My cup of tea

How do I make learning enjoyable again? How do I cover all of the necessary information, but keep it interesting? How do we have a plan, without using lessons and textbooks? How do I make sure that they are staying on track with their peers and doing all of the subjects?

It became clear to me that what my kids needed wasn’t clean, crisp new language arts books, or fancy notebooks and folders to inspire a good school year. While some students find joy with that, my kids found dread. What they needed was to learn that they are always learning, and that real life *is* a learning experience. So, I decided to let them take the reins.

What is interest based learning?

Basically, they learn about things that interest them! They take a bit of control over the direction of their main subject. We started the first day of school with this:

At first they each had an ‘easy’ column, and a mostly empty column. So, I sent them to some 5th and 7th grade science and history books. Very quickly the whole page was filled (even though I encouraged them to leave some blank to finish later)! Then we started into our day-

Their ‘main lesson’ is one of the boxes on their chart. Clare chose by chance (dropped a golf tee on the paper), Clay chose with purpose. They will work on one box for anywhere from a week to a month. During main lesson time they will do research, experiments, write reports, and more with the purpose of filling up a book.

Main lesson covers all of the basic skills- reading, writing, history, science, spelling, researching, penmanship, and even math. They are still doing a math program as well, but really, it can all fit into one block of time, as they are accomplishing all aspects by making an informative book!

Clancy has been so thrilled to do research on Steve Jobs and apple that I’ve barely been able to pull him away at the end of the day. Clare is loving looking through her library books about rocks and taking notes. She has also not wanted to put her books down by the end of the day. It is absolutely refreshing to see them dive in this way. They are excited for school and excited for learning about new things. Will they have to learn about things that don’t interest them? Probably to some extent, but I believe that even that can be made interesting. My goal is to start a block about voting, electoral college, and presidents very soon, and I’m a bit overwhelmed by the idea, but they are very excited, so new level achieved? lol.