Garden-schooling

It's still interesting to me how a lot of interesting discussions start while just hanging out together.

This morning I was down digging and moving some soil from when Simon made the kids their sandpit. I was digging away and Nathan was just hanging out nearby and somehow the conversation moved onto tools (since I was using a shovel at the time). From there the conversation turned to when tools were invented and how early man would have originally gathered food and gone about daily life without tools. He was able to say that early man would have used then used wood, stones and fire since there were no places to buy or manufacture tools/weapons as there are today. When we came up for lunch I got out our book on Early Man and he was interested to continue finding out information about the different time periods when and how tools were probably made and the way fire was likely used. Later on after dinner he was recounting various stories to Simon about how they hunted and the tools they used.

This afternoon we met up with our unschooling group down at the park and then we wandered down to the beach and did a bit of beach-combing after the recent storms.

A few nights back there was big thunder storm and large hail stones began to fall - that went on for over 1/2 hr and there was so much hail piled up that it looked like we'd had a heavy snowfall. The kids were just about asleep, but I got them up to have a look outside. I then ran out there and built a snowman for them which took till 2pm the next day to melt. For a town that doesn't get snow, this was certainly a surprising event for us.