WHAT IS DELIGHT-DIRECTED LEARNING?

For us, delight-directed learning means just that. Simply put, the kids' education is based on following their interests. We do not follow textbooks, workbooks, curriculums, or pre-set plans (except for math). We do not have assignment sheets and I often do not know what the kids will be doing each day until it happens. In this type of learning I see the responsibility of parents as leading kids rather than driving them. I see it as kids taking the active part of learning rather than passively acquiescing to my plans. I see my job as motivating them rather than spoon feeding them, challenging them to go above and beyond what we could accomplish with assignment sheets. It is the one doing the studying that learns most deeply. When Mom teaches, she learns. When the student does the digging, thinking, and digesting, taking the active part-- he learns. Testing and review are not necessary when learning is an active, living process rather than a passive one because learning is deep and meaningful. But just because the kids are taking active line responsibility for educating themselves does not mean that the parents passively stand by and cross their fingers, hoping it all turns out in the end. Parents are ultimately responsible to God for the upbringing of their children and we take that very seriously.

The education of our children comes out of real life. We want learning to have meaning and purpose beyond filling in blanks in a workbook or answering questions at the end of a textbook chapter. All of life is truly our curriculum. When kids learn what they are interested in, their learning is meaningful and they will dig deeply. Learning this way is never dumbed down. Kids can rise quickly to levels beyond a traditional high school education. Because their education truly belongs to them, they begin to care about developing skills like writing. They want to improve and know more, and they spend most of their waking hours learning.

A GLIMPSE AT MY 16-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER'S EDUCATION

Before I say anything else, I wanted to let you see that this type of learning is not inferior to a traditional education, and, in fact, gives a broad and deep education. Since my daughter is the oldest, I'll use her as an example of what delight-directed learning looks like in the later stages. Of course, the education of each of my children will be very, very different because they are all following different paths. I do not give my daughter any assignments or direction. Her education is completely self-directed and she is self-taught, although she consults me regularly for input and accountability. She has finished Algebra 2 and will be starting Jacob's Geometry next. She is learning French. She plays piano-- both classical music and improvisation-- and writes her own songs, which she sings and plays in church. She reads one missionary biography after another and likes to study about the places she reads about. My daughter loves classic literature. While she reads literature, she also likes to study the history of the period, and vice versa. Jane Austen is her favorite author, but she likes the Brontes and Sigrid Undset very well, too. She's also read Hawthorne, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, and many others. She's now working on reading the books in Invitation to the Classics. My daughter enjoys quilting. She is currently reading books by C.S. Lewis and other outstanding authors on the art of writing. She writes well enough that she placed 2nd in the 1997 National Written and Illustrated contest-- a contest with 7,500 finalists in which winners are published. The book she entered in the contest was a story she had written after a long period of reading and study about slavery in the U.S. She wrote the story for her own enjoyment, and when I read it, I encouraged her to enter it in the contest. She spent many hours on research for the illustrations in her book and illustrated it using the medium of watercolor.

My daughter has studied many periods of world and U.S. history, but let me tell you how one area of study branched into many others because this is typical of delight-directed learning. She read a book about Nicholas II and Alexandra of Russia, which opened up her interest in this area. She began reading more about the Romanovs, then the Russian Revolution, then Marxism, then the history of philosophy, and more. The story of the family of Nicholas II led her to a book about the forensic and DNA study of their remains. Her study of philosophy inspired her to read more by Francis Schaeffer (she's read many of his books), which led to a serious study of apologetics-- Ravi Zacharias, many books by C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and others. At the same time she has also read many old, Christian classics. It just so happened that right in the middle of all of this reading, her Swedish pen pal (who is from an intellectual, atheistic family) began asking my daughter about her belief in God. She and Anna have written very long letters corresponding about all the typical intellectual objections to God. All of this reading and thinking by my daughter was timely. No coincidence, in my opinion. Now Anna is at the point where she says, "I'm ready to believe, and I want to believe. I want to know more." She's past the intellectual stuff and is at the personal level now. All of the reading my daughter has done on these subjects has been in depth. She has read nine books specifically on the Romanovs, one of them close to 1,000 pages. The reading on the other topics that have branched off this subject has been heavy, as well. She pulled some of our college European history books off the shelf to read. Somewhere along the line, this study took Aimee into the 1920s, where she read several histories, some literature, studied fashion and culture, learned piano music from the period, interviewed her grandmother, and is now reading extensively about the Lindberghs-- both Anne and Charles. She has read almost all of Anne's writings and diaries, which lead into the 1930s and also other books about flying. My daughter has already studied the '30s and especially the Depression extensively, but is wanting to learn more and will possibly write a story set during the Depression to enter in the writing contest. I won't even try to list all of the branches off of this part of her history study, and I won't elaborate on her other history studies, either, but they are many and varied.

She has covered science topics naturally, too. We have two biology texts, but we haven't used them in the traditional way. Still, we laughed last year when we realized that our daugher had almost completely read both biology texts just using them as resources (one of many) for other areas of study. We attended a creation seminar and she became interested in that. She listened to a set of tapes, read some books, and read about the creation/evolution controversy in the biology texts. She also enjoys gardening and wildflowers. She was reading some botany books as she picked wildflowers to paint. She opened the biology texts to read the botany information there. She likes to flower garden and has been planning a fenced garden area for her enjoyment, so she was reading gardening books-- about soil, plants, etc. She again opened the biology texts and red the parts about plants. Then she read the wonderful books by Dr. Paul Brand, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and In His Image. She found the anatomy and physiology information fascinating, and went to the biology texts again! She also read a bit about midwifery and was allowed to go in the room during my sister's c-section. When she was interested in DNA because of the Romanov study, she read about that in the biology texts, too. For each of these studies she uses many resources. She has also dabbled in ornithology and will be taking a Bird Biology course from Cornell University Lab of Ornithology as soon as the new edition is available (July 1999). She has done other science projects including nature paintings and writings, but I won't list them all.

