Extra Extra Read All About It!

I am so excited to participate in the Schoolhouse Review Crew's 5 Days of Teaching Creatively Blog Hop! And today's topic is Delight Directed Teaching. Which is great, because that's exactly what we do!

All of us learn best when we're interested in what we're learning, and children who are interested in learning, because they realize that learning is fun, are going to learn faster and better.

Lately we have a great example of delight directed learning around here. It's the "newspaper" that was 100% the twins' own idea, while I was busy unpacking from our move. They decided to start a newspaper and sold "subscriptions" (for $0.02 per paper) to my parents, and Rodney and me (somewhere along the line, I bought a copy for Little Bit too, she was feeling left out). They're getting typing practice, which brings in a whole new level of spelling practice, because Word tells them if it's wrong, so they know to ask about it. As they get farther into it, I'm going to slowly work with them to correct punctuation and sentence structure and such. I suspect that it will go much more smoothly when intro'd that way, then if I just sat down and told them what to write about and such. AND it will go more smoothly by holding off abit. . . if I sat down with their first paper and pointed out all the spelling (even with spell check), and punctuation and capitalization and sentence structure errors, it would suck all the fun out of it. Instead of being proud of their very own paper, they'd be frustrated and demoralized at all that they had done wrong (and/or blaming each other . . .well SHE typed it! Well SHE told me to say it that way . . . ), so instead, each week, I'll slip in a little bit more instruction and hopefully it will continue to be fun. (Added bonus, the first week, after they typed it, I went in and adjusted font size and all that fun stuff. The 2nd week, I showed Sassy how to change font size and do page breaks and set her loose. She did GREAT!! Now she's (impatiently) waiting for me to fix some formatting thing for their 3rd paper, but still, she's learning word processing and layout too!

Sassy and MiniMe can't quite wrap their minds around why anyone would NOT want to learn, or NOT bother to ask questions. Part of that is their personalities, but I also believe that being allowed to learn about the things THEY are interested in, at their pace, is what has continued to foster the inquisitiveness and love of learning that most children have as toddlers and preschoolers. I'm soo thankful that I learned about the concept of delight directed learning (though I'm not sure I heard that term, until later) before we ever started homeschooling, it's been such a blessing for us!