Detroit Parade Co. tour

The Detroit Thanksgiving Day Parade is one of the traditions that has remained strong in the streets of that beleagured city. According to the Parade Company's website, it is a 90 year old event that takes 4,500 volunteers and reaches over 100,000 viewers in their homes every year while about a million spectators line the streets. It's a big deal, preluded by parties, music events, and a charity run, all over the city. 

To pull it all off, the parade relies on the Parade Company, which takes all the support, physical and monetary, and manages it until it produces a festivity for the ages! And they do it from the skeleton of an old auto plant building in an unsurprisingly barren part of the city. This warehouse is where they store old floats and build new ones, and they offer group tours of the facility year round, although I can't imagine wanting to go anytime other than November, when the space is crazy with creativity. 

We went last week with our homeschooling field trip group. The tour took the better part of the morning as we were ushered through the facility by a well informed guide. We spied the tracks on the ground from the old assembly line, and noticed the spots where the artsy but poorly planned roof windows tend to leak. We got to take pictures with iconic floats, like Santa's sleigh, and peaked at, but couldn't photograph, the up and coming new floats for this year's parade. The world's largest collection of paper mache heads will stick with me for some time (possibly in nightmares). When we left, nspired and excited for the parade just a couple of weeks away, we were sporting red clown nose parting gifts.

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November Nature

Golden hues, the smell of crispy leaves, the rustling of digging squirrels. These are some of the things that define fall for me. That and football games, apple pie, pumpkin everything, and brisk nights, not to mention a new focus on school and studies. We combined some of the above today by taking our science study out into the field to merge it with the signs of fall.

There are certain things that we study with lesson specificity, others, though, we learn more through rhetoric and reality. To me, arithmetic is learned in sprints, while reading and writing is a marathon study—slow, steady, and more a way of living than a way of studying. Science can be either. We'll learn the periodic table in a sprint, but lessons like evolution and seasons are better trained for like an ultra-marathon. These are a fundamental way of thinking about, speaking about, and seeing the world around us.

So we learn them by doing exactly that. A book can tell us about different species, it can even define for us how their aspects evolved, but only field work and discussion can give a person a feel for what those things mean and the ability to problem solve with that understanding on their own. In the woods today we talked about the adaptations species in our area have for enduring the deprivation of the winter months. We visited about seeing these adaptations at work, especially in the trees. And we chatted about the migrating location of the sun in our sky and the aspects of our orbit that define that movement.

We are several years into studying these concepts, and our introduction to them came from the early chapters of BFSU and from reading and discussions at home, but we build on that introductory learning by living the concepts and seeing them in the living things around them. This isn't homeschooling, per se. It's life schooling, or learning through life itself. This is the way of thinking, the way of being, that we strive for every day.

 

October 2016 Recap

Halloween 2017: a photo essay

Calvin drew and carved this pumpkin all by himself!

Field tripping

The response I hear most when I tell someone we're homeschooling is "what about socialization?". The question comes in many forms. In its most blatant it sounds like an accusation, but other times it comes disguised in curiosity "Do you get together with others much?", and I'll be honest, I'm always torn between giving them the rundown of our social interactions and responding that no, we are what's known as closet homeschoolers: we learn alone in a dark closet.

I know most of the queries are well-meaning or simply curious, but if the askers only knew. In fact, the social experiment of homeschooling might be what draws me most. Yes, connect every Friday with a group of like-minded homeschoolers (because there are many different kinds of us out there, you know), and when we do get together the lack of division between age and gender is truly heartwarming. And it's not the only place we see our fellow homeschoolers. A group of us, connected via facebook, band together to earn field trip privileges at various local places. There's more I want to say about the "socialization" aspect, mainly about how an education in how to be social should not come from someone equally as clueless, and about the value of learning the social aspects of community in the community at large, but right now my focus is really on the second homeschooling group and the amazing field trips we get to take together.

There are lots of good reasons homeschooling field trips are great. For one thing, again, there is no divide along age or gender lines. Then there's the high adult to child ratio. But possibly the most wonderful thing about a homeschool field trip is that pretty much everyone who's there wants to be there. This is no obligatory trip. When the leader posts field trip options in the group, everyone decides for themselves if they want to join up or not, and there's no shame in staying home if, for instance, you aren't interested in the art museum or robotics class. There's no limit to the range of options, the group leader is open to suggestions from anyone and everyone, and the list is there for kids to pick and choose.

This year so far we have taken science classes in the park, gone on guided hikes, and spent a night in the zoo sleeping next to the giant aquarium after feeding the nocturnal animals. Today it was a hands-on class about electricity. Next month it will be a tour of the Parade Company's warehouse.