There are many other areas of study which our daughter has covered in the past two years and is covering. I couldn't possibly list them all. I have no doubt that she will continue to learn about these topics that interest her and that they will continue to branch into other areas of study. Once the door to an interest is opened, it never closes. That's the beauty of delight-directed learning-- there is no final exam-- it's a lifelong endeavor.

IMPORTANCE OF A CONSISTENT ROUTINE

One thing that I want to stress is that, for our family, following a delight-directed course does not mean dropping everything to do whatever we feel like doing. We've chosen this path of learning because we think it provides an excellent education. This type of learning is more peaceful and in most ways much easier for the parent than traditional schooling, but in some ways it is more challenging. I've become a better parent from homeschooling this way. I've learned to work with the hearts of my children to motivate and train them, rather than dealing only with external behavior. I've learned to discern the wonderful individuals my children are, how they learn differently, and as I've prayed for wisdom in leading them, I've come to see them more with God's eyes. I've learned to tune in to the interests and gifts of my children-- watching, encouraging, and listening. I need to be careful not to try to turn each spark of interest into a course of study, but allow the kids to determine where they will go with it because they push to much higher levels of study on their own. And, anyway, if I throw a log on a spark, it will extinguish the flame.

I've noticed that it's almost completely up to me to set the tone for each day. When I get out of bed and wander around, wasting time, not really doing anything but dawdling, the kids follow suit. When I get up and get busy, the kids tend to busy themselves constructively, too. When we are not home consistently I have noticed that the kids do not do the same type of in depth learning that they do when we keep a consistent routine. For us, living a slow-paced life with lots of unbroken time to devote to their learning pursuits and projects is essential. We strive for consistency, but not rigidity. (God is very consistent, and I want to live according to His image because I was created that way.) This type of learning does not work for us when we don't keep a fairly consistent routine. We get up in the morning, do our chores and personal devotions, meet in the living/dining/kitchen area for read-aloud time, then go on to do something constructive. Living a consistent life seems to make a tremendous difference in the quality and quantity of learning that goes on in our home. Delight-directed learning is really a lifestyle.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CREATING A LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Creating a learning environment in our homes and modeling learning for our children is important. While I believe that a child learns best by following his natural timetable, as he did when he learned to walk and speak, I also believe that parental influence is essential. This starts at birth. We provide an environment of care and nurturing for our babies. A child learns to talk because he is talked to. A child's curiosity grows because it has been nurtured and encouraged. A child's creativity blooms because it has been encouraged and appreciated. Children can't grow and learn in a healthy, positive way completely on their own. God gave children parents to train them, care for them, and love them, and we can establish a rich, warm, encouraging environment for growth and learning. One of our main goals for our young children (educationally) was to instill a love of books in them. We read to them every day (and we read on our own) and bought books all the time. When children love books, whether that is reading them on their own or being read to, they can learn anything. There was a study done years ago that showed a relationship between the amount of books in the home and the success of the children who grew up in that home. We got rid of the TV. We stayed home. We tried to instill a love of nature in the kids, taking long, slow walks, watching birds, finding new wildflowers, lying on a blanket at night to watch the night sky, studying snowflakes on the fence, looking at the clouds, seeing the signs of weather changes, and more. We buy field guides, nature art books, experiment books, and other interesting science books. We buy and subscribe to magazines for the kids according to their areas of interest (and ours). We have art supplies available all the time (good ones), art books, project books, tools, wood, classical music and biographies of composers, etc. We let the kids cook and bake, using adult cookbooks and a collection of kid's cookbooks. We have lots of games that develop thinking skills or are just for fun. The kids have used the video camera to make movies, even wonderful stop-animation movies using Legos as characters. The kids are free to make messes. They make paper, stationery, birdhouses, bird feeders, doll clothes, hot air balloons, and whatever else they can think of. Our son made a miniature working motorized cable car system in his bedroom to transport his Legos and other things from the windowsill by his bed to his closet shelf. When we moved to our house 2 years ago, the kids began using the emptied cardboard moving boxes to make things. They made mailboxes for their desks and created their own postal system, they made drawer organizers, they made cars for their stuffed animals complete with working headlights, trunks, doors and steering wheels. They made 2-story houses for their stuffed animals complete with rooms, appliances, dormer windows, shingles on the roof, chimneys, and even lights in some of the rooms. They made mini-mailboxes and mini-stationery for these houses, too. All of this might seem insignificant educationally, but I have learned to value this type of learning, critical thinking, and problem solving much more than what the kids might have covered in a workbook. A friend visited from the coast and saw these cardboard creations. I received a letter from her a few days after her visit and she said, "You inadvertently re-charged my homeschool batteries, again showing me that there are many ways to learn. It was seeing '101 Uses for Cardboard Boxes' that did it this time!" None of this was my idea, it's just what the kids came up with when they were given the time, freedom, and resources to do it.