Are you new to homeschooling and maybe only familiar with traditional schooling? Have you been homeschooling for a few years and not found a homeschool joy that lasts? Or maybe you are a veteran homeschool mom but feel like life and fun have been sucked out of your school day.
I want to introduce you to interest-led learning! This can be as loose as unschooling or as structured as you want. This style of homeschooling is more about changing the filter of how you present the information that you already want to incorporate into your school day. Instead of trudging through the same core subjects, day after day, approach these through a lens of topics your children are interested in.
How to Start Interest-Led Learning
My first tip is to sit your child or children down and help them dream big on anything they can imagine that they would like to learn about: snakes, rockets, polar bears, computers, ancient Mayan pyramids, tractors, or watercolor painting? Really, the options are truly endless. Since I have four kids, we take turns choosing the topics. I make a list so that I can see and plan ahead of time to have materials and also so that they know what to look forward to.
One of the simplest ways of teaching in an interest-led learning style is to use unit studies. These can be a few days long or even a month, depending on the study. They focus on one topic and utilize as many other subjects as possible while still staying within that main topic. Fortunately, there are many wonderful unit studies already created out there. However, I have found that even when there isn’t one ready-made, utilizing the library, YouTube, and Pinterest for a few craft ideas on the subject helps a lot.
I often start the day with the topic we are learning about so that we start the day off right and they can come to the table excited to learn. It makes easing into other subjects like math so much easier because we had a fun start! It isn’t very difficult to include reading, writing, history, and grammar into any topic you are working with.
If we use the example of butterflies as our topic, we can see how many subjects we can pull into it. We can visit the library and read all the books about them. Depending on their age, your student can write a paper about butterflies or copy sentences from the book. You can teach grammar and handwriting by correcting their mistakes or offering areas of improvement. Use YouTube and Google to find something interesting historically about butterflies or people who discovered them. You can also practice geography by finding different species on a map.
I love using interest-led learning because if you think about it, our job is to supply our kids with the basics they will need in life. Everything else should support their calling in life since that is really the path they will go down. If you have an engineer-minded child they may never need art lessons or to know every aspect of history. An artistic child may never need higher math. Give them the basics and a love of learning and they will be equipped to learn anything else they will ever need to know.
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