Really Really Fun Homeschool

We have been officially homeschooling for over 6 months. We started in the summer because my husband wanted a test run before “real” school started and we were committed. I call the last 6 months the “learning curve” months. These are where I learned a lot about my daughter and even MORE about myself. How I wanted to teach and how my daughter actually learns were not always the same thing. Some subjects like history and science went beautifully. Other subjects like math and reading were a screaming up hill battle with neither of us happy with how it was going.

I started wrestling in my mind with two opposing parenting philosophies. On one hand I was very committed to positive discipline. I believe children should learn to love learning because they want to do the learning. I did not want to resort to threats, bribes, punishment, etc just to get my daughter to sit down and do a reading lesson. From the times we’ve both lost our temper with each other over it I was definitely already forgetting some of the rules of positive discipline.

On the other hand our current method was NOT working. There was no way she was going to voluntarily sit down to do math and reading. It was a convincing balancing act based way too much on my authority as a parent to get anything done! (Aka, I was becoming a school dictator… one of the very things I was trying to avoid from public school.) I started hearing in the back of my head feedback I’d gotten from other sources. “You need to teach her (aka make her) focus.” “You need a school desk and school like space so she knows it’s time to learn.” “Children need to be made to (aka forced to) learn that it takes lots of hard work to get to the fun part.”

With all this going on I decided to take a look at the big picture. What was my end goal for teaching my daughter? For me it’s:

Create a life long learner who, provided with the right tools, will happily teach herself anything of value and interest.

To get to this goal she needed to know the basics like reading, writing, math, scientific method, etc. You can’t teach yourself something without being able to read about it. However you really aren’t going to want to teach yourself something if you have a negative association with books. If every time you pick one up you think of your mother making you sit down to LEARN TO READ OR ELSE! I decided positive discipline was what had worked for us so far and I needed to make it continue to work. If I wanted a child who loved to learn I’d better teach her in a way that she loved. I didn’t need to change her. I needed to change myself.

To reach my goal I made two new teaching rules:

1) Any failure to learn, even if it looked like goofing or distraction, was a failure in the teaching method or teacher and NOT the child.

2) All subjects needed to be changed until they were so fun she would beg me to do them.

3) I needed to carefully watch and follow the direction my daughter was leading. She knows her interests better then I do.

It is amazing how quickly a mental shift can make a change. With in a day reading lessons started going better. I realized right away that she wasn’t goofing just to goof. She was goofing because she hated to admit she didn’t know something. Just taking time to review what she should say if she was stuck had her admitting that instead of “goofing”. We backed up a few lessons and things got better.

However the biggest breakthrough came when I realized how well math had started going. We had invented a game based on the book “The Little House in the Big Woods”. We used our math book as a cookbook and our blocks as pieces of meat. Then we did exercises to prepare meat to be smoked just like in the story. After each exercise she tosses her blocks in the smoker (a basket). Randomly she runs off to tell Pa that a bear or panther has come out of the woods. Then she comes back to do another. We both have lots of fun and in all that she is learning her addition facts faster then I ever thought possible!

We recently expanded it out to reading lessons as well. Last reading lesson we were water fairies creating water droplets to fill a puddle for kids. Sounding things out created water drops (little balls) and when we dumped a handful in the puddle (hula hoop) we had to run and hide from the kids and make more drops by reading more. She has fun and she learns.

It is amazing how hindsight is always 20/20. Looking back I worried how my active, imaginative daughter would do in a school setting. Our earlier wars with math/reading showed exactly what would happen, very very little! However once we used her need to move and imagine as part of the lesson they become the asset they should be. What was getting in her way was exactly what she needed to advance. I just had to relax the controls enough to see it.

As my reward I now get to hear:

Mom, mom, can we please do some of that really, really fun homeschool!!!