Describe a favorite winter activity. Go!
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The Practice of Happy!
Lots of homeschool literature talks about “delight-directed learning”—the practice of letting your child’s interests and passions guide learning. The philosophy runs like this: If you allow a child to pursue what piques her curiosity or arouses his enthusiasm, that child is more likely to suck the marrow of learning out of that field of interest than if you put information you think the child should learn in front of him or her.
If we follow our children into their delight-directed interests, we often can teach everything else we hope to teach. For instance, I remember that what finally put Caitrin over the hump for reading was the intersection between the Greek alphabet (a fascination of hers!) and a desire to read the article that told her what happened to Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson’s marriage! (Yes, we live in Cincinnati.)
As you get comfortable with this practice of following your children into their delights and passions, it becomes easier and easier to let your children show you the education they want to have. You, in turn, find ways to enhance that interest and expand it, adding the parts that reassure you that the three R’s are also being mastered.
But what about you, the homeschooling parent?
What if we talk about your delight-directed teaching?
Can you give yourself permission to live in a happy frame of mind on a regular basis, throughout the day?
Do you smile? Find reasons to laugh?
Do you exclaim, “Oh! I love the way the bread dough feels when I squish it between my fingers. And it’s sticky! Watch what I can do with sticky dough all over my fingers.”
Our heads run our homeschools so much of the time.
We are thinking about math during dictation. We’re worried about spelling while the child is reading aloud to us, beautifully. We plan lunch while another child recites times tables. We sweep the kitchen, wipe down the counters, and empty the trash when we can grab a few moments of quiet while children are happy at the table.
But are we happy?
I remember the suggestion to light candles when I did the evening dishes in my sink (in the days before I had a dishwasher). It changed everything. I looked forward to that time: deep warm water and suds, the gentle clinking of silverware, the satisfaction of muck sliding off my white plates, the yellow glow of candles instead of fluorescent lighting, the alone time. For a while, it became my time—my space to regroup. Such a little thing—candles. Yet it helped a chore become a delight for me.
When our family began our bird watching habit, I noticed that I became more tuned into the space beyond my windows. Prior to that, it was as if I lived in a cave! Even though my windows opened to a glorious backyard, I rarely paused to look through the windows. I was too busy in my head planning the next activity, averting the next spill, changing a diaper, and wondering if I’d ever get a full night’s sleep.
Once we added bird feeders, I noticed that I smiled more at the weather outside, too. These feathered friends showed up in large groups in the snow! Changed how I felt about winter.
It takes practice to be a delight-directed teacher. To my way of thinking, it is less about picking topics I love (though that is certainly part of it!) and more about noticing the not-time-bound details of daily living in front of and with my children.
- I can take a walk with them at a snail’s pace and notice the silver trail a snail makes.
- I can enjoy the sounds of squealing toddlers if I can let go of my need to have a complete thought in that moment.
- I can taste my lunch when I sit with my kids to eat.
- I can enjoy hot tea, if I don’t walk around the house with the mug, leaving it at the side of my half-made bed or in the laundry room on the dryer.
I want to be a delight-directed person—not just a teacher, not as a means to an end.
I want to pause and allow for the people I love to surprise me.
I want to stop assigning motives to their actions—a child could be in a hurry, which is why the milk spilled; or a child could be momentarily distracted by the baby’s giggle; or a child could be trying so hard not to spill, she spills! Any of those explanations may be true, but I don’t have to choose the one that makes me angry.
I can allow for ambiguity, I can open myself to the possibility that my children are eager to please me, just as I’m eager to make them happy.
From that frame of reference, we can create a delight-directed homeschool environment, together—with me leading the way.
The cumulative effects are good (aka: it all works out in the end)
My son, Jacob, and I at homecoming at OSU this year.
It’s hard to see in the middle of your homeschool career (a career you didn’t train for) that what you are doing will work. The ever-present anxiety that this form of education is not quite good enough pervades, even among the most cheery, bright-eyed home educators.
I’m here to tell you: it works out.
- Even if your kids don’t go to college right away (or at all!).
- Even if they decide to go to traditional high school.
