Strewing... it's a real thing!

Early this spring I came across the term "strewing" late one night while perusing Pinterest for homeschooling inspiration (instead of sleeping like I should have been).  In fact, I saw it used several times... so I decided to see what it was all about.  It turns out that strewing means to intentionally strew materials around the house and in the path of your child based on their interests... WITH... the goal that they will pick these items up on their own.  Which means if your child never picks up something that is set out, you need to be okay with it.  In short, it is parent-rigged child-directed learning.

This technique is not all that different from what I typically do with both of my kids on a regular basis, but the word that stood out to me was "intentional". Embracing the freedoms that homeschooling allows, like child-led education, is a mental shift that I am constantly trying to make.  I'm still not on board with the "free-for-all of daily living as education" point of view... so this approach, the intentional child-led learning experience, made sense to me.  I decided to give it a shot.

Like most things in homeschooling, I decided to tweak the idea and make my own rules, which were: no TV, no iPad, no computer... but anything else in the house is fair game.  I set out plenty of educational "stuff" for him and most of the time that's what he gravitated towards, but not always, and I was (mostly) okay with that.  So what did I set out?  Legos, k'nex, games and books that he hadn't played with in a while, Snap Circuits, magnet sets, build your own remote control set, gears, Lincoln Logs, his bin of Basher Science Books (his absolute favorite), electronic geography games, marble runs, new library books, Playdoh and accessories, puzzle/maze/how to draw books with paper and pencils, magnetic tangrams, Perplexus ball puzzles, newton's cradle, globes, maps, music, Dr. Seuss books on CD (he follows along in his books)... just to name a few.

Of course I didn't set all of these items out at the same time.  I typically selected around eight to ten different materials each afternoon.  And I have to say it worked beautifully!  At the same time that I began strewing, we adjusted our morning routine to include what we called "book work"... intentional (there's that word again) instruction time for math and writing (with social studies, health, and science thrown in once a week).  So with our book work out of the way, our afternoons were open for strewing.  It worked so well that I'm keeping this model for Will's third grade year... until I decide to change it, which I assume will happen eventually since I changed our routine up half a dozen times last year.  But who knows... the year could be different!