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Butchering a Chicken

We like to learn hands on, with real life events. Everything just makes so much more sence that way. That kind of learning also sticks in your mind.

We have a girl who is very fond of animals. Not just the fluffy caretaker way, but she also wants to see what is inside them, know how they function and what they eat. She wants to become a vet.

So we decided to get some chicken. She wanted to have them from small, so she could watch them grow and develop. We have had them for around 5 months now and it turned out that the 5 hens we bought, was actually 3 hens and 2 roosters. Well, we got them to see the miracle of them laying eggs, se we had to reconsider what to do with the 2 rooster.

As the two roosters grew up, they started to fight each other and chase the children around, so they didn’t dare go out in the garden anymore, as they were afraid of their beaks.

Especially one of them was aggressive. So we decided to kill it and eat it. We watched a lot of you tube to learn from others and set a plan for the butchering. We talked to people who we knew had experience with it and learned.

Well, today we were ready and got on with it. We started out early in the morning and got hold of him and chopped his head off. We then put him in the heated water to get the feathers loosened. Two of our kids removed the feathers and after I took out the guts and we all examined them. The children wanted to measure the intestines to see how long they were.

We then cooked the chicken immediately and ate it. Butchering the chicken ourselves, was brave of all of us, and natural. It feelt really good being that close to nature and taking responsibility for our own food. We all need to have our hands on learning more about nature in our world.

From homeschool to further education

Our oldest home schooled child, has just passed the test to enter gymnasium. Gymnasium is a Danish education, equivalent to High School. It is a 3 year education, which will prepare you for university.

To go from home school to further education in Denmark, you have to sit an 4-hour exam at the gymnasium you would like to enter. You are tested in the subjects Danish, math, english and physics/chemistry in those 4 hours.

You then have to wait for a month to hear the result and you are then called in for a talk with the principal. At that talk you are told whether you have passed or failed to written test.

Our daughter passed the test with 95% correct answers. She also had a 1 hour long talk with the principal, which went very well. So the home school mom, took it as a personal diploma to hang on her home school insecurities, that has pestered her through the years 🙂

Learning with cash

We prefer cash to digital money, when it comes to teaching the kids about money. The hand to brain connection is so much easier for children to grasp, that the imaginary world of digital money.

When you hold coins or notes in your hand, it is so much easier to get a realistic idea of how much you own. When you have spend your money physically with cash, they are gone. You cannot see them anymore. Much easier for children to take in.

Using cash instead of digital money will also help your kid (and most adults :)) to save money. It is much harder to give away cash in your pocket, than virtual money on the internet. So you will start saving, when you go back to using cash.

We did this little creative project with our 7 year old, when he was to make a present for his friend. We are so lucky in Denmark to have coins with holes in them. That made this project possible. A cash necklace.

We like posters

We have a habit for sticking everything we can’t remember on the wall. So we decided that we could just as well, do it properly. We try to understand things we find hard, or find hard to remember, or just stuff we in some kind of way, need to organize and put in place in our memory, by making posters.

The kids walk by, or sit by the table and they read the posters over and over again. And if you should still forget something, you can just look at the poster.

We replace them regularly as we learn and grow in age and level.

Mixing Water and Alcohol

A simple experiment to do at home to investigate mixing different size molecules to reduce mass.

Celebrating the 200th year for H. C. Ørsted’s discovery of Electromagnetism

Today it is 200 years ago, that H. C. Ørsted discovered electromagnetism. Without knowing it, he formed the basis for the widespread use of electricity in our daily life, that we live today.

Electromagnetism is used for motors, radio, radar, mobile phones, computers and speakers.

Hans Christian Ørsted 1777 – 1851, was a Danish physicist and chemist who discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields, which was the first connection found between electricity and magnetism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Christian_%C3%98rsted

Our Method of Homeschooling

Through the years we have often been asked, which method of homeschooling we use. It has never been important to us to have a method of homeschooling. But we learned that to many homeschoolers it was very important to define themselves in a method. The method defined who they were. Especially with those people we met who defined themselves as unschoolers.

We don’t define ourselves as homeschoolers. Homeschooling is something we do at the moment. We may have done it for 11 years now, but it is still not our identity. It is a personal choice to us.

When we started meeting people who said they were unschooling, we heard about the method and thought, well that is what we do. Child-led and interest based learning. But the people we met said, we were not allowed to call ourselves unschoolers, because we sometimes use classic school material and sometimes teach our children classic knowledge, as learning to read, write and math.

Well, just the fact that other people saw themselves in the position to judge other peoples lives, without having lived it, made us quite negative to the unschooling method. It seemed more and more like an ideology or religion. But most of all it seemed like the main focus in unschooling, was to reject and be against all classical learning and school-like learning.

We see homeschooling as a positive way of learning, that can be merged into daily life and gives you a wonderful opportunity to get to follow your children’s learning and development. What you call that, really don’t matter to us. It is just a definition. There are already too many boxes in life.

Our homeschool is all about content, not ideology. But people around us got more and more angry with us, if we called us the sacred word – unschoolers. So I started looking into what methods there was to choose from on the market, or if I would have to invent my own word, for what we do. Well, we found the following methods on the market (I have organised them in the order of amount of discipline involved. Most discipline first, least discipline at the end):

The Classical Method
School-at-Home
Unit Studies
Eclectic
Charlotte Mason
Montessori
Waldorf
World Schooling
Free learners
Natural learners
Self directed learners
Unschooling
un-parenting

One particular box we seemed to fit into, was Eclectic learning. It is a method that mixes all methods and uses it as a palette of colours as you need them. Most homeschoolers end as Eclectic learners, when they have been homeschooling for many years. It is a natural process of learning – to stay open to all methods.

So to us, confining ourselves to a method, is more of a communication tool, to communicate with particularly unschoolers, where method seems very important. We just live and learn.

If it should happen that some people that call themselves Eclectic learners should forbid us to call us Eclectic Learners, we would just call us the Pippi Longstocking and Gyro Gearloose method. It wouldn’t be a problem to us.

Examining a Pyrex flask

Many of our projects spring out of a flee market purchase. We love flee markets. You never know what you will find and you feel like all is possible at an affordable price. This Pyrex flask was used for a large number of projects. First we calculated the volume inside the flask. Then we filled it with water and measured if the amount of water agreed with our calculations.

Then we examined the magnifying effect.

Then we tested how effective the firestarter was.

The Firestarter is working!

Individual learning together

Many people ask us what it looks like when we do individual learning together at the table. Well, here it is.

In the classical subjects such as Danish, Math, English and German, our kids follow each their own level of learning.

I teach these subjects individually, by laying out the books on our weekly schedule on the table the night before. Each pupil get a stack of books by their seat to complete a certain amount of work in, the next day.

I go through the work to be done, with them, one by one. Then they work independently and can ask for help, when they get stuck.

The music in the background is not background music edited onto the movie later, but was played while we worked. We often chose to listen to music while we work, if everyone agree to the chosen music.

We all help each other and respect when someone finds something difficult.

On our current schedule (it often changes), we spend around 1-3 hours a day on these subjects 3 days of the week. Our goal is to complete the books we use and the additional tests, by 1st of April each year. We have reached our goal every year.