L-O-V-E spells learning
Watching my kids learn has been the most fascinating aspect of not sending them to school. Partly, I’m sad for the children whose education isn’t self-driven, because the “love of learning” face that toddlers are known for grows more beautiful the older a child gets.
At 4, Grace is very helpful around the house. Recently, she wanted to help me fold laundry. She sat by my side, wadding things up into little blobs while I obsessively created perfect folded squares. She looked at her pile and said “Mommy, show me how you fold.” So I did, we started with long sleeve shirts and she mastered it after 2-3 of them. Madelyn (6) came in and Grace was beaming at her new “pile” of perfectly folded shirts.
At 6, Madelyn is enjoying writing notes. Of course it’s faster to speak out loud but she is enjoying writing notes. She’s been playing Farmville and Yoville and some other silly FaceBook games and she has friends who write her notes while she plays. She loves chatting online with her friends and has decided that she’d rather communicate with everyone in writing. I must have spelled “I love you” out loud for her a thousand times last week. She doesn’t want me to write it for her to copy, she just wants me to say the names of the letters, including spaces and punctuation, for her to transcribe. She runs into the room several times a day to ask “Mom, how do you spell “get your stinky feed off of my pillow or you can’t be on my bed anymore” or maybe “Please please please get out of the bathroom I need to pee.” If I don’t say “space” or comma” when it’s time, she gives me an odd look. If a word doesn’t look right to her, she says “Are you sure this is spelled right?” At the end of each note, she EXPECTS a period, a question mark or an exclamation mark.When I don’t tell her to write one, she asks “Is this a complete sentence?
The kids have set up a system of mailboxes at everyone’s door and spend all day long passing notes throughout the house. So they’re learning to write and read and use punctuation and capitalization through love, through the desire to communicate. At this point, I can’t even imagine another way anymore. Imagine being assigned “Write “I love you” fifty times today. Wouldn’t that be ridiculous? It’s become increasingly ridiculous to me that kids are taught reading and writing OUTSIDE of the desire to communicate. THAT is what reading and writing are for. No wonder schools fail, when written communication is irrelevant.
At 12, Meagan spent many years as a victim of our aggressive work schedules. There just wasn’t much time or money to do the things she wanted to do. She always wanted to do Soccer but I could never find the sign-up information and Saturday 7am practices and games were NOT something we wanted to participate in. Actually- here, they practice like 3 days a week and play games on Saturdays at the crack of Dawn. So this year she decided she wants to take tapdancing. It works for us. We signed her up for a class for her age group and all of the girls in the class have been dancing since they were toddlers. The teacher showed them the dance really quickly. Meagan felt a bit lost, like she was in over her head. She set up the laptop in the kitchen and watched youtube to learn the beginner’s moves. She practiced tapping in the kitchen for hours and hours and hours. She didn’t even consider giving up. At class yesterday, she remembered the entire routine. She practices at home all the time. It’s noisy, but beautiful. She’s taking jazz, too and her smile is just phenomenal when she dances.
Learning is beautiful, when it’s rooted in love. Sometimes it’s my 6 yr old pleased to present us with personalized love notes or surprising us with notes she’s spelled on her own. Sometimes it’s my 4 yr old screaming at anyone who tries to fold a long-sleeve shirt because that’s her responsibility and sometimes it’s my 12 yr old tapdancing in the kitchen at 2am.
Dakota is 5 and in kindergarten. He is a lover of learning. The other day he was watching Tom & Jerry with his Daddy. Tom pulled something over on Spike the big mean dog and across the screen it said “JACKASS” with a donkey head in place of Spikes head. Dakota asked what that word said. Thinking it was not a good idea to share the real answer, my husband said “Donkey”. They continued watching for a couple of minutes when Dakota said, “Dad, that didn’t start with a D! What did it really say?” I love the way their brains are just soaking up the world, wanting all the info. (But it scares me too, since I want to shelter my kids from the world. lol.)