Experimenting with a new style of learning.

This week we started to experiment with a new style of learning. We noticed that Sissy loved delving into a subject and spending all day exploring it. So we had a Science Tuesday (we were involved in some legal proceedings on Monday so no school), Math Wednesday and History Thursday. We couldn't do school today (Friday) because I was needed at the office. One of my administrative assistants went to attend her best friend's funeral. The poor girl took her own life and my assistant is understandably a wreck. But I digress, let me get back to the topic at hand. I had, until now, tried to maintain a school style schedule while attempting to cover all  or most of the necessary topics in a given day. But while this worked fine on many days, on other days it was simply counter intuitive. There were days when we found it hard to abandon a subject we really wanted to continue working on simply because the clock told us it was time to go. Therefore, this week we decided to allow ourselves to really soak in the lessons and discovery as long as we wanted to. And it was bliss. We pored over books and other material and researched on the Internet. She worked on notebooking and illustrating what she had learned about and it was altogether very rewarding and enjoyable.
While we will certainly do this again I don't think it's a sustainable daily experience. As fun as it is, it would be a challenge to muster the same level of concentration every day. Some days doing a little of this and a little of that makes sense.  I guess, as I learn arguably more than my children in this journey of homeschooling, I am yet again reminded that something that works fine some of the times, doesn't always work every time and flexibility is key. The other thing I learned about learning is that inspiration comes in many guises. As it turns out this homeschooling thing is less about me teaching and more about our mutual discovery of the world.