While I love the philosophical reasons for Memoria’s approach, I’ve also found it to be highly practical. It means our ability to learn isn’t dependent on whether I remembered to buy experiment supplies. We can add hands-on science activities when we want to, but they’re a support to our learning rather than the means of learning.

It’s the best of both worlds.

But how do you add hands-on science activities without losing your mind? Here are some of the things we’ve done over the years — and a few from my “maybe someday” list!

Everyone says it’s easy to kill our children’s love of learning. It can happen if we expect them to do things they don’t enjoy. It will never return if we “do school at home” instead of homeschool. Our children could have life-long scars if we fail to make all our learning as sensory and relaxed as a nature walk.

Besides all this, we’ll become stressed, demanding mothers who lack any sense of joy or beauty.

These beliefs ruled our homeschool for five years. Here’s what happened when I finally dared to push back.

Over the past ten years, we’ve homeschooled just about everywhere except the bathroom: our living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom-turned-office, fifth wheel camper, and even the laundry room! Needless to say, I don’t believe a school room is necessary for homeschooling. But my kids do better in a separate space, so we converted the front room of our house into a minimalist homeschool room a few years ago.

I hoped that would be the last stop in our game of “musical school spaces”. I should have known better!