Are there any local teams or bands in your community not segregated by age?
Yes. Depending on the sport, they mix girls and boys in the younger ages, which I like. They separate older boys and girls for obvious reasons.
Do you see children playing outside much in your neighborhood? Yes! And I'm so thankful. We have lived in neighborhoods where this was not the case.
What about in neighborhood pools during the summer? I ask this because I am always lusting, positively lusting over swimming pools in the summer but I rarely see people swimming in home swimming pools that I pass.
My brother and family have a pool and they use it. A friend also has a pool - again it is well-used. But they are both homeschool families. :-) Our neighborhood pool is always packed.
Is it possible to destroy a child's capacity to play?
Yes. Definitely. I've seen this too. I've watched these kids and had to teach them how to play.
"We talk a great deal about independence, but we loathe it as much as we loathe the blessed freedom of nothing to do.Children no longer play because we have taken from them the opportunity and, I'll insist, even the capacity to play."
Why does he insist? Do you agree? I agree heartily. Maybe he is insisting because people may be inclined to call some things play that really aren't, so that people don't even know what play is anymore.
What do you tell your children when they say they are bored?
Honestly, they are not allowed to say it. If they did, I made them work. This served two purposes: they learned to make doing chores (scrubbing floors, for instance) more fun out of necessity (pretending to be Cinderella, for instance), and they got their juices flowing in play to avoid a job. :-)
Is it possible that riding the school bus is downtime for modern children?
No, there's too much bullying, noise, and stress.
How do you avoid the 45 minute syndrome (Pg. 53) at home?
I don't have an internal clock so this isn't an issue for me. I never have any sense of the passage of time.
"Not to worry; the momentary excitement of discovery will pass..."
I think the CM method of short lessons ensures that the child will want to come back to it.
Are tightly scheduled days a help or a hindrance to wee free men?
There has to be some structure, but a tight schedule isn't human. I just always think that for hundreds and hundreds of years people went by the sun thereby not allowing any "tightness down to the minute."
How do we balance productivity with time to grapple?
This is one of my biggest frustrations with the world we live in. We've forgotten the principle of incubation. People and ideas must have time to develop slowly and be given "permission" to not display any perceptible signs of what's going on inside!
Fallow time is essential. Rest. Restoration.
Oh, boy. One of my favorite subjects. My next post will list those.
Thanks for defending fallow time. I need this so much, but it is absolutely not tolerated in our world. We have to do everything RIGHT NOW THIS MINUTE IMMEDIATELY. And I don't think that way. I believe truly excellent, even perfect work, is a possibility. I also believe that it takes long stretches of germination before it grows to a full tree.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea of cutting and pasting Cindy's questions.
ReplyDeleteShe really is a great moderator, helping us all sort through our ordinary lives :-)