In which she tries an unexpected new activity

And I muse about my educational philosophy and the National Curriculum.

She had a friend sleep over last night and I had promised to take them swimming. We got to the pool, where I discovered that I'd forgotten my swimming costume. Fortunately the girls are old enough and competent enough swimmers to be allowed in the pool without adult supervision so off they went. I hung around the edge and read my book. About half the pool was set up for a fun session with huge floats and the other half was occupied by the local scuba diving club. after they'd been in for a few minutes, there was an announcement that the club was offering 15 minute taster sessions. Hannah immediately wanted to try, but I wasn;t sure they would let her because of her age. I suggested she went to ask, but she got distracted by the game she and A were playing and forgot about it. Until someone from the club came over and asked me if the girls would like a go. Turns out eight is not too young, so they went over. There was only one set of small enough gear so A had to wait while Hannah had her turn. I watched her for a bit and she seemed to be having a blast...which prompted the musing about educational philosophy.

"Do you have to follow the curriculum?" is quite a popular question when we tell people we home ed and mostly I just say no, especially if they have children in school whose learning is contrained by the state-determined, lowest common denominator that is the NC. What I really want to say is "no, thank God." I suppose we are by default following it in maths because Hannah likes workbooks and Education City, all of which are based on the NC, but then we can also discuss very large numbers, make our eyes go funny with the number of 0s in a googolplexian, use all sorts of maths in our everyday life and enjoy ourselves with abstract concepts...mainly on car journeys!

But for the rest of our learning (and I do mean "our"..I am re-teaching myself Latin and learning a lot of biology for the first time and fascinated by astronomy), the NC is so narrow and restrictive. The universe is so big and beautiful and amazing and a lifetime isn;t enough to learn all we want to know about. Thinking about all the potential to learn we have makes me so excited and I want Hannah to feel that buzz of wanting to know something and having the tools at her fingertips to find out and the pleasure of discussing and debating the things that have no answer or of finding the answer to questions that nobody knows YET!

All that from a 15 scuba diving taster session! But it seemed a perfect illustration of  how I see our journey, looking at the world as our classroom, our playground, our resource cupboard, our shelves full of interesting things to find out about and launch ourselves wholeheartedly at whatever opportunities come our way.