Real Life Homeschooling is a monthly blog hop with 20 other blogging mommas that I’ll be participating in this summer. It’s all about the non-traditional face of homeschooling today. What it looks like when it doesn’t look like school-at-home.

Last week my introduction post touched on our love of nature study and family read-alouds. This week I’d like to touch on the idea of learning everywhere, all the time. I’ve been writing about our camping adventures lately, and I think that’s a perfect example of how we can surround our children with learning opportunities no matter where they are!

What are some benefits of “real life” learning?

• Makes lessons come alive for hands-on learners.
• Cements previous book lessons with concrete experiences.
• Connects lessons across subject areas.
• Reinforces the value of learning by providing practical applications.
• Creates sense of immediacy that increase attention span.
• Can be tailored through discussion to address multiple age-groups without multiple lesson plans.
• Provides an opportunity to share and shape your children’s worldview in-line with your spiritual beliefs.

And I’m sure you can come up with even more! Every moment can be a lesson!

Here’s some lessons that we naturally touched on while hiking and camping (and we were out there for less than 2 whole days!):

• Animal Classification. Birds, mammals, reptiles, insects…the differences between reptiles and amphibians and mammals and fish.
• Animal Identification. From sightings, from listening to bird songs, from tracks, from bark scrapings, from seeing worn paths through the brush. We also discussed observation skills that let you track and find animals–like listening quietly for woodpeckers and then following the sound until we found them in the treetops.
• Plant identification.  We went over identifying by leaves, by bark, by growth location and habits, by shape, and by buds–although that was awkward since they couldn’t see buds right now. It comes from having dendrology drilled into me in college–you never depend on the leaves to id a tree!

{BTW Virginia Tech has wonderful Fact Sheets for identifying every imaginable tree at their Dendrology homepage–for FREE! They even have an app for it–which we didn’t have for this trip, but we do now!} 

Another camp visitor that we’ll be memorializing in our nature journals!

•  Life Cycles. We discussed life cycles of plants and animals, growth patterns and seasonal change, and how the weather affects different animals and species. We talked about annuals vs perennials, planting vs volunteer growth, and successional growth in wild spaces. We talked about how fire and weather play into plant life cycles, and how animal decomposition plays into plant growth.
• Habitat, Food, and Water Cycles. We talked about the food chain, and how it can be maintained or disrupted. We talked about the critical role habitat plays in species survival and how changes in habitat (natural or man-made) change the food and water cycles–which then affect the organisms living there. And we talked about adaptions/evolution to changing habitats.
• Physiology. We talked about the critical necessities for survival for humans and how they are different from other organisms because we are not adapted to living outside all the time. We talked about how to find water and food, and make shelter and fire in “the wild.”
• Evolution. Yep, the “big E.” Or in this case, the difference between the big “E” and the little “e”–since we believe in evolution (with a little “e”) as a scientific process of adaptations within families/species which has been conclusively documented. But we don’t believe in the extrapolation of documented evolution into the Theory of Evolution (with a big “E”) that says humans came from apes (or pond slime) or that evolution crosses species/family boundaries–which has never been conclusively documented.

The point of that last digressing point being that real life homeschooling is a transfer of knowledge and wisdom and experience to your children-not just facts.

Each month the Real Life Homeschooling blog hop will be sharing ways to be a teacher, and learn with your family, outside of the traditional school day, schoolroom, and school curriculum. Ideas to fit learning into your everyday and surround your children with the seeking and finding and growing that will make them love learning. Be sure to stop by and visit the other 20 bloggers touching this topic today and share your own great Real Life Homeschooling posts too!