Have I told you yet why I love homeschooling?

Well, today is a prime example of the benefits of homeschooling:

String Bean found My Book of Little House Paper Dolls: The Big Woods Collection I was going to use last year (but never got around to). She spent a joyful morning with me as we cut out the clothes, relived reading the books from last year and she invented her own stories to go with the characters. She thought it was really cool that Pa can play his fiddle -- she's the one that just started violin ....

Tonight, she gave us a whole show using the dolls and telling her own version of life in the Little House. It was so heart-warming to hear the creativity and imagination flowing.

This was after she had found some flash cards and was playing concentration matching the big and little letters (now, if I had assigned working with flash cards, she wouldn't have wanted to "play" that!).

Then we made cookies to bring to our lovely homeschooling friends, friends we'd made online at 4Real and have since been able to "hang with" now that we live in Colorado....we discussed field trips, projects and other CM-y things. We prayed the election novena for tomorrow. Our kids played. What a fabulous thing it is to know other homeschoolers that have a similar philosophy of living/loving learning with your children!

MaryM also pointed me to a great, once-in-a-lifetime kind of activity -- seems Mercury will be transiting in front of the Sun on Wednesday, November 8. So, while the big ones attend their public-school funded homeoption program, my littles and I will be at the Chamberlin Observatory actually tracking Mercury's progress! How cool is that?

Any wonder I'm loving this homeschooling adventure?