures, flaps that lifted, mini books within books and fold out inserts. It was created from a stack of printouts painstakingly coloured, cut out and stick into place.

That, in a nutshell, is a lap book

Alfie and I have so far filled ours with different information about Chile and Argentina. We have looked at money, climate, found them on the globe, looked at food, language; in other words, we have picked a starting point and then let our questions take us where they will.

Sometimes I have asked questions of Alfie to see if they spark, sometimes he has taken us in a new direction with his own thoughts and questions. We sit at the table with the tablet, the globe and our lap book and we just shoot the educational breeze.

This weekend we will be looking at Brasil.

I say this weekend, I'm not sure we will last that long because I kid you not, he spent last night pleading with me to let him stay up so that we could do more work together.

Passion for learning? I should coco.

I don't just mean for him either, I mean me. 

This morning my ride to work involved me doing a lot of pondering about whether Earth has a right way up which frankly is not the sort of thing I thought myself capable of right now. Frankly, my new job is taking up so much brain power it's a wonder I haven't been found bimbling around the waterfront with pants on my head, a pencil up each nostril shouting "wibble" at passing tourists.

Come to think of it, that sounds like an idea for a Friday night on the town.