This week I've been thinking about the way that Ben and I homeschool. Our kids are young (Ashtyn would be in preschool this year if we were doing traditional schooling), so we have just begun really homeschooling, but I have read and studied about the different types of schooling and the way children learn best. We've decided that a simple homeschooling style will work best for our family and are implementing that now with Ashtyn and Parker.
One thing that I truly believe about simple homeschooling and child led learning is that children are always learning. As we give them the time and support to explore what they're passionate about, their love of learning will not diminish as they reach the age of 5, 6, 7, or 8. They will continue to learn and love learning. And the best way to learn is in natural, every day experiences.
This is something I have believed, but it has been amazing to watch it in the lives of our children. Today, I wanted to write down some of the ways I've seen this happening recently.
One thing that we do is while I do their hair, I'll let them choose something to learn about and find YouTube videos about it. We've learned about things like the history of holidays, math (addition and subtraction), chess, volcanoes, the layers of the Earth's surface, how paper is made, the life cycle of butterflies, etc. There are a lot of great resources for kids' learning on YouTube and it's rare for me to not be able to find a video on the topic that they choose. Some of these topics (like how paper is made) came from a question Ashtyn had the day before. One of the cool things about it is that Ashtyn will tell Ben about the videos at dinner and she remembers a lot of it.
It's cool to them make connections as well. The girls love to choose nonfiction picture books, mostly about animals and bugs, from the library right now. One of the books talked about prey and predators. A week later, we were watching a YouTube video on different fish. Ashtyn realized, "Whales are the predators, and those fish are the prey!"
It's amazing to me how often there are teaching opportunities in the moment. Ashtyn and Parker love to set their water bottles on the counter in the morning to make a rainbow on the wall, as the sun shines through their water bottles. One afternoon this last week, Ashtyn was trying to do it during lunch. She got mad, wondering where the sun had gone. Ben got to show her how the sun moved; we got some toys, set them right by the sun shining on the floor, and then watched as the sun got further and further away from the toys. Then we got to talk about why the sun does that and what it means to orbit, etc.
Another thing I think is amazing is how much kids can learn from one interest they have. We're really seeing that with Ashtyn right now. Ashtyn's biggest passion currently is perler beads. She spends hours everyday making new designs (some she makes up and some she uses a reference on my computer). Doing the perler beads, she is learning patience, spatial awareness, shapes and grids (for example, there are some patterns she can do on a square grid, but others she can only do on her hexagon board), color awareness (she knows her colors, but she gets learn how they look together, the subtlety of the different shades, etc.), counting and how each perler bead represents one unit, creativity, how to make her own pixel art designs that look good (for example, she made a girl the other day and learned that it would look better if the arms were slightly shorter, so then she learned that our arms are shorter than our legs). When it's time for her to learn about graphs, it's going to click for Ashtyn because she's already using graphs. And when she's a little older, she wants to learn to do pixel art on the computer for Ben's games and when she does, she'll have a huge head start because she's been practicing with perler beads for so long.
Even though I already know that kids want to learn and that they can learn so well from the world around them, it's been so fun to begin seeing it in my own children. I am so grateful to get a front seat as they grow and learn and am excited to continue that as they get older!
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