Learning via everyday life. We do it from the moment we are born, and hopefully continue to do it all our lives. No doubt children learn more new things each day, from how to move their bodies to learning a language to social interactions to facts/knowledge about whatever they find of interest.

I’ve been trying to be very mindful of Ethan’s learning each day, what things he learns about or asks about, what observations he makes on his own, in a very basic day at home with a work-at-home-mom.

This morning, as I mentioned, we Couch-2-5k’d it to the bank. He got 3 miles of bike riding in, plus he learned a bit about the bank and why we need to deposit money (okay, okay… I told him that it’s because the bank is a hungry machine that needs to eat our money or else we can’t use them to buy things… which is not entirely untrue!). He also stopped to make observations about the fact that there are a lot of Queen Anne’s Lace growing (we’ve been studying native wildflowers and collecting them to press) and other random things he saw on the ride.

At home, it was mostly a me-work, him-movie day, but even still, I noticed a ton of things he was learning. For example, he asked lots of questions about the movie Little Bear – about camping, making food, pretending to go to the moon, so on.

He learned to organize/load and start the dishwasher today too.

At one point today, he counted to twenty a few different times today, and when I asked him what he was counting, he informed me that he was picturing twenty kids and if they could fit in his shark tent. Do they?, I asked. Nope.

Later, he asked if I could take a break from work to show him a map of Oregon. (He’s been seeing the bumper stickers that have a shape of Oregon with a big green heart on it). We looked at Oregon and pointed out where Portland is, where the Willamette River is – which we will tour on the lunch cruise tomorrow for his birthday, and where the mountains are that we visited with Nana Betsy. Then he wanted to see a map of America, to see where Oregon fits in with Florida and so on. He was very puzzled that Florida was NOT in the sky (because, after all, you go UP in a plane to get there. I reminded him how the plane comes back DOWN to land when it arrives in Florida.)

Before bedtime, he’ll collect the eggs (actually, he just did this, and informed me that there was 1 in the coop and 2 already collected, and that 1 plus 2 equals 3!), feed the chickens, pick up his room, water play in the shower, read books (today we are reading about the months of the year and many concepts that are taught in Blueberries for Sal and its sequel, One Morning in Maine), color some pictures, write a thank you card to Misty for his pinwheel, brush his teeth (and no doubt have a fight about it and I’ll have to explain again that he will be going to his first dental visit in two weeks, etc) and sing and pray with mama and dada at bedtime.

Recap the day in early education terms: home ec, farm concepts, pet responsibility, arts and crafts, penmanship and early reading practice, music appreciation, natural sciences, botany, PE, cycling, banking (economics?), math concepts/counting, geology, hygiene, social sciences (what does a dentist do, etc), water manipulation/free play, spirituality, astronomy, so on and so forth.

When I stop to notice it, I’m often quite surprised by how much learning he does when I’m not even trying to formally teach anything at all. I can’t even begin to imagine how much more so when the gift of knowing how to read is at his disposal!

… P.S. Amy, if you are reading this- remind me to ask you about some movie Ben told Ethan about… apparently there’s a boy who eats his own poop. That was a lovely topic starter/lesson to discuss today LOL