We watched "Alice in Wonderland" tonight, as a family, all curled up on the couch in the family room.
We loved it and Johnny Depp is, as expected, Amazing!
Throughout the movie, I could not help thinking that Lewis Carroll was an "outside the box" thinker and that Tim Burton is an "out of the box" thinker...and then I thought of other "outside the box" thinkers...Steve Jobs, for sure.... Thinking outside the box is why, as a pre-school teacher, I encouraged my students to color their trees pink and purple and paint their sun green and make the sky red. I didn't want those children to be hampered by conventional thinking. That was what I learned in college. Every child development course I took said to allow children freedom of expression. It's also why I used to allow P to come shopping with me dressed as Belle from Beauty and the Beast or why even to this day, I allow the girls to pick their own clothes when we go shopping and wear them in combinations that I may not choose.
I kept thinking how I feel that my girls are both so creative and that to foster that creativity they need to be in an environment that is not so...constrictive and regimented by these blasted standardized tests (also, when I was in college, they were trying to do away with standardized tests. But that was the early 90s and it's almost 20 years later...). I was back to thinking of the lessons I could teach them, how I could encourage their creativity in homeschool. How just the act of going against the convention of traditional school will teach them to think for themselves and not accept what they are being handed, in essence, to think outside the box.
I picture the "box" as those little ovals on the Scantron sheets used for the dang standardized tests.
Jason and I had decided to read some books and revisit homeschooling when we are done reading. I am reading Linda Dobson's What the Rest of Us Can Learn From Homeschooling and Jason is reading The Well Adjusted Child:The Social Benefits of Homeschooling by Rachel Gathercole. I am eagerly looking forward to reading Linda Dobson's The First Year of Homeschooling.
One thing I have decided to try (and who knows, maybe it will become a tradition, like saying grace before meals), I wrote myself a note and left it on the table...I am going to ask the girls to "think of 6 impossible things before breakfast"...flying pigs, talking animals, purple grass, clear people, square wheels, and humans running 60mph...just to get the wheels turning that it is OK to think like that, it is good to picture things that we think are impossible...
