Instilling a Love of Learning with Homeschooling

'Kids', oil painting by Louis Pohl (Photo credit: Wikipedia)As the year winds to an end we often wonder if the pivotal points in our student's learning correspond to what we hope they need and want to learn.  Did we somehow tie in the learning outcomes to meet our student's learning style, and passions, or interests?  We know from reading The Element that true learning should stem from the heart or passion of a child.  But how do we know where our children's passions, or God given gifts begin?  At 5 or 6 years old we cannot really get a glimpse of our future child prodigy, or can we?  Do our kids really LOVE what they are doing? 

Here are a few of some of our students' learning styles, or gifts that help meet the goals.

Observation- The child who loveees to seriously ENGAGE in the world
Having watched my son over the last 15 years I think that many of his interests have stemmed from his personality.  More of a quiet and studious child with artistic leanings, he would often linger way longer on one particular topic than want to explore things superficially.  He voraciously explored non fiction books, and was eager to share his facts at every dinner setting!  We had a project based learning student, who loved the whole intrinsic  excitement and anticipation of learning something NEW and RELEVANT.  Had he been the child who drifted from thought to thought and got bored easily, this would not have been the type of learning he needed.  Research , artistic pursuits, musical meanders, book clubs, directing, teaching, mentoring, collecting with hobbies, building via virtual worlds; anything that allows this student to share their love of input and learning will ignite the passion.

Practice- The child who loveeees to TALK
Do you have a student who loves to practice things or gets a kick out of recall?  I have a few students who just love to practice memorizing their bible verses and get a huge kick from reciting.  These students love any kind of oral learning, and sharing via video, podcast, dramatic performance, teaching their siblings or debating class.  I have one student in grade 1 who started his own bible series on Youtube.   Firing them up to share orally is what makes them tick!

Chronological-  The Child who loveees ORDER
Don't you just love those kids who have to have everything in the right order. If you do things in the wrong order their whole world is thrown upside down!  Our left brained students who take to math and science like ducks to the water, fit this criteria.  These students also do well with project based learning, teaching their siblings, having their own chemistry lab, working from textbooks, creating their own textbooks, helping organize a class, building projects, cooking!. 

Moving- The child who loveeees to use their whole BODY
Do you have a student who just cannot keep still whilst learning?  This child loves being engaged physically with his learning.  Involving this student in sports or dance, or any kind of kinesthetic movement will help him understand the world in his own terms.  I love how Sir Ken shares in The Element, about the student who needed to do ballet if she was going to learn anything.  In a classroom she would not come alive and learning was non existent.  But on the dance floor her passions were ignited; movement and learning intertwined.  These kids love to learn with their hands, feet and whole body.  Sculpture, music lessons, baking, building projects, drama, computer classes, robotics, agriculture or conservation,  make learning happen for this kind of student.

Is it not AMAZING blessing that we have the perfect place to explore our students' gifts in the home school environment.  We have the perfect opportunity to encourage and disciple our young ones to truly understand their gifts.  Using 21 century tools that we have at our command we can lead them in ways that will glorify God.

I know I have not covered all the gifts here.  What gifts do your students have that help them explore their world uniquely and passionately?  What is your passion in life?

If you would like to listen to Sir Ken sharing on passion in education check out this video!


Many Blessings
Pippa

Future Work Skills 2020

I have just finished reading the results of  research completed by the University of Phoenix, Institute for the Future Research which analysed the top 10 skills needed for our future work force with excellence!    As educators we need to be rethinking our ways of learning/teaching to get our kids on board for the future.  Here are the top skills required:

1.  Sense Making skill These are those perceptive skills required to ascertain a deeper meaning.  Higher level thinking skills are the ones that machines like computers cannot do.  They cannot synthesize information to make ethical or critical thinking decisions.  Bloom's Taxonomy comes to mind here, along with Project Based learning, as a way to help students migrate to sense making skills.

2.  Social Intelligence Our wonderful interpersonal skills that allow us to connect with each other effectively.  How we interpret each others' social cues becomes more important with the use of social media.  Hence let us get our students practicing in this area with fenced social media for the younger crowd, and good digital citizenship for the older crowd using Twitter, Facebook, or Edmodo.

3.  Novel and Adaptive Thinking This involves the ability, or flexibility to adapt to change in any situation.  Having just read the book Who Moved My Cheeze, it is evident that if you don't adapt  to change your role becomes limited ie  your teaching worldview is myopic.  So we need to embrace technology as a means to enhance relationship, build trust, and encourage adaptive thinking in our students.

4.  Cross-Cultural Competency This vital tool allows us to understand and accept people in any culture and from any culture.  As Christians this is a given:)  If we are to disciple the next generation then our students need to know how to do the same with their next generation.  Cross- cultural competency is often what drives innovation, and brings the gospel to our neighbours.

5.  Computational Thinking  We have to understand how to read data and teach these tools to our students.  Teaching our students progamming language, different technologies and applications keeps them constantly prepared for future change in the tech field.  Examples shared in the PDF document included teaching students Scratch, which is basic HTML.

6.  New Media Literacy  How do we help teach students about how to use the media with critical analyses?  We can show students how to create blogs, podcasts, websites, videos, and assess them the same way you would assess an essay.  Teaching website evaluation is a tool to get students to think critically about website integrity, accuracy, reliability, currency and authority.

7.  Transdisciplinarity  Wow that is a long word:)  How does learning occur in multi- disciplines? Looking at one problem through myopic glasses is not enough, we need to incorporate many disciplines in our teaching methods so that the student is fully engaged to solve problems which are complex and layered.  Having the ability to engage in teaching from many disciplines will hold our students' interests, and help them learn many disciplines at the same time.  Teaching science and incorporating math in data building, humanities, art and languages, the list is endless to overlay disciplines..

8.  Design Mindset As computers and communication applications lead the way in industry, we need people with design skills to plan environmentally and aesthetically pleasing environments.  Where we live and work be it physical or virtual, we need the space to be brain engaging and God encompassing!  This calls for great organisational, architectural, and artistic skills in all facets of design. 

9.  Cognitive Load Management  How we filter information is vital as information explodes exponentially.  This involves bookmarking, and ranking information to make our desktop manageable.  As library staff and teachers we can help students become aware of the hierarchical nature of information.

10.  Virtual Collaboration  As distributed learning teachers or homeschooling parents this one should come naturally in regards to teaching our students!  We need to engage our virtual friends be they local or global, as we tend to become dispersed in our own little worlds.  Our objectives need to be clear, our vision all encompassing, and we need to give prompt feedback.  Add to that Love- and virtual collaboration is definitely Christ infused.


If we were not trained in teaching these skills then maybe we need to rethink how we are teaching our students, and pray for innovative ideas to help in this regard.    We cannot do all at once, but taking a couple of skills each year and researching them, incorporating some professional development or learning along with our students we can do this together, so that no-one gets left behind. 

Maybe your students are already learning these kind of skills.  As a teacher librarian I still feel I have a long way to go!  But God will get us there:)

Blessings to you as you embrace our exciting new world, and prepare our next generation for 2020 employment.

A big thanks to the University of Phoenix for researching this so well!

Pippa