Ever since our guest lecturer, Peter Gray, a lot of people
have been interested in Learning in the Woods, The Barn School, Little Seeds,
and the Burlington-Hamilton Unschoolers.
With all these names, it gets a little confusing so I thought I would
try to explain how all of these groups are related.
It’s hard to know how far back to start this story! I’m also really bad at narrowing down a
story. I’m one of those people who
thinks “But all the details are important!”. Here it goes. The beginning is the most confusing I think.
Children provide us with an opportunity to change us as people. They challenge us to think critically about old
ways of doing things and give us a chance to reinvent ourselves. That is what parenthood did for me
anyway. Can you relate to that? Did parenthood change your perspective forever also? After my first child was born, I was reading a lot of Attachment Parenting, RIE, and peaceful parenting blogs and books. Facebook was just blowing up and more accessible to me with smart phones becoming more affordable so I was posting a lot
on my personal Facebook page about my "radical" parenting ideas. I thought everyone I knew would be as inspired
as I was but my friends and family didn’t necessarily share my newfound
passion. :/ I noticed my posts were
distancing people and that was never my intention, so I created a separate Facebook
page to explore my parenting ideas and I called that page Curious Mom E.
After my maternity leave, I was back at work as a public
school kindergarten teacher, applying my positive parenting techniques and
loving the results. I had a principal
who placed a lot of trust in me to try new things and as I did, the kids in my
class were flourishing. I felt empowered
to explore things further. I started to
really challenge myself to understand the ideal learning environment for all
kids. I thought of some of my favourite students
and how their diagnoses of ADHD and autism really didn’t fit with the public
system’s style of learning. Other students
were really arts-centered or into building with their hands and I saw that their
passions were never valued equally as math and language or science. Watching those kids lose self-esteem because their
skill sets were not in line with what our public schools valued, marked, and
tested made my heart break. A person’s
worth should not be determined by how well they fit into the narrow definition
of what the system deems valuable…can you relate to that?
By now, “Curious Mom E” was filling up with a lot of posts
related to parenting and my educational philosophy involving self-directed
education and nature play. Thinking of my
own child entering school, I looked around for alternatives and was
disheartened by the lack of options in our area. Somehow I convinced my husband that we should
sell our lovely house so that we could finance our own private school. Within 6 months we had bought the land in
hopes that we could build The Barn School.
I started a Facebook Page by that name and started to hone my vision for
that by posting my educational philosophy posts there.
Around that same time, I met Meaghan and told her I was
starting a private school. She
introduced me to the homeschooler community and I was excited to learn that
that alternative was thriving. The moms
I met were intelligent, fun, and interesting to talk to. Looking for a little extra income to justify
staying home with my kids to homeschool while I worked on Barn School, I
created a hom
I really wanted to offer my son some multi-age child-lead experiences
and was hoping the home daycare would be the ticket but most homeschoolers and
moms with young babies actually like to be home with their kids (imagine
that!) So it dawned on me that if I wanted
to give my son those experiences, the moms and dads should be there too. During a snowy winter playdate with Meaghan,
we hammered out the philosophy behind Little Seeds as it is known today. An outdoor nature-based playgroup for kids of
all ages where the kids could have a chance to explore on their own terms.
Instead of creating a new Facebook page, I decided it made
more sense to use my fairly inactive Little Seeds page since it was full of
relevant content and just a handful of moms who were in the group. We started to post events and shared the page
on Facebook wherever it made sense. I posted
on Attachment Parenting Moms Hamilton, Meaghan shared it on some of her homeschooler
group pages. Our first events were in
the winter, a tough season to encourage people to get outside for several hours
at a time. Meaghan, Ellen, Trish and I began
to meet once or twice a week in the woods, in the snow. We were pretty formal back then, trying to
establish a culture I suppose. We had a
meeting to start and finish, which the kids hated. But they loved the child lead play in the
woods.
By spring, we had several families checking us out, though
not on a regular basis. Well except for Tanya, who is our Learning in the Woods Director today! We knew from
doing it for several months that there was value in coming regularly and
frequently so that the kids could establish and maintain friendships. We also started to see that the forest became
“another friend”. Returning to the same location every week helped to build
that friendship with a natural space. We
started to think about how to offer that on a more regular basis, and Learning
in the Woods was born. (See blog post
The
In the spring, as more families came to check us out, we had
some learning leaps. We realized this
style of play is not for every adult (though I would argue it is for every kid). Some parents feel really uncomfortable
letting kids play with sticks or climb rocks and trees. Other parents wanted to direct the children more
in terms of social skills such as forcing “sharing” or pressuring everyone to
play together. Also around that time
there was a death at a local Hamilton hiking trail due to a fallen tree and
that spurred a conversation about liability.
We talked to a lawyer who guided us to stick with our values of
democracy and equality and we decided that everyone would be a page manager and
share in the responsibility of planning and offering events.
Little Seeds has been running for two years and now that I
am on maternity leave with my third baby, I find myself tapping into that Little
Seeds community once again. It’s nice to
be able to create an event that works for your schedule and driving radius and
hang out with other like-minded families.
We now have a sharing day on Mondays where members can share their home
business or related events and support each other in that way. I think it is still maybe a bit intimidating
for new families to come out to events but Heather Boyd, one of our original
members, moved to Niagara-on-the-lake and created a Little Seeds Niagara group
there. In a short period of time, she
gained a lot of local interest.
I think what I like best about Little Seeds is that no one
is in charge. It was really just about
people coming together to give their kids some time in a natural setting (as
opposed to a playground) to play without too many rules or adult interference. It’s reassuring to see there is a community
of people out there who value that.
In my next blog, I’ll share how Learning in the Woods came
to be.
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