Laugh while you learn and retain 800% more! This Friday’s laugh is by The Brothers Winn. Brett and Jedd produce an innovative vodcast, What You Ought To Know, covering many and varied topics.
By January, the anticipation of a new school year has become a distant memory and the remaining months of homeschooling loom either as mountains of drudgery or peaks of delight. While using a relevant curriculum is paramount, I suspect that there is another key element at play here, one that most homeschooling parents would do well to consider.
Whatever your reason for undertaking a task of this great magnitude, the relevant question to consider is how you see your decision to homeschool altering with time? In your wildest dreams, do you think that in years to come government schools will adopt a curriculum that teaches core subjects without promoting hedonistic lifestyles? Do you think it will be as acceptable to have a nine-year-old who does not read as it will be to have an eighteen-month-old who does? Or do you think that private school tuition costs will actually drop? If you share our view that public education is on a downward spiral, then one of your obligations as homeschooling parents is to ensure that your children will know how to teach their children.
The easiest way to accomplish this is to surround your children with teaching opportunities. Because it is easy for children to confuse teaching with bossiness, initially it is helpful to formalize the course of action. Just like you, your teaching children need to see that what they are teaching has value; they need to know that there is a need to know. And your children need a method of accountability, which is best realized by measurable goals. Whether it is teaching the new puppy to come when called or teaching a younger sibling multiplication, be alert to both natural and created opportunities that demand more instructive effort on the part of your children. As your children’s teaching abilities increase, they will discover that teaching others can be a natural part of daily life.
So why not make 2010 the year of learning to teach? Set some concrete goals and enjoy the exciting adventure of raising young teachers!
Timberdoodle Co
Dan, Deb, Joy, Hope, Grace, Abel, and Pearl
P.S. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts. How are you cultivating your childrens’ teaching abilities? Join the discussion on Facebook here.
Over Christmas and New Years our family used some of our favorite Timberdoodle items during our different get-togethers!
Our first gathering was our fire department’s Christmas party, at which our family was responsible for child entertainment. We racked our brains for a while on this one, what would be engaging, indoor, and suitable for 1-25 children confined in a smallish room! We ended up with an assortment of different activities, (Rolit, Exago, Duplos, arts and crafts, etc) but our favorite was “target practice.”
After building a number of Citiblocs towers (which was almost an activity in and of itself), we held a shooting contest to see who could knock the towers down first with Hot Rocketz. It was a blast – literally! Of course the adults couldn’t stay away either, and it provided an easy and fun way to direct some of the endless energy that evening.
Our second gathering was our New Year’s get together with extended family and for this gathering we loved Word On The Street. Our family is not a “reserved” family and so of course we had many enthusiastic plays and lots of laughter. Word On The Street gave us an entertaining outlet for our excess of (friendly) group competition. Because we had family members arriving at different times the freedom of only having two teams, and no limit on how many team players, was a blessing.
Here are some short video clips Joy managed to capture while we were “trialing” the game with Grandma before the other relatives arrived:
So how about your family? Did you receive Timberdoodle items for Christmas? Which one was your family favorite?
