Individual learning

A while back, when I was asking for suggestions about what I should write about, a reader asked me about the individual projects I was having my children work on. Since I saw most of them with their books out today doing just that, it seems like a timely topic.

I called a holiday today. I woke up feeling totally done in from my weekend away and knew I just needed to spend the day mostly resting. It has done a world of good, as I am feeling significantly more myself. We'll be back to our usual schedule in the morning. Because I had cancelled school this morning, at least my part of it, I was rather heartened to see quite a few people at work in the dining room on their individual animal projects when I got in from the barn. I hadn't asked them to do this, they just did it. That's always a nice homeschooling moment that one likes to share. It sounds so much more impressive than if I say that my daughter ripped her math book up in frustration, which is equally likely to happen. Just so you don't have any illusions...

Y. and I had a discussion over how you go from taking notes to actually writing something in your own words which is an area where she currently is feeling challenged. L. told me that she was going to write about each of her animals, but then she was going to make an educational video about each of them in Scratch. (Scratch is a coding program for kids which helps them learn to code. This is one of L.'s current interests. At least this is what I'm told. Don't ask me any other questions about it because I don't know the answer. W. got her set up with this... or maybe D... which goes to show exactly how much attention I pay to it all.) When I got home from the grocery store today, L. had a short interactive video all about leopards which she had made. 

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, we are studying biomes this spring. For each biome I have asked each child to do a short report on an animal who lives in that area. I put books on hold for them and gave some suggestions about how they could write these reports, but that's it. Well, and the occasional reminder that they needed to work on them. I think it was me delaying starting the next biome so they could catch up that spurred the sudden industriousness. Truth be told, I read them, but don't make a huge amount of comments about them, and when I do it is something global, such as me pointing out to Y. that she had notes and not a report. I actually like to see how each child decides to present the information; I think it is a huge part of the whole process. 

[A brief note of irritation. It is extremely difficult to find non-fiction books about animals that are aimed at middle to high school students. This is particularly true about animals that seem to be associated with younger children, say... sloths. I keep having to put more and more books on hold for certain animals because the ones which arrive are clearly written for kindergarteners and my children look upon them with contempt. I didn't realize there was an age limit for being interested in unique animals.]

I think the whole individual project idea works (we did one over the summer as well) because I don't micromanage them. I also don't correct their writing. Or spelling. Or punctuation. Really. I'll let you pause to be horrified for a moment... those things come with maturity and practice (yes, even if I'm not constantly correcting them) and with reading good books. I feel pretty confident in this by now since it is exactly what I did with my older children who all excelled in the written portion of their college educations. As a result, my children can focus on the content, which they find interesting, rather than getting caught up in peripheral matters. They all know that I am happy to actually edit something for them if they want, and sometimes they do ask, but the mechanics of writing are not going to be an impediment to their writing.

Learning about things that they are interested is just something that one does. They don't view it as work or something negative, it is just more a part of life that is interesting. As G. and I were heading to the grocery store today, she asked me when schools get out. I told her mid-June for where we live, though we would probably finish in early May. And then I chuckled and added, at least from school, you don't actually stop learning. G. then observed that if you spend so much time in school every day, there is probably no time left to actually learn stuff on your own, and then went on to the next topic. 

This is actually how we do much of high school as the balance between outside directed (me) to inside directed (the child) shifts. They learn, I figure out how to document it while making sure that we have hit the expected high school credits as well. It's actually quite simple. 

Learning is actually quite simple. Adults often want to make it more complicated.