It’s important that we plan out our school year and set goals. We want to stay on track and make progress. But I recently had a good reminder that we also need to embrace those unexpected homeschool detours.
Detours
Unexpected detours in homeschooling happen all the time. You’re studying bugs and your child is more interested in who eats the bugs. It’s rarely a waste of time to go off on a tangent to follow a question or interest.
When we were studying China for history last year, one of my sons latched onto a mention of the Opium Wars. What were they about? My resources didn’t have much information. He ended up researching them on his own and we modified his English assignments to include a paper on the Opium Wars. I’m sure that this is what he remembers most from our unit on China. Not all the info I poured into his brain. The info he took a detour to explore.
Paint Spins
When we had our Summer Art Day this August, the students in our homeschool group did four preplanned projects. I’ve posted about all of those. What I didn’t post was the fifth project. The one that they came up with. The one that is, arguably, the best part of our art exhibit.
Our modified paint pours were an attempt to replicate some of the paint pour techniques without the volume and mess of larger paint pours. A few of our older students came up with an awesome way to further modify the paint pours and used one of our cordless drills to create “Paint Spins”.
Directions
After several trials, here’s what they found worked best:
- Put a bolt through a hole in the center of a paper plate.
- Fasten a nut on the bolt on the underside of the plate so the plate will spin.
- Put the bolt in the cordless drill.
- Place a piece of heavy card stock on top of the plate.
- Use tape to secure the underside of the card stock to the plate.
- Use the paint mixtures from the Modified Paint Pour on top of the card stock.
- Hold the drill above your head (to avoid getting splattered).
- Turn the drill on low to spin the paint.
- (Obviously, this is a good project to do outside.)
We can do all the planning and organizing we want. And then we need to be flexible and open to ideas and questions and innovation. Because sometimes you get some pretty awesome results.
When the art comes down from the library later this month, I’ll hang my youngest son’s paint spins up at home to remind me to embrace those unexpected homeschool detours.
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