Organic Learning

There are lots of ways to fall into learning.

The longer I follow my children around the more convinced I am that good learning comes from the convergence of teachable moments with an available mentor. I must remember to slow down and be present because those moments can either slip by unnoticed or they can be times of great progress and learning.

When my oldest was about 2 1/2 he started to become very in-tuned to the shape of things. He started commenting about the letters he saw out and about and he started naming them.  His names were descriptive names, untraditional for sure. The first one was his name for capital L. He dubbed capital L as a boot. So we went to Lowes and there was a nice big boot and since it was there we must talk about it. Boots started showing up everywhere.

Next came the O's. I don't know why this one landed on what it really was but it was fast followed by a broken O, otherwise known as C.

Certain books really capitalized on this curiosity with letters. One of those that really did a great job of drawing him and getting him asking more questions was I'm a Dirty Dinosaur.

The colorful block letters really drew him in and the fun sing song rhyming really was a perfect accompaniment for this age that is having so much fun with word sounds and discovering how the world works.



With all those beautiful letters
what is not to love?
I really have to love the ingenuity of the illustrator who used real mud in the making of the pictures! Too much fun.


After he fell in love with letters he saw them everywhere! It started a fun new pursuit and exploration.

I started to search for books that would encourage this interest and love. Here are some of my other favorites that have added to the fun.

This one just has a wonderful sweet home like feel to it. It became another fast favorite. It is a more traditional alphabet book but it has a real story to it. It follows a family in their bedtime rituals and starts with how awake the child is and ends with the Zzzz's. I hope to always have this book on my shelves. 

As we have begun now to embrace new chapters in our learning experience we are beginning to spell and this book has become a close friend. One of the interesting things that I am discovering is that phonetic sound issues that I have struggled with are something my son struggles with too. When we are sounding out how a word might be spelled, I catch myself drawing my son's attention to how the sound is made in the mouth... I really never thought I would use those silly phonetic terms again when I ran across them in Greek class. Who would have guessed I would be teaching my son... watch how f is said with your teeth against your lip, while th is said with your tongue against the roof of your mouth...Ok so I didn't actually say that... what I said was watch me say the sound... f is like this(teeth against lip) and you get the idea. I have always struggled to hear the difference when trying to learn another language and often resort to can you spell it for me. LOL!! We pull out the Illustrated Alphabet not just for it's beautiful pictures and the opportunity for  me to have my kids find what the capital or lower case letter looks like but also for it's adorable pictures with "extra" hidden things in the picture in addition to the ones mentioned that start with that letter.

Want to explore all our Wipe Clean titles?

As we have been diving into our homeschooling and unschooling experience I am being thrown back into grappling again with my basic tenets and the philosophy with which I approach education. I love learning. I learn in the way teachers like to teach...but I am also fascinated by the learning process. My husband is not a classic learner. He doesn't learn from books, he learns from doing. He is highly intelligent and can teach himself how to do just about anything. He is a gifted musician and plays by ear. One of the basic things that I have landed on is that one of my basic beliefs is that learning doesn't have to look like a classroom. Classrooms can be wonderful. I loved many a classroom and would probably gladly embrace being a professional student. But learning doesn't have to look like that. Learning can look like wandering from one place in the woods to the next and exploring each thing you see.

I mention all of these things, because while my background is education(I have my bachelors in secondary ed.), I want to raise my kids wild and free. I don't want learning to be something we do only during set hours. I don't want to create papers for me to grade and to sit my kids down in desks for school time. I want us to go out and explore the world and as we walk along to stop and talk about why leaves change color in the fall as they draw their chlorophyll back in. I want to have learning to do something have a purpose and not just be abstract...unless a child is following an interest. 

The wipe clean books give me a basic starting point for teaching writing that we have quickly transferred over into writing with purpose. Much of our writing is done currently to share letters with our loved ones. The kids participate in our monthly card ministry at our church. We send cards to friends who have birthdays, we have missed or just to touch in with them and share our love. It is so very nice to give my children opportunities to learn to express themselves with the written word. Our newest writing experience is our pen pals. My son was thrilled to open another letter today. My daughter was unfortunately sad that her pen pal hasn't written her. I hope she doesn't bail on her.

The other thing I like about having our wipe clean books around is that they give me an opportunity to add choice into what we do. Yesterday I asked my son what he wanted to do to count and he pulled out one of our counting wipe cleans. Having sovereignty over how we accomplish what we are doing really helps to keep anything that might resemble a more classic school experience fun. My goal is to do a bit more of the out of the box things over the next few days and weeks, but it is nice to at times work along side each other cuddling on the couch while they work on their book and I write.

I have included below a fun toddler alphabet video my kids loved. 

I would love to hear about your organic learning. How do you pull learning into everyday life? What are your favorite resources? How do you stay bonded and build good memories around your learning experiences? Is there something you are struggling with in teaching your kiddos? I don't know that I have the answers but I would love to brainstorm and create a community that builds each other up and offers wisdom and support.

Want to explore more great books, literacy ideas and the wonderful world of learning? Join me over in Kristen's Happy Book Nook.