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How Do You Raise An Independent Learner?
a collaborative project…
I’d like to start a discussion about the ways in which we can encourage our kids to learn independently. But before we jump into making a list, it seems to me a good place to start is to highlight the ways in which our kids are already primed for independent learning.
Your child was born hard-wired to learn. We come preloaded with the gift of curiosity. This innate interest in the world around us motivates us to explore our environment. The hours babies invest in learning to control their arms, legs and hands is propelled by a desire to grab those delightful objects they see hanging just beyond their reach. They want to bring those objects closer so they can examine the shape and feel, and figure out what else they can do with those shiny things. This innate curiosity is why babies eventually crawl, then walk, then run. It’s a gift from the Creator that causes us to grow.
Without a desire to learn, we would never fully develop. Not only does curiosity cause us to do the hard work necessary to develop our gross and fine motor skills; but it also causes our brains to develop. Intellectual growth comes from learning. The more we invest in learning, the more our brains develop.
Staying mentally active is also one way we can delay the effects of aging. God intends that learning be a lifelong endeavor as part of healthy living. (Homeschooling isn’t just beneficial for your children, it is good for us moms, too.)
Here’s another part of the equation: Not only are kids hard-wired to learn, we are also built to be social creatures. In order to reach our full intellectual maturity we need others to help us. This is primarily facilitated by parents and siblings, but as we grow our social circle should grow and we learn from interacting with others, too.
Learning is stimulated when we exercising our brains in groups.
How should these two truths —our gift of curiosity and our social nature — influence our homeschooling? What do you think?
Comments
5 responses to “How Do You Raise An Independent Learner?”
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I was just thinking earlier tonight, as I was looking at the moon in all it’s amazing glory, about how much I miss having a toddler who gets excited about everything. I was remembering how much my oldest son, who will turn 13 in a couple of weeks, loved the moon when he was young. He would get so excited whenever we would go outside and he could see the moon. I miss the days when everyday was a new adventure and there was excitment in every new discovery.
I feel like I respond much like a toddler now as I teach my children, in that, I get so excited with all the things we learn homeschooling. Things that I have ethier forgotten or never learned in school. I get so excited to be able to expose them to so many important things and to point out God’s hand in it all. Unfortunately, they don’t always, rarely, show the same excitment as they did when they were toddlers. However, I do think, if we pay close attention, God shows us those little fruits that keeps us going. On more than one occasion I have heard one of my sons explaining something we had learned to someone else and he would show the same excitment that I had expressed. It is so rewarding to realize the seeds of “a love for learning” that I have tried to plant are taking root.
I think the three most important things for our children to see, as we go through our home school day, is our love for them, our love for what we are doing in teaching and learning with them, and our love for God. Whether they show it to us directly or not, a love for learning is contagious, which helps to nuture their growth into an independent learner. -
Might I begin with thoughts regarding raising infants and toddlers?
I think it’s important to put babies on a large blanket on the floor, where they have freedom of movement, and can learn to control themselves and their environment. If babies are always in some type of holder or seat, they come to rely on it, and don’t know what to do when they have freedom.
I also think young children do not need to be “entertained” every minute. Yes, it is important to provide a stimulating environment in which young children encounter plants, animals, music, the outdoors, books, worthwhile toys, and a variety of humans who love them. But starting when they are quite young, I think it is good to give them short periods of time in which the child must do the acting on the environment. For this to work, the environment must be enriching, and the child must have freedom within safe boundaries.
As the children grow older, there will be benefits from training them to occupy their time well themselves. For example, on long car rides, if children are able to see out the window, they can learn to be content with looking out the window, and coming up with mind-occupying activities, for part of the time. Also important is a significant amount of time spent outdoors just playing. If there are siblings in the home, it’s important that they learn to play together games of their own devising. The role of the parent is to train the children to occupy themselves within safe boundaries.
As the child moves into more academic pursuits, the day can be structured so that there is a balance between time spent on needed academic skills, and time for the child to pursue interests. Again, the environment must be enriching (providing musical instruments, art supplies, scientific equipment, and of course, books) and there must be an expectation that the child will spend the time wisely. This is more easily attained if the home life is not dominated by TV and electronics.
The hope is that children raised in this manner at an early age will grow to take more responsibility for their own learning. Parents can help nudge this process along by taking the time to have planning sessions with the child, and teaching the child to fill out her own planner. This takes time, but is worthwhile in the long run. The parent can guide the planning sessions with comments such as “Which outside activities do you have scheduled this week?” and “When would you like to have X completed for the week?” and “What are you going to learn this week?” The responsibility for completing schoolwork and learning is on the child. It is important for the parent to ask questions later such as “Tell me what you learned about X today” or “Did you learn the new math concept?” instead of merely “Did you finish your work?” The emphasis is on learning, not just completion of tasks.
It is also important to give the child some latitude as he grows, so that he may, for example, attempt to do all of one subject in one day, and another subject the next. In some cases, this can actually work, as the student may need a long block of time to spend on one subject. In other cases, the child and parent may learn this does not work. But the child needs the freedom to try out some scheduling of their own time, to learn what does and does not work. Better for them to learn this while they are still at home, where the consequences are not so great, than to have to learn this in college.
I look forward to someone else addressing the social nature aspect of learning.
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Linda,
I think this is excellent advice. An issue psychologists have noted in regards to the rise of the Internet and digital media is our attention span is shrinking. Teachers in a traditional setting are finding they must shift to new activities on average every 7 minutes – how exhausting. I think your insights would really help infants and toddlers develop both their imaginations and longer attention spans.
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I agree that kids are born with a natural predisposition to learn; in some senses, they can’t help but do so, being proverbial blank slates at the start. Their brains are wired for it, and in my experience, their natural desires are as well. For example, asking my three year old niece “how many are you” and getting three fingers in return prompts me to ask if she’s “this many” by holding up three different fingers. She was sure she wasn’t that many, but after asking a few questions back and forth, she got the idea, likely muddled and incomplete, that three could be represented on fingers in more than one way, which is the first step to abstracting the number itself from the physical means used to represent it. The whole interchange took a few minutes, and played out like a game. Asking her a few days later, though, the idea was still there; what seemed a game had left its mark.
By contrast, I also have any number of high school students who seem to think learning is a drag, and that my job has much in common with that of a medieval jailer. So what happens over the years that turns a bright-eyed, inquisitive child into a sullen, electronic-device-absorbed teenager?
Without answering that question in its totality, I think part of the answer is modeling. Typically, when I meet a student’s parents for the first time, assuming I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time with the student first, I’m not at all surprised by what I find. The sullen student, bemoaning even the smallest tasks to be completed at home, typically has parents who apparently function the same way. The student who refuses to pick up a book typically has a father who apparently does nothing of the sort in his time off. On the other hand, students who read and learn voraciously typically have parents that do the same. Therefore, it seems to me that if you want to raise an independent learner, your best bet is to be one yourself and act the part.
During one of my school’s development meetings this past year, one source we read stated its thesis quite simply: children are always learning, so we must be careful what we are actually teaching. Keeping this in mind, perhaps the key to fostering a love of learning in children and young adults is to love learning visibly and honestly ourselves, thus encouraging them through our examples in ways we could never achieve with exhortation alone.-
David,
And how did your own parents perhaps model this well for you? What do you remember?
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