Learning doesn't just happen on a worksheet.

At times I get so hung up on the plan and the list of things to tick off I miss the learning going on all around me. Gaah! We are not getting to cover the Spanish Armada...but somehow Jordan has learnt all about World War Two pilots.

It's a radical concept for those of us brought up in the school system; for both ourselves and our children to realise how much learning is incidental, how much goes on around us all the time.

Connor and I haven't touched on fractions formally yet but with his current passion for cooking we are discussing them constantly in the kitchen.

We haven't done an Australian animal "study", but when we often see new types of animals and with the help of a field guide we are able to identify the species and learn about it's pecularities. Last week we learnt about the different cockatoo species as we caught glimpses of them. We learnt there are different types of bull ants and some of their bites hurt a lot more than others. Perhaps a school child would fill out a worksheet to prove that they knew this, but does that validate the learning any more than the fact the information is in the childs head? I don't think so.

It's the same with tests in subjects like history, when we are having a discussion at the dinner table about the Aztec capital, the idea of testing for knowledge of the Aztecs becomes slightly ridiculous. When you are with your children all the time and learning and discussing alongside them, you understand what they are learning.

I haven't done as much formal art this year as I would like. But in the last few weeks, all three children have been doing very complex drawings of strange characters they have made up, and their drawing has improved in leaps and bounds.

How do you quantify the new historical and scientific facts the kids are constantly picking up through the enormous numbers of books they now read compared to when they were at school? Jordans reading must have tripled at the bare minimum and his desire to read outside his "favourite" genre is a source of delight to me.

What I really love is watching the way the children have the time to spend reading, drawing and learning about things that take their fancy.

But when I sit down at the end of the year and finalise the "reports" I have already started to show us how far they have come in the "official" subjects, how do we include these things? To other people what the children do when they are not doing "school" work is just play, but more and more I realise that at least as much real learning takes place when I have no finger in the pie.