- Even if they never care about history or catch your enthusiasm for literature.
- Even if they compare themselves to their schooled peers and worry that they have missed some critical piece of information or instruction.
- Even if you are sick of home educating and are doing a poor job of it.
- Even if… yes, even that.
You know what you have going for you?
- Your ideals and your heart.
- Time and space.
- Room to grow personalized passions.
It’s been demonstrated that parental involvement in a child’s life is the key to a lifelong love of learning, whether you home educate or put your kids in school. By choosing to homeschool, you’ve made an extraordinary commitment to that ideal. Keep chugging along. Good stuff is on its way.
Your adult conversations with your kids about growing up and becoming who they are meant to be, the glorious reading you do together through cliff-hangers and inside jokes, the incidental discussions about the stars and skies and weather, the experiences you share about how to get along with people you don’t like, the research you do to figure out how far it is to China from where you live and how to learn Chinese while a kid and what jobs one could find if one wanted to go live there when all grown up…
THIS is the education.
It’s the invisible, impossible-to-quantify benefit of being at home all the time with your kids.
They will turn to you and say: “What bird is that?” and a month later, you are the proud owners of field guides, binoculars, several types of bird feeders, and a clipboard to keep track.
THIS is what we do as home educators. Keep going! You don’t always remember to “count” this stuff, but I promise you! It’s the real deal.
Yes, to math facts, and spelling, too. But you’ll be surprised. The struggling speller at 12 catches on by 15 in most cases without you doing much of anything. Reading, copywork, dictation, and a child’s consistent editing of his or her own work does it. It’s not like you have to create some super-duper specialized multi media curriculum to learn to spell. Millions learned without the computer and now we have Spell Check. It’s just not nearly as critical to success in life as knowing how to pick a mate or being awed by the constellations or finding a passion and pursuing it with gusto.
Math comes. Kids can get tutored in math. Kids can get tutored in any area of weakness that you have.
What they can’t get from others is YOU! You give them grounding, your interest, the resources that you freely share, the curiosity about their current hopes and dreams, the space to revise those as they change their minds or exhaust one idea and move on to the next. That’s what makes home education so different.
Homeschooling is a journey of shared enthusiasms: theirs, supported by yours; yours, catalyzing theirs.
As they explore the world (even stuff like rap music, online video games, and Candy Crush levels on the iPad), they are discovering connections between all manner of information. There isn’t some boundary line between what is “real” learning and what is “fake” learning. It’s all the same: school subjects bleed into personal pastimes. That’s how it is for adults and homeschooled kids discover this much sooner than we did.
Likewise, your children are more fitted for college if they’ve dug deeply into the ideas that fascinate them:
- Writing and taking pictures for a personal fashion blog,
- Learning how to create constructed languages with a group of linguists,
- Reading Jane Austen’s novels, and rewriting them into different settings to create new novels,
- Crafting poems during math tests,
- Spending hours on end watching “Top Gear” about cars and learning all the details that make quality engines and machinery,
- Acting in a Shakespeare company,
- Reading every single J.R.R. Tolkien book and film over and over again,
- Learning the night sky through a telescope,
- Immersing oneself in Korean pop music until learning the Korean language becomes a criteria for desirable colleges.
These are all various pleasures of our homeschool that I did not create or generate, yet each item represents activities and passions my kids had as they grew up.
Our family created time and space for that kind of living. Yes, we had math books. Honestly, I was an awful math teacher. I tried as best I could but eventually had to let tutors take over for high school. Somehow the kids were okay—got through college math, or started teaching themselves on their own when they were adults and not in college at all!
Yet who would have taught them to value time to explore what interested them on their own? Only their parents!
No one can know how it all fits together–homeschool, personal passion, study, immersion, exploration. The kids who acted in the Shakespeare company aren’t studying Shakespeare now. But they were shaped by Shakespeare in ways I couldn’t possibly teach them—to think in beautiful words, to create connections between modern story lines and the bard’s primal ones, to be “wordy” people, to think about morality and social conventions.
They’ve become whole people—grounded, well-rounded, curious (with and without college!).
