This article is excerpted from LEARNING AT HOME - A MOTHER’S GUIDE TO HOMESCHOOLING. The author, Marty Layne speaks from years of experience and provides honest, common-sense narrative that only true-life adventures of a real, in-the-trenches, homeschooling mother can share. (from Chapter 2)

Environment - The New Lexicon Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language (Canadian Edition), defines it as 'surroundings, especially the material and spiritual influences which affect the growth, the development and existence of a living being.' Create is defined as 'to bring into being.' When we homeschool, we need to bring into being material and spiritual influences that will support and encourage a child to gain mastery of the skills needed to function in the world. This is a pretty big order! It may look kind of scary, and yet we have been doing this as mothers since our children were born.

I want to share with you some of my ideas about how to create a learning environment conducive to homeschooling. Please keep in mind that each family will create their own unique environment; one that fits their needs. At the same time as each family will have a unique learning environment, there are some things that I think are important to include in all homeschooling learning environments. First and foremost for successful homeschooling is that children need to have a place to play and things to play with. Play is the 'work of childhood!' We have a picture book, How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen by Russell Hoban, that seems to me to capture the essence of homeschooling in quite a delightful way. Tom just ?messes? around and doesn’t seem to do any sort of studying. This bothers his aunt who decides to show Tom how foolish this is. She invites Captain Najork to compete against Tom hoping to demonstrate to Tom that he needs to spend time with more formal studies. Tom wins all the contests because he has ?fooled around? with all sorts of things and is better able than the sportsmen to play the games.

Children need to play and fool around with things; it’s an important part of learning. We in our North American culture have formalized learning to such a great extent (classes for babies and toddlers on how to do everything from singing to working a computer), that it may be difficult to accept that the time children spend ?messing around? has any value whatsoever much less an educational value. Yet play, non-adult directed play, is vital to a child’s intellectual growth and creative abilities. In order for us as human beings to understand things, we need to have a primary experience of what we are trying to understand. We need something to hang our experience on 'La experiencia es la madre de la ciencia. Experience is the mother of knowledge.' Cervantes. The book Truckers by Terry Pratchett about some nomes (this is how Pratchett spells this word) illustrates this point. Most of the nomes have lived inside a store building for many generations and cannot even conceive that anything outside the store exists; that there is an 'outside.' When a group of nomes come to the store who have lived 'outside,' it takes a long time for the store nomes to believe in the existence of this other kind of life which is another world to them. To then learn that all nomes came from a star and were travelling through space when they landed on the earth is beyond the comprehension of most of the store nomes. As they have only experience life in the store, they cannot even conceive of 'outside' much less other planets or stars.

Play gives children primary experience to draw on as they get older. A child learns about numbers and the one to one correspondence of numbers as he plays with Lego blocks, dolls, or other toys. A child who has not had experience manipulating objects and not been allowed time to observe the relationships of objects - i.e., that three objects are three objects no matter how they are arranged cannot understand the concepts of arithmetic. A child who has not experienced moving his body through space will have a hard time understanding gravity and velocity. During play, children also integrate their experiences with the knowledge they have acquired and test out how the things they have heard or learned about actually work. Play provides children with opportunities to try things out. building with Lego, blocks or tinker toys gives children a sense of how gravity works with small objects. Swinging, jumping rope, riding a bicycle, or riding on a merry-go-round are some ways to learn about gravity with their whole body. Learning with the body - somatic learning - is something that is basic to understanding. Children need many experiences with natural forces or objects so that they have a framework to later understand the intellectual concepts that describe the natural forces at work on our planet. Play - inside and out of doors, imaginary, mentally or physically active - is vital to a child’s developing intellectual powers and creative abilities.

Clarisa Pinkola Estes, in her book Women Who Run With The Wolves discusses the importance of play in creative life. Play allows us to experience things for their own sakes, to see what will happen if this and that are put together or this and that are put here under this. Play leads to new discoveries not only for children but for adults as well.

Because my children have never gone to school, they have had lots of time to play. I found it fascinating to see the sorts of things they did as they played. When the oldest two boys, Josh and Noah were young (5 through 8 years old) among the many other things that they did, they loved playing with little cars. They spent hours racing them and kept track of which car was the fastest in which situation - statistics. Robin and Holly at that age played with families of little animals, Lego people, or stuffed animals - sociology. As Robin grew older, he, like his older brothers, played more statistically oriented games. It is only our formal educational system that divides the world into various subject categories. In life, as in play, there are no divisions. One thing leads to another, and children discover facets of the world that do not fall into neat and tidy categories as they play. Children play in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of physical environments. I have seen little girls play in the shoe department of K-Mart, while their mom was shopping for shoes, creating an entire world within the space of a few minutes. Play is as natural and as necessary for children as breathing.

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