More thoughts on integration

I wrote yesterday about the integrated life.

The topic has been sticking around in my mind all morning as I experienced what is a typical Monday in my home.

My husband called from work around 6:30 am to ask me to prepare my son to join him when he got home. My son got ready. When my husband walked in the door, my daughter asked if she could join them, and he said yes.

I had a neat pile of books sitting on the dining room table ready to tackle, but the only people I was left with couldn't even name letters, so I sighed.

I set about doing my morning chores with the little ones following close behind me undoing everything I was doing. Grateful for the time to train them despite the annoyance of having to take the time, I got down on their level and began to do the work of instilling habits in them from the start. "Can you help mommy pick up that sock?" and "let's see if we can make this look nice and neat..."

In an hour or so my older children will come home, tired and happy from their activities out of the house, which included daily mass and a visit to their grandfather.
I will make lunch, and we will eat together. Afterwards I will settle down with them and read a story or two, and we will take naps. Then they will work on the things they left behind this morning: math lessons and map work, grammar and a science activity. If we're lucky! There's a good chance someone may pop up at the door, and then lessons will be for after dinner.There's also a good chance hospice will call and let us know it's time for us to gather bedside around my Father in law. Then maybe we'll have to skip lessons tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day..... life is happening. Every day. But I am armed with a list, and with a method, and ready at every moment if  the opportunity should present itself.

THIS is what I meant by "integrating," not the other way around, where life dictates what learning will happen. That is unschooling, and this is an academic education. We integrate learning into life, but we aren't rejecting formal lessons. We are just being malleable... allowing the day to dictate the right place and time for those lessons, and keeping them a priority without falling to pieces when they have to shift a bit.

We didn't have to be homeschoolers long to learn a few things that have shaped how we look at homeschooling.

1. When you homeschool, there is INFINITELY more "housework" that needs to get done because you are actually living IN the house. This requires a plan and some initiative. Good habits are critical.

2. When you homeschool, life gets in the way. Every time. This is important, because it ties into our philosophy. People will think you don't do anything all day and pop over at random times. All your children will get sick at the same time. You will have family emergencies. New babies will come. Your husband will be home some days. People will ask you to babysit.
The reasons "not to get things done" are vast and wide, and it takes a firm vision and adaptability to overcome these challenges. Some people respond by shutting in the children from 8-2 and forming a "school-like" environment (desks, a classroom) in the house. We don't. We are at home, and not at school, so our lessons take place at the kitchen table and on the living room floor. Other people respond by saying "well, they still learned something." And calling it a day. We don't. We believe it is our duty to provide a strong academic life to our children, AND to be flexible.A lack of one thing doesn't mean we can let EVERYTHING go. It just means we need to keep calm and educate on.

Similarly, when I refer to integrating, I mean subjects. We are used to thinking in compartments because in school, this is how we learned. Not so with a Charlotte Mason education. People often look at the lists of subjects covered in regular CM week and balk--- "WHAT??! I could never have the discipline to do all that!!" I hear that all the time, and get frequent, frustrated phone calls from new-to-CM families who are struggling to fit every subject in, but wanting to.

A CM education isn't like that..... we aren't stuck at our desks all day. When we read good books, we learn ALL the subjects, and this is an idea that has struck me so powerfully that I am considering re-thinking our one-subject-per-day method... and even our future.

Normally, I read science books on Mondays and Literature on Tuesdays and Geography on Wednesdays and History on Thursdays and Arts books on Fridays. But lately it has seemed that I am reading history books every day and science books three times a week,  or that some of my subjects are deeply overlapping.
When we read Aesop, it is literature. But it is also history--- and even bring out discussions about science! Plutarch is civics and history. I read Le Fabre's insects the other day to the children, and they noticed the religious lessons, the lessons of "the back then" way of life, and the lessons in science and nature study and even religion! Jenny Wren in the Burgess Bird Book is a gossip. Should we gossip?  On and on it goes.
It's becoming harder and harder to compartmentalize, And I'm becoming conflicted about where to schedule certain books... and that's a good thing. It means I'm starting to get this CM thing right.
It also causes me to reconsider our future plans. As a Classical home educator using the Charlotte Mason method, I myself am steeped in the Great books and in the experience of life-long learning. Suddenly, twelve years of school doesn't seem enough to go on to really "educate" my children. Suddenly back and forth emails I am having as an adult with my parents on the topic of a book we've both read are reminding me that learning is still happening NOW. Suddenly the entire concept of a "children's book" seems a little silly, really.
I'm also surprised that instead of "sending the kids off to college" I am seeing something different in my mind's eye: maybe a campfire visit with my kids and maybe even their kids, after a hard week's work, singing some treasured folk songs, and reading some John Muir, discussing it late into the evening and solving the world's problems as the world settles around us and the cicadas buzz.
Anyways, I used to think about how my kids were going to grow up really good scientists or really good historians and how something was going to stick. But now I think... my kids are going to grow up really good THINKERS, and then the whole world is their oyster.

Lately, too, I've been getting rid of all my books that don't make the "perfect" cut. And that has often included books that are so clearly subject-oriented that other subjects are excluded. In the end, I find, I'm reading history when I read a living book about a plant and the one who discovered it, or reading science or arithmetic when I read the biography of a philosopher. Everything seems to mesh into this big, beautiful "story of the world."  I love it, but it makes it so hard for me to compartmentalize when I am planning books for the family to read aloud! This is also an integrated education--- although it seems more complex, there is something so beautifully simple about reading a classic and saying: "let's see what we dig out."

I hear parents ask a lot of questions about how we lesson plan. The real answer is that we don't... we read incredible books, and we discuss them. Sometimes we use them for reading practice, other times for memorization. We might copy portions of them in our own hand, or dictate portions of them to each other. If they contain a potential activity that we think sounds important or interesting, we might re-create it using materials we have at home, to better understand it. That's really the extent of our "plans."

I hear parents say a lot of things on facebook. Here is one of the most common complaints I hear in the homeschooling realm:

"When will my child be ready to do this stuff on his/her own?"

I believe that children will branch out when they are good and ready, and that our job is neither to stifle them nor to push them, but just to observe, encourage, support, and model until they figure it out. When we make this stuff important to everyone in the family, people tend to NOT fall by the wayside. I learned by having a co-op with a dear friend of mine that the stuff we do not get to still gets done when we commit to doing it regularly even when life gets "in the way" and it is imperfect.
The growth still happens.

Ultimately, when I talk about integration I am thinking of how we ALL begin to connect the dots and how the material we study affects our day and how our day affects how we study and everything in between.I mean--- not unschooling--- but flexibility and learning-across-borders. I mean that our learning has become a lifestyle, and that it just feels.. whole.
I have friends whose kids don't even realize they are IN school-- they are constantly telling people that they aren't. Which is embarrassing, but hilarious. And kinda what we want, in the end.