My dear friend JoVe emailed me a great link yesterday that became a topic of great thought in our home. Camp Creek has an excellent post on Project Based Learning. In many ways, we have used this technique sporadically, but I always maintained a core framework for us throughout the year.
Still, I have often fancied how this sort of learning would work with my daughter. She is much more akin to developing her own interests and actively trying to learn more about them. A few weeks ago, she mentioned that she wanted to "be inspired" by her learning next year.
I shared this post with HoneyGirl, thinking she would jump at the chance. She surprised me by telling that it just won’t work for us, especially not through high school. She summed it up quite nicely…”Mom, if you don’t lay some sort of planned groundwork, nothing will ever get done. We both get too busy and distracted with other things.”
Kinda scary when your kid can analyze the situation so well! I hate to admit it but I am just not in a place where I even want to be that constant side-by-side teacher any longer. This sort of "plan along with them" is just nothing that I could manage on a continual basis. There is too much life getting in the way. I was struck with such a wave of guilt about this reality, until Honeygirl yet again set me straight.
She loves her independence as a student when she can open up a planner and plot out her week using the syllabi's for her various classes and subjects. Our co-op gives her active teaching in a variety of subjects, and I am always right there while we do math. But I have to admit that I enjoy not feeling tied down to hand-lead through all her lessons anymore. I selfishly enjoy the freedom I have gained !
While I do love this in theory, I also have a very practical child. She wants to attend college, and knows that with her learning difficulties, she needs some practice with traditional curriculum in subjects like math and science. She feels that all the experiments and hands-on will parlay any monotony of the text, and she wants to willingly trudge through to get practice in taking notes on reading.
So I have been brainstorming to come up with a way to make a traditional high school science curriculum less monotonous for her , without making it totally drudgery for me. You see, I have another confession to make. As much as I love other sorts of projects, science experiments are one of my least favorite things to do. Too much prep, too time consuming, too messy, and often they don't work as they should and I feel all the time is wasted. I am certain that there is something from my past lingering here...but I can't shake the feeling of major dread.
This is where it pays to have lots of homeschooling friends. One of my girlfriends is a former nurse and loves experiments. We have both been searching for an alternative to the Apologia Physical Science curriculum, which unfortunately is the favorite of the science teacher at our co-op.
Last week, I was lucky enough to be given an older Prentice Hall set, with teacher's edition and all the teacher's guide books and testing materials for each chapter. The two of us decided to share ...photocopying enough of everything for all three girls, and we will get them together on Friday afternoons to science lab and then just hanging out to play music together.
In turn, her girls will take my classical mythology class, to help her with English (her least favorite subject).
My point here, is that planning styles really need to reflect lifestyles. There was a time when I was fully "there" for my kids and all their school work. But as they age and develop their own abilities, they don't need me to be involved as much as before. This independence has been a good thing, when I moved from teacher to supervisor. I am enjoying standing on the periphery a bit, watching her create and learn, and then come to me to share her success.
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4 comments:
Odd. I read that post completely differently. Hmmm.
Agree with the point about planning styles reflecting lifestyle. Might add also personality. Hmmm.
More wisdom from you, as usual. This is something I have wrestled with over the years - incorporating homeschooling into our normal lives, personality types, and goals for the future, rather than trying to incorporate all those things into a homeschooling method that looks like it should be good.
I can also relate to you appreciating your freedom more!!
Like Jove, I also had a different take on that post. I felt it was more about NOT planning every little detail of your child's learning experience,but instead planning time for collaboration and discussion. Things I see you doing all the time with Honey. Interesting.
Like you, I think it is natural and good that as a child reaches Honey's age that she should be more in charge of her learning. I also think that it is good to begin the process early on, which is what Lori was writing about, I think. If we want our children to become independent learners then we have to let them experience that at age appropriate levels throughout their lives, don't we?
Like I said, this is exactly what I see you doing as you encourage autonomy in your children.
I'm not surprised you ladies interpreted the article differently. I think when we read things like this, we all glean different things from it -- based on our experiences and philosophies. Interesting discussion!
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