Life Long Learners - December, 2013

In a recent newsletter from CreateBetterWriters.com there was an article about creating life long learners. As I was reading the article I was pleasantly surprised that, as homeschoolers, we, to some degree, do the three things suggested to give children a love for learning.

First, find the "awe factor" in the what you are teaching.  Instead of just teaching facts, we find something that will ignite our child's curiosity and make him want to find out or do more.  Whether that is making clothes from the era we are studying, building a castle, making a rocket, watching ants rescue their eggs from the flooded garden, or learning a poem.  The time we get to spend interacting with our children lets us learn about their likes and dislikes so we can better know what will grab their attention.

Second, help your child be successful at learning. We don't want to consistently give our child messages that he is not a good learner. When our children are struggling, they know they are struggling, so we are careful to not crush their love for learning. With homeschooling we can step back, take it slower, change our approach (or even our curriculum), and celebrate successes, no matter how small. We don't have to put grades on papers. Our children never have to see a report card. We don't need to subscribe to a certain grade level of curriculum. Our children can just learn what they are ready for, and can review when it is needed.

Third, allow your child to explore his passions. Allowing students to make their own decisions is a strong motivator in education. Here, also, homeschooling allows us to excel. In elementary grades we can allow our children to follow and explore the shifting winds of what arouses their interests. In the upper grades we can customize the subjects they study to match their interests and the direction God is leading them.

I'm going to add a fourth item, I believe that when our children see us getting interested and excited in what we are learning together, it makes them more interested, too.

Being able to raise our children with the love to learn is a great gift to give them and rewarding to ourselves. A person who loves to learn will never be bored. I praise the Lord for the ability to be able to teach Kim according to "her bent" instead of her having to sit in a classroom with 20 plus other students with a teacher trying to interest all of them in what she is teaching.