Learning @ Home |by Kerry McDonald, M.Ed
Our homes are powerful places for living and learning. As we move through the daily and weekly rhythms of home, we discover panoply of learning moments for our young children. These moments are not tied to a curriculum, not focused on standards or expectations. They happen naturally, organically, as our children follow their innate instincts to explore the important tools of their culture with curiosity and enthusiasm. Boston College psychology professor, Dr. Peter Gray, writes in his book, Free To Learn: “Children are biologically predisposed to take charge of their own education. When they are provided with the freedom and means to pursue their own interests, in safe settings, they bloom and develop along diverse and unpredictable paths, and they acquire the skills and confidence required to meet life’s challenges.”1
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Here are 10 simple ideas for re-envisioning your home as a powerful place for natural learning:
- Freedom You are a facilitator of freedom, a protector of the conditions of natural childhood learning. You simply listen, and watch, and then you help to gather or find resources that help your child to learn naturally as he is innately designed to do. You bridge the gap between your child’s nascent interests and ideas and the vast world around him.
As pioneering early childhood educator, John Holt, wrote in his classic book, Teach Your Own: “What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over Whether your children are still toddlers and pre- their experiences, and to use fantasy and play schoolers, or if you have decided to homeschool, to make meaning out of them; and advice, road there are many ways that you can create at home maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to the conditions that ignite natural learning. By get where they want to go (not where we think reimagining the ordinary spaces of our homes they ought to go), and to find out what they as extraordinary resources for early childhood want to find out.”2 As a parent, you protect this learning, we can foster a home learning envifreedom—the time and space for natural learnronment that sparks curiosity, engages children ing—and connect your child’s burgeoning naturally in discovery of their world, and cultipassions with the abundant resources of your vates a more peaceful home life. community.