Learning Through Playing Games

The other night we played Rummikub, a game with tiles that are placed on the table. It seems to be a numerical cross between scrabble and the card game rummi. We had a great time once we got the hang of playing. With most new games we relax the rules until we've learned how to play. Playing games like this has always been more of a cooperative, friendly past-time rather than an emphasis on competitiveness.

Yesterday I woke up with a combined game and craft activity buzzing around my head. It's for younger children, but the craft activity could suit an older child. I called it Hickory Dickory A Clock & Counting Game.

When my children were young I loved making up games. Sometimes they'd pop into my head but most of the time I'd have a particular skill I wanted the children to learn and would create a game to suit. Games included ones like Hickory Dickory; dice, board or card games; role playing games; or games with toys. Playing games with my children was the easiest way to educate them!

If you have a game you like to play, or one that you've modified to suit your children, or one that you've made up and you'd like to share it with others on the Homeschool Australia website, please email me.

© Beverley Paine 2006

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Visit www.alwayslearningbooks.com.au for a great range of homeschooling, unschooling and books on natural learning!

Defining Delight Directed Home Education

Gregg Harris's article on Delight-Direct Study had me wondering if he and I read the same John Holt... His acceptance of delight driven learning as legitimate, especially for Christian homeschooling families, and his dismissal of unschooling, defined and encourgaged by the late John Holt, as something completely different, puzzled me.

John Holt helped me to see the way in which my conditioning as a schooled student hindered the educational growth and development of my children. His example, the one that I followed, and one that is historically the approach taken by those that study child development, is to observe and reflect. As a school teacher, John observed not only the way in which children didn't learn in school, and the ways that they did, but also his successes and failures as a teacher. First and foremost John was a school reformer. We all know how frustrating it is dealing with schools! At some point it's time to stop banging our heads against the wall and implement easier and energy efficient solutions. This is how John came to support and encourage homeschooling. After all, it is a method that has worked for millenia! Like others he could see that literacy rates, among other educational measures, had dropped considerably since the advent of mass compulsory schooling in the USA and continued to decline, despite the billions of dollars spent on 'improving' the school system.

The way Gregg Harris describes John Holt's 'hand's off' approach to education is a far cry from how I interpreted and put into practice the ideas John's words birthed in my head.

I can't remember reading anything in any of John's books (and I think I've read at least half a dozen over the last twenty years - about half, I reckon) that encourages parents to abandon their children throughout the learning/educational process. John (or a parent) was always in the picture in his descriptions of children learning. What John discovered was that learning for learning sake is incredibly inefficient and sometimes a sad waste of time of resources, as the lessons are usually often forgotten. John advocated interest based learning - led naturally by the learner, but within an environment that supported and encouraged the child. All of the examples in his book showed dedicated and committed, caring and attentive, loving parents.

We waste a lot of time in homeschooling land mucking about with definitions, and when all is said and done, the tendency to do this is based on our own too well schooled conditioning. The desire to tease things apart, analyse them, label them, schedule them, and make them fit into tidy boxes - that's what school did to us. Some of us are naturally organised of course, but one of the roles of school is to get us to all think this way so we can be productive little cogs in someone else's big machinery...

More information on Delight Driven education can be found on the Home Hearts website.

© Beverley Paine 2006

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Visit www.alwayslearningbooks.com.au for a great range of homeschooling, unschooling and books on natural learning!

Freedom, Choice and an Abundant Lifestyle

I believe an abundant joyful life isn't about only freedom of choice... it's about responsibility. I'm wary of the word freedom, and the word choice. I think both can be really misleading. And easily corrupted. So we have responsibilities. We base our philosophy around meeting our survival needs as simply as possible (something we frequently fail to do as life becomes unnecessarily complex each day!) - surviving means learning how to be responsible both as individuals and as community members.

Freedom and choice seem more like luxuries to me... we can afford them when the basic responsibilities of life are met. Therefore they aren't that essential... so we don't aim for them. I find it eliminates a lot of the issues people seem to have with other. Abundance happens when we learn to go with the flow - allow nature (our natures) to guide us. When we trust in the natural way of being. Joy is taking a breath and thinking, wow, I'm taking a breath. Cool eh?!

There are so many things that determine our path - we are never really 'free' to follow our self-determined path in a conscious way. Our subconscious seems to be much more in control of where we're going and what we're going to bump into! Learning to read the patterns allows us to consciously see the amazing synchronicity.. then we can build our own wisdom. Sometimes our head leads us around in circles and we wonder why we can't have what we desire... We fail to trust ourselves.

I once read: "The access to the things you desire comes when you focus on JOY in your present moment with the knowing that all your desires are on the way."

That's just it - I don't focus on 'desires' - I focus on meeting needs, not desires. And defining needs in a very basic way. Life becomes meaningful and my purpose becomes clear. Finding clarity and getting rid of the all the gumph we humans have attached to being alive brings the joy. Simplying our lives allows us to see the amazing abundance. The path becomes clear - joyful - easy. Fulfilled desires fall into my lap - not because I pursue them, but because that's what happens when one moves with consciousness in life...

© Beverley Paine 2006

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Reasons to Keep Regular Homeschooling Records

I often hear parents commenting that they don't want to 'waste time' on recording their children's learning. I'm not sure that they are aware that most of their worries about home education and the legal issues arise, for the most part, from a lack of confidence in learning naturally. I've only ever met one or two parents who felt so confident that they could convince anyone of the efficacy of the approach without resorting to refering to their records - and I wasn't one of them!

