Creating a Love for Learning in Your Home School, Part I
By Donna Reish
I recently had a "kick-off the school year lunch" with my mini-support group, unit study co-op group, field trip group, and accountability group - all the same five fellow homeschooling moms. One creative and affirming mother had the idea that since we are starting a new school year, we should go around the table and encourage one another in our home schooling strengths. After we bawled our way through lunch and dessert and the Kleenexes were all discarded, there was a common encouraging thread towards me: They felt that I had encouraged them and modeled for them how to create a love for learning in my children and in me.
After our emotional lunch (and a quick stop at the scrapbooking store-we recovered from our emotional outburst enough to shop!), I contemplated how I influenced these moms in that way. I considered some of the comments they made. And then I asked myself, How can I spread a love for learning to home schoolers everywhere? In this chapter, I would like to share over a dozen key strategies that Ray and I have discovered to help our children love to learn-strategies that have caused our children to get out their school books on a Saturday night simply because they want to, strategies that make learning in our family a joy instead of a drudgery, strategies that have helped us to build fond (and exciting!) home school memories.
Model a love for learning.
Your children want to be just like you! They might not say it. They might say just the opposite at times, but the fact is, they want to be just like Mom and Dad. The beginning of teaching our children any skill is to model that skill for them. I remember in teacher’s college when the buzzword (or acronym, actually) was SSR - Sustained Silent Reading. The goal of SSR was to set aside ten or fifteen minutes each school day to have every student reading. The superior teachers were the ones who didn’t grade papers or file their nails during SSR; they read too. The idea was that if the teacher were modeling reading for her students, they would follow her example.
The same is true for home schooling parents with modeling a love for learning. Do you force-feed them what they need to learn but remain stagnant in your learning? Do you act as though you already "know it all," so there is nothing else for you to learn? Do you seek out information about topics you are interested in learning more about?
We recently took a family vacation to Disney World. I carried (well, whoever carried the backpack actually carried) an eight hundred page book entitled, The Unofficial Guide to Disney World. I pulled it out as we traveled to each park, reading aloud about the best viewing spots for the afternoon parade, the worst hamburgers in the place, and the longest time one has to wait during mid-morning to ride "Space Mountain." At first the kids teased me merciless (okay, I did have over a hundred sticky notes of various colors and sizes protruding from the sides of the book-you’re not allowed to highlight in a library book), but then they began asking me what "my book" said about this or that. Eventually, we were fighting over the book during tram, monorail, and bus rides! On the last night, the kids insisted that I cover myself in sticky notes, scatter my "charts" (oh, I made charts too) around me, and have my picture taken with my precious book. They saw firsthand how learning new information makes for a great vacation; they came to see the method to Mom’s madness - and I guarantee not one of them will ever take their kids to Disney World without that book! Modeling a love for learning for our children works.
Start early and go for the long-haul.
When I say "start early," I don’t mean start out with workbooks and assignments early! I mean start out with learning early; make learning a lifestyle from a young age. We decided that we were going to homeschool when our first child was a little over a year old. (And we actually began home schooling my eighth grade sister at that time.) Everything in our life became school-morning devotions, chore time, story time, evening devotions, listening to tapes while traveling, etc. Ministering at the nursing home, hosting Bible studies in our home, and preparing the church bulletin board all quickly became "school"-with a toddler in tow, learning as we went.
I always got so upset when my children learned from others that school means book learning - and specifically workbooks-and as preschoolers and kindergarteners would say, "I want to do school." My mantra through the years has been something like this: "Did you do your dishes this morning? Did you read the Bible with Daddy? Did you do story time with Mommy? Did you play a math game with sissy? Did you help brother make bread today? Then you just did school!" Starting early means beginning in their very first years to develop a love for learning in our children by providing learning activities that are worthwhile and enjoyable-giving them a good taste for learning.
I have noticed a trend in home schoolers: the reason they home school often determines their children’s love for or lack of love for learning. Children from families who home school because they think it is a superior way of learning seem to love learning more than children from families who home school because the other option (public school or private school) is "bad."
Now don’t get me wrong. We home school for a myriad of reasons, but our children know we are in this because it is plain and simply the BEST - all the way around. They also know that we are in it for the long haul, as long as God permits us. Thus, there is no way out. There is nobody else that will pick up the slack in learning for us. There is nothing in the future that will save our children from our laxness. It is all up to us. We are responsible for our children’s education for all of their school years; and once they become a certain age (oh, say, eight years old or so), they are responsible for their learning, too. It is ours and it is theirs.
