I left my last thoughts hanging with some questions that I feel like I've found the answer to. These are the questions I put in that post:
"How could I avoid the battle? How could I inspire my kids to have self-motivation? How could I teach children of so many different ages? When would I find time to plan all those lessons?"
Ultimately, the real question is how do I teach my children to love learning? As I've pondered on it, and as I've gone to seminars and read books (the ones I recommended in the earlier post) some things have clicked for me.
Here we go. I hope this makes sense.
If I love bananas, I will naturally buy bananas. Then I will eat them and buy more. If we have bananas in our home, my children see me enjoying them, and I offer them to my children, odds are they will at least try them and will probably learn to like them. If I hate apples, never buy apples, and never offer apples to my children they may never learn to like apples. I use this approach when I teach my children principles of our religion. I've long been a believer that I can't force my children to embrace prayer, a love of the scriptures, etc... but that I can teach and inspire them by example. My children love to pray and they believe in prayer. That is because they have seen me and my husband praying every day, and because we pray as a family. They have observed from birth that prayer is important to us. We encourage them to pray and explain why we believe prayer is important, but we don't force them to do it. If I were to force it, I think they might rebel and decide that prayer is a chore.
One of the key ingredients to TJEd is "inspire, not require". We learned about this in the first presentation that we attended, and that's when our answers started coming. To inspire also can mean to lead by example. Once this clicked for me it changed my whole perspective on teaching my children. I realized that they way I teach my children our religion is by example, or I inspire instead of require when it comes to that aspect of our lives. Of course that can apply to an academic education! I will not learn something that I don't want to learn, but the way a person presents something and their excitement for it might peak my interest. My children will not learn something they don't want to learn. I cannot force them to listen. I cannot force them to think and process information. The way I approach something can peak their interest and motivate them, though. So, if I want them to like bananas I will buy and eat bananas. If I want them to understand the importance of prayer, I will pray on my own and with my family. If I want them to love learning, I will study and learn with them! This is one of the things that is so different about the TJEd theory/ method and if makes a lot of sense to me. When I read these books and went to these classes, I was surprised that the very first step was to focus on my own education!
Children are naturally curious about what is going on around them, and often value the things their parents value. What messages am I sending my children about what I value? If I only work or study when I have to, but spend all of my spare time in from of the tv what do they learn that I value? What do they learn about work and studying? If I read an awesome book and share my excitement about it during our dinner conversation what do they learn about what I value? If I am curious about the recent disasters in Japan, and I decide to research earthquakes and tsunamis, are my children going to be curious too?
This is the hardest part about inspiring. I can't inspire someone else to love learning if don't love learning. So I might have to do some studying until I feel that very real light that comes from learning, and I need to keep it up. If I do love learning, though, I believe I can inspire my children to love it. If I do study, I believe my children will be much more inclined to study. And if my children are feeling inspired, they will have the self-motivation to learn. Then hopefully we can avoid the battle. So far my children are loving everything we do in kidschool, and are very willing to learn. I'm new at this, but I believe I have a good beginning.
That's one "ingredient" and there are more. That's the one that stood out to me the most, though, and changed my way of thinking about home education. As for the questions of teaching children of so many ages, and preparing lessons, I will briefly address those here, but elaborate later. A child who is self-motivated to learn can have a lot of choice in what they study; then it will be more meaningful because it's what they are interested in. No one can teach my child anything if he doesn't want to learn it! There is also an "ingredient" of "structure time not content" which means to set aside a specific amount of time for learning each day, but allow for great flexibility in what is studied. This makes lessons planning a lot easier. So I set aside our morning hours for kidschool, and we have a basic routine with it, but our learning activity can be anything. We don't have to work on reading every day for 30 min., then math for 30 min., etc... If we are super curious about whales today, we can devote all our time to studying about whales, and it's going to be a lot more meaningful. If we decide to work on addition, but it quickly becomes tedious and we're all getting frustrated with it we can move on. As children get older and are more independent, they are able to study more on their own leaving mom for more time with the littler ones. That helps with teaching different ages.
I don't like that last paragraph, but I'm not sure how to explain these thoughts so briefly (which is necessary for me right now). Anyway, I guess this is the end to my introduction on the why and how we homeschool. Upcoming posts will better explain the how. (I really need to learn how to write conclusions!)
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