Home School Group Field Trip

My granddaughter Laurel is home-schooled. Well actually she has never started organinzed lessons, she just turned 6 and they are taking a casual approach to her education. Before you begin to worry- she can read on a 6 grade level, does all the math for adjusting recipes, knows more geography then I do (her family is very well traveled), and we won't even go into the scientific aspect of her education- with two biologist parents you can probably imagine the level of her education in this field! (I know, I know- I sound like a proud Mamaw- cut me some slack here!) Laurel belongs to a home school group which does activities with the children in the group. Among these are organized field trips. Laurel wrote me a letter today telling me about the recent field trip she went on last week:



Dear Mamaw,



I want to tell you about my trip to the one-room schoolhouse. It was very fun. We drew pictures of an owl and wrote stories about the school. We learned a song about the continents and tried to guess which ones were countries and which ones were continents. We learned to write with a quill pen and I still have the piece of paper that I wrote on. I wrote my name on it with the quill pen. We did some math but it was mostly learning. We memorized a poem about an owl and recited it. It went "A wise old owl sat in an oak. The more he saw the less he spoke. The less he spoke the more he heard; now we can't we be like that wise old bird?" There were very old pictures on the walls including one of George Washington. There were three rows of desks. I sat in one of the front desks because I was with the first-graders. All of the desks except the first-graders' desks had curled iron or some kind of metal on the sides. The first-graders' desks were just flat metal on the sides. My desk was wooden on top and it still had the hole where they used to have the ink bottle! The American flag was very old and tattered but I really liked it. It had small lengths of golden string hanging from it, and I liked to look at them. I passed out small paper booklets in my row. In the back was the story of the owl. There was another small booklet where we wrote our story about it. One of the things I liked most was trying to read cursive. One of the older girls listened to us read in the coatroom while the teacher was doing things with the other children. I read the first grade book out loud at the recitation bench but it was too easy. In the second grade book only the cursive was hard.The only thing I didn't like about the day was when we had to go home. I hope we will meet again soon! I miss you!



Love,

Laurel