My wife and I home-schooled our son this year. We thought of it as a “Gap Year” in which he could take time to look at other ways to learn and gain life experience – without being constrained by a school day that can be a little too rigid and structured at times.
It’s been an interesting experience for everyone, that’s for sure. We, especially my wife, spent a lot more time with our son. It helped us appreciate what schoolteachers have to deal with – times 20. On the other hand, we’ve never been so integrated into our child’s education as we are now.
But of all the many homeschooling experiences we’ve had this year, the best by far were the two days a week our son spent in outdoor focused educational programs: Tuesday’s at Crow’s Path and Thursday’s at the New Village Farm.
Crow’s Path is located on Rock Point right in Burlington. It offers a Field School for kids. They do things like foraging for edible plants, whittling, lighting fires with flints, tracking animals and identifying birds and plants. They also sing and make music by the campfire.
New Village Farm in Shelburne calls itself a Biodynamic Learning Farm. Kids spend a day a week there doing farm work: tending to pigs, cows and chickens, building sod huts, weaving with bark they’ve skinned from trees and more.
They were hands down the best educational experiences my son has had this year. He comes home happy and engaged, head filled with new knowledge and skills, and stories to share.
Most of all he’s been part of a tight, supportive and even loving group dynamic – which is not at all what he’s typically used to in school.
In my more practical moments I try to compare this kind of learning to learning in the classroom. Then I remember that when I was his age, my history teacher told us we had to remember one critical date: 1066 – the year of The Battle of Hastings. But never in my life – whether at work or in school, including a brief stint in a doctoral program in history – have I ever had any use for that date.
On the other hand, I could’ve used some of the things my son is learning out in the field, in my own life – like early in my career when I was working in the film business on remote locations and had to cobble together some crazy thing or another to get the perfect shot. Those Crows’ Path skills might’ve come in handy back then.
Next year my son goes back into the public system for middle school. And I’m happy to say there’s a group in Burlington trying to introduce more outdoor education into the schools. I sure do hope they succeed. It’s the sort of thing that helps a kid look forward to going to school every day – and gives him skills he’s likely to use for the rest of his life.