Recording - whether by the delightful approach that a snap happy friend of mine does, by keeping her digital camera handy all day, or by jotting notes in a diary, writing anecdotal or explanatory notes on children's samples of work and building a portfolio (a joy to flip through forever) - gets us in touch with the processes at work: how our children learn. Because we have to pay attention and watch closely and think about what is going on when our child does this or that, or says something different, or behaves in a different manner, and reflect on that, we are better able to discern his or her preferred learning style. This in turn helps us to work out different ways to build on his strengths, or strengthen her weaknesses or expand his limitations. Some of us do this naturally: I know I did but I also acknowledge that I was prone to forgetfulness. Eventually I decided to keep records more often to help my less than perfect memory. With three children I also frequently fell prey to treating them as homogenous humans, ignoring that fact that they were individuals and had completely different ways of perceiving and learning about the world!

In the end, if you don't want to comply with local regulations, then you are, in effect, protesting against them. This is an ethical stand that living in Australia allows. How you protest is up to you. I always go for a low key, least stressful approach as that is the way I'm built. Keeping records allowed me to build a confidence in my role as home educator to the point I could easily hold my ground in a roomful of teachers. Thomas (19) was never 'registered' as a home schooler yet we were never approached to register by departmental officials. I knew that if we were challenged I could prove, using evidence from our record keeping regime, that he was progressing in all areas of child development. Being prepared meant that if such a situation ever arose I wouldn't find myself panicked and forced into rash actions which I might later regret.

Record keeping - in any form - is also a very useful skill to demonstrate. It's the cornerstone of scientific advancement. Businesses wouldn't prosper without keeping records. There are many different ways to record a project - and educating our children at home is a project - and all of these ways have instrinsic educational value. If we stop seeing record keeping as an onerous burden and begin to view it as simply another useful tool in our educational tool bag it is no longer a waste of time and energy.

© Beverley Paine 2006

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Writing an Unschooling Learning Plan for the Year Ahead

I know a lot of unschoolers don't bother with writing out unschooling learning programs or a curriculum for the year ahead and tend to 'fly by the seat of their pants'. Some see writing learning plans a bit alien to the concept of learning naturally, but I never found it so. I was always a little paranoid and not very sure that learning naturally would get my kids to where I wanted them to be. Thus I went down the path of documenting the learning process - both as plans and as evaluation/anecdotal records. I put together an unschooling curriculum for Roger when he turned 13 to cover the next three years (developmental stage rather than age based). It was a comprehensive list that incidentally covered learning in all eight school based curriculum areas, together with a statement on philosophy, methodology and how we'd know he was learning. About five pages all up.

I did a similar learning program for April as a homeschooled Year 8 student - feeling worried that I'd need to justify our homeschooling as by then our exemption had lapsed and I figured they'd notice she was turning 13... They didn't. The plan we put together was largely unused. We found more interesting ways to learn what was needed and by the end of the year only a few things on the original plan had been touched on in the way we'd planned. Planning was good though - especially at the beginning of the year - as it helped focus my thoughts on our goals and the reasons we were home educating again.

I used to read through our philosophy statements, etc, at least once a year, to help me remember what not to do, how not to teach, what was most important, and to let go of the need to emulate other homeschooling families' approaches/methods, or copy what the schools were doing. Reading through our self-designed curriculum helped to centre us.

© Beverley Paine 2006

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Visit www.alwayslearningbooks.com.au for a great range of homeschooling, unschooling and books on natural learning!

Homeschooling Recording Made Easy Using Snapshots of Every Day Life Learning at Home

I'm a haphazard recorder, even though I write reams every day. My hard drive is a mess, according to Thomas, who wonders how I can find anything and asks if I ever access even a fraction of what I've stashed away. I do. I have boxes and folders on my desk and on shelves in my office too. It's one of the things I want to change and simplify in my life!

What I found very useful was bouts of concentrated recording: a snapshot of our life in a two to four week period, three or four times a year. This was something I could do. Keeping detailed records every day was something that would quickly fall by the wayside as life simply got in the way! Plus, in the early years, I'd work with one learning plan and recording system for two-three weeks and then abandon it. We did a lot of 'contracts' in those days, with checklists and the like. It looked terribly structured (for those few weeks anyway) but in reality the children still played most of the day, or did chores, or became involved in what we were doing, etc. The difference between those weeks and the other weeks was that I recorded, in educational jargon and in a structured way, what was happening. Back then I was also in the habit of asking the kids to do a page or three from workbooks for an hour or so three or four times a week - it all helped to build my confidence that they were learning even when they didn't use their work books.

I chatted to a homeschooler whose preferred mode of learning had nothing to do with paper or writing and she really didn't want to keep records, plus she wanted her children to learn nestled within their culture - which wasn't one that embraced recording and writing. It was challenging coming up with ways to record the natural learning process. The best I could think of was visually - through art and film, with audio recordings. Much of their learning activities were of the kind that left no trace - no concrete 'evidence' that learning has occured. And it's true to say that most of the education in a home learning environment occurs through conversation and doing things together. I settled on the idea of taking snapshots of development over the year - at least four separate 'weeks' spaced widely apart, captured on video perhaps, like a tv documentary. Or a scrapbook, done in much the same way. There is nothing to say that our records of our children's progress can't be a creative endeavour or a labour of love.

The end point is always the same: when we make the effort to record and reflect on our children's learning we learn so much about them, about their learning styles and needs, and this allows our confidence as home educators to grow and helps us determine where to go next and how to help them achieve their goals in a sympathetic and effect manner.

© Beverley Paine 2006

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Visit www.alwayslearningbooks.com.au for a great range of homeschooling, unschooling and books on natural learning!