Ready to Strew

A year of so ago I came across, what was to me, a new home educating ... strewing. A blogging friend in Aussie mentioned, in one of her blog postings, that she does this with her kids so I had to look into it further as it sounded so interesting.

For those who are new to this term. "Strew is defined by Mirriam Webster as: "to spread by scattering". It was brought into homeschooling, and specifically unschooling, terminology by Sandra Dodd (a  homeschooler) when she said: "I just strew their paths with interesting things" at a meeting she was attending. The term stuck.

Strewing simply means to place objects in the path of kids without any expectation, coercion, or force of use. When a new passion is sparked, you can continue to explore it via books, online, documentaries, board games, experiments and especially one-on-one discussions.

Strewing is about more than just placing physical objects, though. The intention behind strewing is to inspire curiosity that leads to learning; but we don’t need to limit that inspiration to physical items like books, pictures, objects or toys. Curiosity could also be inspired by a field trip or other form of exposing our kids to new experiences.

Well since reading about strewing I have been itching to start doing some myself. Finally, yes finally, I was able to make some space and set up an area to use. Note, you don't need a specific area, I just wanted it in the school room in view of the kiddlings and out of a certain chewing pups reach (thank you very much RORY!)  

And here is my wee area ... I am using my sewing table (also a gift many, many years ago from my mother-in-law). I will change the pictures every so often. The girls watched me put these up on the wall and were simply nagging me to death to know who the artist was, which was a little disconcerting as I was trying to hammer in some hooks so as to hang them in a straight line. I think, when I change the pictures next time, I will do it when they are in bed, it will be more of a surprise then too. I really love the Mary Cassatt pictures, that I printed, so am not actually looking forward to changing them.

I have some books on there, current affairs (Nelson Mandela), and a boomerang (we are studying Australia this term), and some other nick knacks. Every so often I plan to remove something and replace it with something else. Possibly a CD, something I find on one of our nature walks, a book, a statue, something they can make up like a model, a recipe, or whatever else I can think of.

Just quietly, I am  pretty pleased with it. It will be interesting to see what my kiddlings pick up and explore and what they ignore.