I know that many new homeschooling parents come at this homeschooling thing as they have to copy school, or be better than school. They stress over curriculums or what are they going to do when they need more math knowledge? You remember taking algebra, but you don’t remember if x = y or z or why were we even trying to figure that out in the first place?
Learning Can Be Fun For You Too!
But one thing that seems to be forgotten is just how much fun learning can be! Not just for your kids, but for you! Many of us homeschooling parents did our schooling in public school. In public school how many of us had a subject that we absolutely LOVED and before we knew it the teacher was moving us on to something else? All we really wanted to do was dive deeper into whatever it was that we were interested in.
In homeschool we get to do just that! And I don’t just mean that we get to let our children do that, which we absolutely do! We the parents get to build the volcano that we didn’t get to build in science class because the teacher didn’t have enough supplies for everyone! We get to really dig in and have some fun when it comes to history lessons! (Do we need to mummify a store bought chicken to really understand how mummification works? No, but no one is telling us we DON’T need to either…)
Curriculums…More Like Guidelines
Showing our kids our own enthusiasm for learning will do far more than any curriculum ever can. I like to think of curriculums as guidelines, I don’t have to use everything exactly as it was written. With any curriculum I have purchased, I tend to use it as more of a book list and project idea list. I am fully accepting that we may not do most of what is on the list and go down a completely different rabbit hole.
Right now in our school we are learning about how the earth was formed and the layers of the earth. In the next few weeks we will be learning about earthquakes, and volcanoes. When I was a kid this was my favorite science subject! I wanted to be a volcanologist until I experienced my first earthquake, then I switched to seismologist!
I was in public school at the time and we spent about 2 weeks on this, that was it. We watched a Bill Nye episode and did a label the layers coloring page! Oh and let’s not forget the volcano experiment that didn’t have enough supplies to go around. But now with my kids we can stay on this subject as long as we want! We can deep dive!
And if one or more kids doesn’t want to continue I can still move along, while allowing one child to continue to dive down the rabbit hole. But it’s so much more than that! It’s sharing a love of a subject and seeing the spark of understanding something new about our world! Its diving into what questions will arise as a result.
You Can’t Fake Enthusiasm!
The double edge to this sword of course is when you are not enthusiastic about something in your homeschool. You feel you have to do it anyway because that is what the curriculum said. I admit I am guilty of this! I still am, especially when I buy a shiny new curriculum and it has so many good ideas and I want to do all of them!
We have read stories that my kids have absolutely no interest in. I am falling asleep just attempting to read these stories aloud and any sort of lessons my kids were supposed to be listening to are completely lost. None of us can even pay attention to the story much less tell you what is going on.
I would rather read my kids stories that they like, even if that means we don’t get to all the classics that we are told we are supposed to be reading. We get to create the love of learning that I believe many of us wanted to feel in school but too often had to move along to the next subject. Have fun learning and let me know what subjects you are excited to revisit with your kids!