Valuing learning is critical to successful homeschooling. Here are 3 strategies to help you and your children think about learning as a process, not an outcome.
Here's what you'll learn in this article:
- The importance of seeing value in learning as a process for growing and getting the most out of life.
- Three strategies you can start using now to add more learning to your home school experience.
- Answers to common questions about integrating learning as a core value into home school.
- Key takeaways for valuing the process of learning in your home school experience.
- How to learn more about home schooling tactics and incorporating varied learning experiences into your day.
Treating Learning as a Value is Essential if You Want to Crush Home School
A value reflects what is important to us and helps guide our behaviors each day. We often employ values when interacting with people and deciding what causes to support. Values can play a role in any project that we undertake. They can serve as our guide posts. Including learning as a value in home school can guide your decision-making regarding your overall approach, the lessons you offer, and materials you select.
Learning as a value means approaching learning as a process, not an outcome. It is the difference between giving your children the minimum educational requirements to complete as quickly as possible and giving your child a lifelong skill they can use to explore and create in a way that uplifts and deepens their interests.
3 Strategies for Valuing Learning in Home School and Fostering Creativity and Exploration Every Day
Ideally, an education teaches you how to learn in a way that works best for your individual needs. Educating that focuses on memorizing facts, rote drills, or minimum requirements is approaching learning as an outcome—an end result to be accomplished, so you can move onto the next task. This is often what people are referencing when they talk about “teaching to the test”.
When you approach learning as a value, it becomes a way of thinking--a process to guide your behavior. It isn’t only about completing the assignment, it's about how you get there and the discoveries you make along the way.
With this in mind, here are three strategies parent-educators and other caregivers can use to incorporate learning as a value into their home school experience:
1. Shifting Your Mindset to Value Learning in Home School
Why did you start homeschooling? In the short-term, it might have been for a practical reason like scheduling. But, once you achieve that short-term goal it’s time to think about the bigger picture.
What do you want from homeschooling for your child? Only meeting minimum educational requirements each day leaves a lot of time in the day. What else will your child do with that time? What will it model to them about the value of education if the expectation is the minimum?
Your child gets one childhood to have the space to explore their interests and learn about themselves. Embarking on home school is an incredible opportunity to demonstrate to them how rich and engaging each day can be. Expanding your mindset to prioritize the value of learning will allow you to provide a variety of learning experiences as part of homeschooling.
2. Valuing the Process of Learning
Consider these two vignettes:
Homeschooling Without Learning as a Value: Pat starts the day when told by their parent—sometimes it is early morning and sometimes it is around lunch. The expectation is to complete two work sheets, an online program, and read. Pat knows this takes about an hour to do, then the rest of the day can be spent playing outside and running errands with their parent.
Homeschooling With Learning as a Value: Pat starts getting ready in time to start the day. Their parent is starting a new article about the moon that they are looking forward to hearing. The expectation is to complete standard requirements in the day like reading and a math worksheet. Pat knows how to manage completion of these items during the 6-hour school day. The other spaces in the school day allow for returning to ongoing projects from sewing to science, and the freedom to select other self-directed learning activities like foreign language, painting, calligraphy, sentence analysis, writing, or plant and bird classification.
Each of these school days accomplishes minimum educational requirements, but the second emphasizes the value of learning as a process your child can use to create and explore their world. Valuing the process of learning is about having a prepared environment that includes distinct learning activities from what is available outside of school hours.
3. Creating Learning Activities
Not all activities are learning activities. Likewise, a learning activity for one child might just be an activity for another child.
A key benefit of home school is the ability to tailor your child’s learning activities to meet their style and needs. When creating and choosing learning activities, it is helpful to consider the concept of mastery used in the Montessori method. As applied to learning activities, the concept of mastery is a useful decision-making tool. If your child has mastered an activity, then this is not a learning activity to include in the home school day.
For example, if your child knows how to add to such a level that they rarely to never make a mistake, then they’ve mastered it. At this stage, they cannot simply do addition problems as part of school. However, if they want to challenge themselves to do X number of problems in 60 seconds, then this may create a situation that is not mastered, so it is appropriate as a learning activity for home school. Ideal learning activities are those that are not mastered and provide just enough of a challenge to require critical thinking and focus to complete.
FAQs: Valuing Learning in Home School
What if I don’t have time to prepare all the extra learning activities?
Crush Home School can help! In addition to our monthly membership that provides topical learning activities adjusted for each grade-level, you can adapt how you approach planning for each home school day to begin adding more activities that prioritize learning. Using a home school planner is a great way to build a routine around creating and preparing learning activities.
What if my child is used to only doing the minimum education requirements?
If your child isn't used to a full day of learning activities, it can take time to shift the expectations and the routine. Start at a natural transition point like after a break or at the start of a new quarter. Include your child in discussions about what is coming. You can also build in new trial activities as you lead up to the shift.
For example, prepare a new space with possible learning activities like books on a favorite topic or blocks of the geometric shapes with their matching names. Your child will likely take interest in the new material without much coaxing, so this can be a low-pressure approach to start the shift to valuing learning.
Key Takeaways
- Appreciate the value learning as a process. When you value learning in home school, you are giving your child a valuable tool they can use throughout their lives.
- Shift your mindset (if necessary). When you value learning in home school, homeschooling becomes about creating days with variety and challenging activities, not about finishing by lunch.
- Learning is a process, not an outcome. Learning as a process is about how you approach each day—with curiosity and wonder, not as a list of things to complete.
- Learning activities provide novelty and challenge. When deciding if an activity is a learning activity, consider what your child has mastered and how a potential learning activity will provide them with something new.
Where to Learn More
If you would like more tips for improving your children's home school experience, consider becoming a member of Crush Home School! With our membership plan, you get monthly guidance delivered to your inbox with downloadable resources and much more. Learn more about becoming a Crush Home School member.