Integrate school with chores, service, ministry, and more.
In other words, do not make "school" a separate entity from your life. "School," as we know it, is a man-made institution. The New Testament says that children are to be under tutors and managers until the time appointed by their father. Many schools often began as a result of a perceived need to teach children the Bible. Certainly no body (governmental or otherwise) was intended to raise our children for us! The "rules" and "guidelines" that we devise for our home schools are often the result of what we see in "real schools." Of course, many of these are based on solid research and experience of how children learn, etc. But more often than not, the "school ways" are devised in order to provide "mass education." We should only copy what are truly superior ways to learn. How many children do you know who go to school and love school or love learning? We don’t want that to happen in our home schools!
The Bible is filled with admonition after admonition to teach our children all the time. It tells us to teach our children when we get up, when we walk, when we sit, and when we lie down. That certainly doesn’t mean to "have school" day and night! I believe that learning takes place all of the time - life skills from chores; social skills and much more from service; Bible, character, and godliness from ministry - and of course, academics from bookwork.
When everything we do is looked at as "learning" and "valuable," it doesn’t matter if a student is completing a math page, helping an elderly neighbor, or reading to little sister. It is all learning; it is all valuable; it is all needed. I realized that I had done too good of a job incorporating school in our lives and our lives into school when ten years ago, my oldest daughter (now eighteen and faster than lightning at household and kitchen tasks!) was a dawdler. At five o’clock one evening, she was still sitting at her little table doing a math page when I suggested that if she would work faster on everything, she wouldn’t still be sitting there doing her math book so late in the day. She smiled her cheeriest smile at me, shrugged her shoulders with arms out, and exclaimed: "I like school. I like chores. And I like to play. It doesn’t matter how fast I go or when I’m done because I love it all!"
I cringe when I hear of academic students who are too busy "doing school" to minister or provide services to others or selfish young people who are too consumed with their own interests to reach out to those in need. A well-rounded student is one who balances his time among "academic" pursuits, ministry and service opportunities, hobbies, family activities, spiritual growth opportunities, and fun. Any imbalance in these areas-even in "over-academics" - makes a student lacking in something-and certainly not a model of a student who loves to learn and loves home schooling. When we train our sons and daughters to put making a meal for a new mother right up there in their "to do list" with their English, we are integrating school with life and life with school.
Stock up on learning
My friends’ husbands often tease them about staying away from me and my "catalogs." (At least I think they are teasing!) They hide the checkbook when I’m coming for fear that I will talk their wives into buying the latest, greatest educational item I have found. I always say, "We get our clothes at Goodwill and our groceries at Aldi’s, but we get our books everywhere we find them - on sale or not!" We build a learning environment when we fill our home with good books and educational items - computers, good software, learning games, cassettes, videos, and more. It’s hard not to love learning when learning items are surrounding you
Nowadays, home school materials, in particular, and learning materials, in general, are everywhere! And the prices couldn’t be better. I have gotten complete sets of readers at garage sales, expensive creation science books at Goodwill, and educational videos at thrift stores. Ebay and other online used buying and selling sites abound with educational materials. Home school swaps are prevalent online, as well. If you see a learning item somewhere, you can more than likely get it used or on sale.
Start out with general materials and Bible/character materials and branch out according to your students’ interests. Our initial "home school" purchases when our first born was a baby, twenty-one years ago, were the complete cassette series of Your Story Hour (of Uncle Dan and Aunt Sue venues), Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories, The Coriell’s Books of Character Building, and The Family Bible Library. Guess what? We still have all four of them - and we still use all four of them almost weekly! Our oldest child Joshua was nine months old when we began this adventure by home schooling my younger sister. At the time, I had no idea what his interests would be (except maybe the packaging and boxes the tapes and books came in!). Begin your home school library and supplies with items you have found others to enjoy and with items that anyone might enjoy.
Of course, you can’t go wrong beginning with Bible-related and character-related materials. As your students grow up, you will see certain bents and interests developing. Capture these. Do not get so locked into learning the "essentials" that you do not take time out for their interests! Pursue the art books and classes for the one with artistic talent. Check out every book the library has on airplanes for your future aeronautic engineer. Read the classics aloud to your literary student.
Watch the next edition of the Informer for the continuation of "Creating a Love for Learning in Your Home School" in which I will discuss other aspects of creating a love for learning including whetting students’ appetites for learning (by giving them a sneak preview of what is to come!!), reading aloud, making time for the most important things, reducing frivolities, using non-book teaching tools, learning at home vs. school at home, developing the home school lifestyle, making home school memories, and more.