Experience is the stuff all our days are made of — all the moments with and without shoes that decorate the fabric of time. Likewise, the E. in my P.E.A.R.L.S. homeschooling philosophy is really EVERYTHING that makes up our lives and provides the raw material for us to be able to grow in understanding, skill and virtue so that we can fulfill the vocations to which God has called us. I think this overarching mission provides the most important orientation for me — my constant North Star — that all our time together at home and in community are the training grounds to grow in preparation for the missions that God chooses to give us. Knowledge, skill and virtue come only through experience, and those experiences can vary greatly (even when there are some similarities) among families.
Looking back over our 10+ years of homeschooling, I recognize all the different ways in which our variety of experiences have enriched our learning and growth in character. Therefore, experience in P.E.A.R.L.S. has a very expansive view of learning and educational activities! Since I LOVE categorizing, I have organized our experiential activities that fall under the rubric of “schooling” into 12 categories that fit our family well: 1. Faith/Ministry 2. Life Skills 3. Language Arts 4. Foreign Language 5. Music/Art 6. Math 7. History/Social Studies/Geography 8. Science/Nature 9. Physical Fitness 10. Architecture/Engineering 11. Technology and 12. Creative Play : ). I have yet to find an activity that doesn’t fall into one of these themes! So while I try to have consistency in certain areas for particular skill development, I also try to balance the types of experience that we have, recognizing the distribution of activities will vary greatly depending on the age of my child, the time of year (liturgical calendar and outdoor seasonal), their particular interests, our virtue/character development, and what’s generally going on in our lives and in the world.
Embracing the experience that is the foundation of learning also means recognizing that my kids learn best when they are fully engaged in the process. Homeschooling provides such a wonderful opportunity to think outside the box in this regard! So, for example, we recognize the value of many different sorts of reading experiences to gain knowledge about a particular topic — historical fiction and fantasy novels, non-fiction and biographies, current event news periodicals, travel guides, speciality magazines, world cuisine cookbooks, art books, instruction manuals, coffee-table-books of all sorts on national parks, wildlife photography, bird-watching, marine life, botany, etc., etc. etc. We have absorbed these resources in various forms — silent reading, family read-alouds, in-the-car audiobooks, podcasts, and book clubs. Nothing is more exciting than putting these concepts that we’ve been reading about into practice, so our reading experiences often lead into a particular hands-on project such as cooking an ethnic meal to share with others, planting a wildflower and herb garden, identifying wildlife and unusual geology on a nature hike, creating a mini-world out of legos, or playing backyard games with team names that reflect various countries and cultures about which we’ve been reading. We’ve come up with silly songs to remember hard facts, and used art and play to reflect serious concepts.
Experience, even more importantly, includes the Christian activities that draw us into our local community — such as attending daily Mass, altar serving, volunteering at a pro-life pregnancy center, performing violin at homeless shelters, nursing homes and food distribution sites for the needy, praying the Rosary with our parish family in public, preparing meals for a meal-train and volunteering at overnight shelters, among other endeavors.
Experience encompasses the personal events that directly impact our family — moving (yet again!), kidney stones, Daddy’s knee replacement, my father’s funeral, our own triumphs and struggles as well as those of our relatives and close friends. Experience recognizes that sometimes our daily activities will be affected by the news —local, national or worldwide — on events of great (sometimes tragic) impact, commemorations, holidays, and, even more importantly, holy days and the liturgical calendar of our Catholic faith, which is the bedrock upon which we begin each day.
In sum, all kinds of experience promote learning in one fashion or another. For me, the keys for successful homeschooling are prayerfully discerning which experiences are profitable for my children and my family in the current season of our lives, and the places where God has called us to serve him, and, even more importantly, finding the blessing in disguise when those planned activities don’t quite go as expected, or maybe don’t even happen at all! In these moments, I can choose to embrace the experiences we do have as opportunities for learning and growth, no matter what, and try to have a positive attitude, even in the midst of disappointment or frustration! This, I have learned, comes way more easily when I give myself over to trusting God and make an effort to lay everything before our Lord — the good and the bad, the planned and the unplanned, the ordered and the chaos, as an offering to Him, with the prayer that he will use all of these experiences to transform us into the servants He wants us to be!