Mom Is Teaching

I’ve made it fairly clear that I believe the most important educators in a child’s life are the parents.  And, in some cases, the parents are substituted for babysitters, aunts, uncles, preachers, Sunday School teachers, etc.  But, the bottom line is, no matter how much outsiders try to take part in educating our children, I still think that regardless of whether the parents teach their children good habits or bad habits, they teaching is there, the teaching continues and the teaching is inevitable.

So, for the time being, I’m curious what you all will be teaching your children this weekend.  We tend to use weekends to do the fun things in life (now that we don’t own a daycare) and we have managed in the past to do the fun things like going to the Zoo, going to a water park, going to a small lake, or simply stringing out a sprinkler in the front yard and allowing the boys to play until dark and then start trying to catch firefly’s or moths or whatever.

Since we are on the verge of taking a trip to the beach in a week or so, I’m going to be on the outlook for buckets and shovels and the such.  Last year when we went and accidentally left all of our play things in a inflatable boat and then left it down near the back door of the condo.  And, naturally, someone else wanted the things.  I just hope we don’t forget our umbrella. 

And, the lessons to be taught this weekend will be the buying and preparation of our traveling supplies.  And, we can really teach a good lesson on buying in the off-season as we should be able to find quite a bit of stuff on sale. 

Then, the ability to contain ourselves and continue with life as the time nears for us to get in the car and leave.  And lastly, far and away, vacations lend themselves to many life lessons.  The lesson of being polite to the folks who open doors for you, or opening doors for someone else, the thank you and the please’s when people help you or you ask for help, the appropriate behavior for restaurants that we don’t frequent and possibly have different rules.

So, for those of you getting down and dirty with your homeschooling, I’d love some input from you on how you continue your lessons while on vacations.  Of course visiting the aquarium in my mind is one such way to ensure my children receive at least that lesson about water animals. 

We will be taking all of his school work and I have no worries about that.  Mini-me still takes a nap and that means that Ditto-Boy can easily do his lessons while Mini-me naps each day.  And, we plan to eat breakfast and lunch at the condo and that will give us plenty of time to continue our on-going study of manners and polite behavior.

This got a little wordy but my main purpose was to say, we are going on vacation.  We are taking our kindergartener out of school for a week.  We are taking his lessons with us.  Any suggestions from the experts who’ve been doing this kind of thing for way longer than I have.

I’m open to suggestions.

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