Love to Learn Conference

On Saturday I attended the Love to Learn Conference for home schoolers in North Carolina. This was a secular conference, so I saw a veiled Muslim, veiled Amish/Mennonites, total unschooling hippies with hair in dreadlocks and dyed purple, and many other varied folks. While I missed certain aspects of being at a Catholic home school conference, it was neat to see such a wide variety of people drawn together by something about which we all feel passionate.

The talks I attended covered the topics of:

1- A basic overview of NC home schooling law. We're a fairly lax state, which is great. Our requirements: Register as a home school when our first child is seven years old in September. Keep attendance records, vaccination records, and testing records of the one state test we are required to give each year. We do not need to submit our records to anyone, just keep them. We do not need to grade the tests and the kids do not have to pass them.

2- A two-hour session on being with your children 24/7. Our homes run differently because we're with our kids all the time. (And a surprising number of women in the session had husbands who work from home.) What are difficult spots? What arises because we're together all the time? Solutions?

3- A mother of seven described a collaborative learning process. It wasn't unschooling per se, but allowing the children a lot of self-direction in the early years to find their interests and passion, then the parent would facilitate their learning more about a subject. Then in later years the parent would provide more and more direction.

4- Home schooling the special needs learner. A wonderful session by a neat mother of four with children with widely varying needs: (1) super easy baby, near genius IQ, (2) super difficult baby with sensory issues: very intense, (3) child with a rare genetic disorder and autism whom they spent her first two years of life "just keeping her alive," and (4) another super intense child with sensory issues.

5- "Homeschooling when life happens." When we have a crisis, sometimes we consider putting our children back into institutional cancer. For example, pregnancy bed rest, cancer, or the husband loses his job. This mother of four shared some stories from her life (they were so funny, but only in retrospect) and how she chose to keep homeschooling.

6- "Getting Ready to Learn." The title of this session misled me. I thought it might be about the preschool years, but it was about some "woo-woo" techniques.

I took Mary with me to the conference and she was a happy lap baby, if a little loud with her joyful noises. John had a fun day with daddy that included washing the car with the hose and going swimming.

When I came home, I reorganized those wonderful shelves in my kitchen. I put most of my cookbooks in the pantry, leaving out only the few I use frequently. I'm dedicating most of those shelves to craft supplies and activities that require some supervision. I'm all in favor of Montessori-style activities, but I don't quite now how to keep them available to the child on a low shelf. The thing is that in a Montessori classroom of, say, three-year-olds, there isn't a baby running loose, losing all the parts or choking on a small piece. Since this is a home and not a classroom, I'm currently going to keep certain activities up on a high shelf.

I bought two toys from Discovery Toys at the conference. I've been eyeing these Measure Up cups for a couple of years now. Mary and John are already having fun with them.

I bought Playful Patterns for John. It comes with many patterns to imitate, starting at a very basic level and becoming more complicated. The box says it is for four years old and older, but I suspected John could do the basic patterns. All I did was hand him a basic pattern and ask, "Where are the shapes the same?" and off he went! You can see in the photos what he was able to do himself.