Delight-Directed Learning: a Homeschool Natural for Summer
Delight-directed learning entails helping your kids pursue whatever interests come naturally to them. If your kids have been longing to go to a health care camp, or dive into a new orchestra performance, that’s delight-directed learning, which occurs naturally. Often this is most evident in sports. Our family did summer swim team. Other families will really dive into music and art.
Some kids will do nothing but read books. I had a son who constantly had a book in front of him. A lot of kids will do volunteer work; they’re really into being a candy striper at a hospital, and summer may be their only opportunity to do that. Others really love working with children, so they go from vacation bible school to vacation bible school helping out with different churches. Other kids will do the majority of their projects like scouting or 4H.
One way you can encourage delight-directed learning is to use summer as a gift-giving opportunity. You can give your children some gifts that will encourage their interests. For my son, this meant obtaining Teaching Company courses on economics or American government. For my other son, it meant different things, and for your children, it will mean different things as well. If you give gifts that encourage their interests, it can help them to feel like they’re taking a break.
Educational activities are another excellent way to encourage delight-directed learning. Try some field trips, or perhaps meet with an organized group that gets together for sports. Some parents plan units that their children can do independently. I wanted my children to have a health class, but we couldn’t fit it in the school year, so I bought them the book Total Health. They read the book, a chapter a week, and managed to finish it on their own time—and I didn’t have to be involved at all!
In the midst of everything else, be certain that you plan time for relaxation, where you require nothing. In the book Margin, the author talks about how important it is to have a lot of space. When you look at a book, the more white space there is on the page the easier it is for you to read the book, and the faster you’ll be able to read. The same is true for life—the more unplanned white space on the page of your life, the faster you’ll be able to go and the more efficient your life will be. Planning for nothing as well as planning for relaxation can really help.
If you plan to do summer school and there’s something academic that needs supervision, try having the non-teaching parent be the one who checks on the work and makes sure that it’s done each day. If your child is working independently through a math book or something, maybe you’re not checking it day-to-day and the non-teaching parent will just hand your child the test, take away the answer key, and check the work when they’re done. If you don’t have a spouse at home who can do this, you could share this job with a friend. Just make certain you get a break from academic work!
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