Free range learning

My mom used to call us ‘free range kids,’ like free range chickens… We roamed the countryside. —William Moseley

I think we skipped from March to June this year, but I’m not complaining. Yes, it’s hot. Yes, it’s dry. But good golly, at least it’s stopped snowing.

The warm hot weather has reminded me how much I’d really love to have an outside classroom space, something that I think we’ll work on perhaps once we’ve got the picnic benches built. As it is, I’m dragging kids’ attention back to reading lessons and math games as they gaze longingly out the windows… and I don’t blame them one bit. A simple white board under a pole barn seems like a small investment in everyone’s mental health. And, oh yes… education.

Our family has entered the season of spending more time out of doors than in. We’re not yet eating every meal out (see picnic table discussion above), but we’re courting it. The freedom of tinkering in the garage, digging in the sandbox, walking the trail to the creek, bringing a book to a shady spot, riding a bike down the drive, gathering buttercups, chasing butterflies and wild rabbits, watching the bluebirds in the houses, making “paint” from the juices of leaves… it’s all exploded over us in a wave of early summer that is deeply satisfying.

I’m amused as I watch the younger kids, who are entering their third summer here on the farm. They take so much for granted. All children do. I remember a summer years ago in Washington, driving towards the spires of snow-topped mountains that pointed us home, and spotting the nesting pair of bald eagles we had been watching all spring sitting in trees by the river.

“Look!” I said excitedly, “The eagles!”

“Yep,” Jack sighed from the back seat. “Eagles.”

I was stunned. How was it that my children were immune to the majesty of not one, but two bald eagles against the backdrop of towering mountains?

Well, to them, of course, it was common place.

There was no wonder in mountains that were home to year-round glaciers. There was no delight in rivers that raged in whitecaps. There was no awe over salmon leaping before our eyes to reach their spawning ground, or in paths littered with edible blackberries and salmonberries. No real shock in volcanoes, or lava tubes.

This was life. Home. Every day.

I’m seeing the same in my younger children, who are patently nonplussed by chickens who attempt to peck at pencils as they bob over math workbooks, or in pressing the seeds from the gourd that made last Thanksgiving’s pumpkin pie into the ground to, God willing, bring forth the fruit that will end up on the table this November. I’m seeing it in the casual, “Should I go pick lettuce for the salad?” and the slight amusement in their eyes when a well-meaning guest asks if you need to have a rooster to get eggs from hens. (For the record, you don’t.)

This is life, and it’s home. The miracles of three summers ago are the simple facts of today.

So after morning chores and breakfast, they squirm through a few abbreviated summer lessons, then they burst free, books and projects and plans and all. They apply the day’s science lesson on the shape of a bird’s wings to the observation of a cardinal in flight. They sketch the blue-tailed skink they found on the clothesline. They lay out a grid of ownership in the sandbox by first calculating the area and then dividing it into even quadrants.

All the while, I’m watching and marveling at this gift they’ve been given, unawares. I’m basking in the fact that here, now, in 2018 America, my kids have the freedom and the privilege of living a life so unlike the lives of most of their peers. Lives where they can get so dirty in the daylight hours that the evening’s bathwater turns brown, lives where they aren’t confined to sidewalks, lives where they understand, intimately, the rhythm of the earth God set in motion in the beginning.

I’ll probably go ahead and rig up that outdoor classroom, but I realize I don’t have to. These are the months when I’m reassured, again and again, that learning is indeed a 24/7 enterprise in the right environment. This environment… it feels right. And the learning? It’s happening, even if it’s completely taken for granted as it occurs.