So deep breath. Make room for living and learning today, without worrying too much about all the picky details of any one subject. You will always cover math, spelling, grammar, history because that’s what we do. You’ll get through enough of it in the end to send your kids to college. Colleges are businesses and they know homeschooled kids are good risks. So breathe.
In the meantime, enjoy learning about every little thing under the sun, and trust it.
It works.
Movies Wednesday Resources for the New Year
Surprisingly enough, watching TV or movies with your kids ought to be a primary part of any good language arts program. There is nothing like listening to language used in the right context by various people (especially actors) for vocabulary training as well as growing in familiarity with proper syntax.
Using films and TV shows wisely is a big part of the Brave Writer Lifestyle. That’s why we’ve highlighted and reviewed movies here on the blog!
Here’s how one Brave Writer family incorporated film into their homeschool:
Julie,
I wanted to gently introduce my children to your philosophy of Language Arts by watching a movie after dinner. So, we plopped down after Chinese takeout and watched my favorite, “The Princess Bride.” I thought it might be a little much for my six year old, but she LOVED it. She has been asking me questions just so I will say, “As you wish” (which means I love you.) I promised her that I would also read her the book. My sweethearts are very excited about school because they didn’t realize that movies would be included!
Cheers!
Sara
If you’d like to do something similar this year, below are some helpful resources.
Resources
The Brave Writer Lifestyle: Movies and Television. Shares good reasons to include visual media in home education.
Movie Wednesday Master List. Brave Writer blog posts all about movies that include summaries, discussion questions, and additional resources. Also included in the list are links to any Arrows and Boomerangs (literature-based language arts guides) that correspond to film adaptations.
Brave Writer Goes to the Movies. Our digital product helps you to comment meaningfully on plot, characterization, make-up and costumes, acting, setting and even film editing. This eleven page guide gives you the background and series of questions to help your kids discuss movies on a deeper level, rather than the usual “It was really good…” responses they offer. As your children learn to talk well about movies, these skills naturally help them to discuss literature.
A Family Movie List. A compilation of suggested titles from a group of friends who like to discuss movies and books.
Movie Discussion Club. Brave Writer’s four week online class. Your kids will be so excited about movies, they’ll hardly notice they are writing!
Poetry Teatime: New Year’s Eve Edition
Robert Louis Stevenson, Cider Donuts, and Candles
Here is our tea time photo. The boys read original poems and I read some from our Robert Louis Stevenson binder of poems. Such fun!
Notice the cider donuts and candles. The cider donuts were not homemade. We had gotten them that morning at a farm store nearby. I realized at the register that I had just not quite enough cash to pay for our items. The woman behind me offered to give us the few dollars and after I resisted, she said, “It’s okay, just do the same for someone else in need in the future.” And I said to her, “Pay it forward–absolutely I will!”
This lead to a discussion of the expression “pay it forward” in the car on the way home. My boys had never heard of it before! They really loved that the woman did that for us and I think we spent a lot of time discussing her act during the tea time–in between the poetry reading!
Thank you for the inspiration!
~Nancy
Finally Made the Plunge
We’ve used many parts of Brave Writer for several years, but this week I finally made the plunge and committed to doing a weekly Poetry Teatime. Here is a photo of our very first one. We don’t have a pretty tablecloth yet, or fancy tea cups. But I did buy a huge assortment of hot cocoa mixes at Sam’s for my kids to choose from. Who knew you could get eight different flavors! Our favorite poem of the morning was “If-ing,” by Langston Hughes. The kids all say that they really liked doing it – and not just because of the hot cocoa. I think there’s something about poetry that really resonated with kids.
~Aimee
P.S. Here’s the poem, in case you haven’t read it.
If-ing
If I had some small change
I’d buy me a mule,
Get on that mule and
Ride like a fool.
If I had some greenbacks
I’d buy me a Packard,
Fill it up with gas and
Drive that baby backward.
If I had a million
I’d get me a plane
And everybody in America’d
Think I was insane.
But I ain’t got a million,
Fact is, ain’t got a dime —
So just by if-ing
I have a good time!
~Langston Hughes
Images (cc)
