homeschooling active kids

Do you have a child who can’t sit still and be quiet? GOOD! This may be a problem at school, but not in the real world. In today’s world you need a little ADHD just to get by.We must NEVER judge a child by his ability to be passive. Passive children often turn into passive adults, and that is a problem. Did you know that classrooms and desks were invented for the convenience of teachers, not for the best interests of the child?

Every child development specialist (and wise parent) knows that children need lots of time to play, imagine and invent. Children NEED to learn about the world around them by asking questions and experimenting. Children are naturally ACTIVE, ENERGETIC, IMAGINATIVE, CREATIVE, and NOISY. They were NEVER meant to sit still for hours on end and be passive. Why train up a generation of couch potatoes? Children were designed to learn through PLAY, DISCOVERY and by IMITATING their parents and the people around them. Do you realize that your child was smart enough to figure out how to walk, sing, turn on the computer, and learn a language by age two-and-a-half? With NO lessons! He wanted to be like you, so he figured it out on his own. How is it that we live in a society where passive children are rewarded, but creative and active children are punished. Real life does not work this way. Not anymore.

Contemporary schooling is all about controlling the child and training him to be a good student. A good student is expected to be silent, to stop asking questions, and to stop being active. The highest praise goes to the students who can follow a teacher’s instructions… instead of their own hearts. The applause goes to the child who can fill in the blank and memorize facts, not to the child who would prefer to explore his own interests.

Why? Because schools are designed to train people for institutional jobs. Schools were invented during the industrial revolution, at a time when the best job you could get was in a factory. Schools follow a model that require individuals to let go of all of their individuality. The child is trained from a young age to be a good employee who will work for the boss, no questions asked. The goal is to train them to complete assignments and be dependent on an authority figure to control the their time and activities.

During the 20th century almost all parents expected children to get a good education and a good job. The good education was expected to be the golden ticket to a good job. All the parent had to do was put the kid on the big yellow bus, no worries. The government would take care of everything, mom and dad could go to work, junior would spend all day in a nice school and get educated for free. The world has changed. People who want to live the “good life” are no longer finding good jobs. Many highly educated people are living on unemployment or living with their parents at age 35. Many people who own businesses are no longer looking for employees. Taxes are high, risk is high, minimum wage is more than they want to pay, minimum wage is less than an educated person is willing to work for anyway. (click Page 2 below to continue reading)

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Recently a mom asked this question:

How should I handle a child who doesn’t put forth much effort on the Fun-Schooling pages?

The truth is, he was just hacking his homeschooling and doing the minimum, which is what kids do when they want to move on to doing something they feel is more important. The problem is that kids all have a different learning style. We make Fun-Schooling journals for all the different styles. Let’s start off by talking about these, and what I call the Five Learning Languages.

There are some kids who are Creators. The kids who are Creators learn everything for one purpose: to create something. All their education has to revolve around creativity. That’s what they are motivated by. These kids will not do normal workbooks. They need things that are open-ended, that revolve around their passions and interests.

Then you have the kids who are Detectives, who get really deep into the one thing they are passionate about. They love research and are not interested in anything that you want to teach them. They are only interested in what they want to learn. They are very difficult to give a standard education to because they aren’t going to remember anything or make any effort to retain anything that doesn’t revolve around their interests.

Then we have the kids who are Explorers. These kids will not sit still. They can’t. They want to be going from place to place. They can give maybe 5-15 minutes of focused attention to some sort of lesson, or activity and then they need to switch. They won’t sit at a desk, doing workbooks, textbooks, or even online school that makes them sit for very long. I developed a lot of materials for this kind of kid. We call them the “active kids”.

Then, the next kind of learner is the Friend Learner. These are kids who are motivated to learn through social experiences. They do not want to sit by themselves and do anything. They want to be with somebody collaborating, bonding, talking, or doing a project or reading with someone. If you ask this kind of kid to do something alone, they are going to get bored and distracted and wander off to find somebody to play with. Sometimes pets help.

Finally, we have the classic students, the little scholars, and we call them the Followers because these kids just want to please the teacher, the boss, the authority, the leader, the parent. They will do everything you ask them to do really well, step by step. They don’t put their heart into it for the sake of learning, but more for the sake of making somebody proud. They really like grades and scores and tests and multiple choice and ways to just prove that they are good at something and worthy. They are really good at “in the box” type of schooling, but a lot of times they don’t tap into their own creativity and curiosity. (click Page 2 to continue reading)