Category: Education

Recently I wrote about “the 15-minute learning window,” a way that homeschoolers have learned to tap into “teachable moments” and condense learning into smaller packets. It works really well with subjects that you feel your child needs to work on but is not really driven to learn at the moment.

Then the other day at our house, I watched a great example of a complementary phenomenon unfold before my eyes. Instead of doing anything else she was “supposed to” do, my daughter spent much of an entire day working on one subject diligently. We had no need for the 15-minute approach: she was so totally self-directed, all I had to do was sit back and watch.

How did this happen?

A month ago, I was thinking about our year and wondering how I could tap more into my daughter’s interest in horses. She’s a very obsessive learner, which means it’s easy to get her to do things having to do with her current interests, but very difficult to get her to do much else. But she loves almost anything horse-themed, and I was thinking it was too bad there wasn’t some sort of horse-based curriculum.

Any seasoned homeschooler reading this will know that this statement begs the question: have you actually googled that?

I did google it, and came up with a hit for an “Equine Science” curriculum from Winterpromise. This is a Christian homeschool curriculum company, and though we don’t teach a Christian curriculum, this package looked great and another search told me that their curriculum is known to be accessible to other homeschoolers. I usually avoid packaged curriculum, also, because she never uses enough of it to make it worth the money. But I had a hunch this one might hook her so I decided to try it.

So far, this curriculum is perfect for my horse-obsessed girl. She happily did the first week’s assignments, which included reading history and science materials, answering scientific questions about the equus species, and doing some horse anatomy drawing. The next day, we were watching a documentary assigned for my son’s documentary-making focus group at his homeschool program, and she asked, “Can I go on to the next week in my horse curriculum?” Then she happily planted herself in front of the video—reading, doing activities, and watching the video all at the same time. (This is a girl who thrives on multi-tasking!)

Happy kid, happy mom.

This is the very best thing about homeschooling: When your child finds something she really loves, she doesn’t have to stop doing it. It’s not like her equine science class ended after 50 minutes and she was forced to go on to math. She just kept doing the thing she wanted to do, and spent a happy afternoon learning.

A former homeschooling mom told me that after she sent her kids back to school, never again did they come home from school asking to learn more about something they were studying. The 50-minute chunks they were fed in school were like junk food—they came home feeling full of learning, but were starved of intellectual nutrition. I don’t think that this has to be the way school works, but it certainly is one of the predictable results of presenting a rigid curriculum that has no time to stretch with a child’s fascinations. If only all kids could have days like the one I gave my daughter simply by letting her do what she wanted to do. It was a beautiful scene to watch and enjoy.

Once upon a time, learning the details of the elements was “serious science” and left for older students who had the math skills for chemistry. But these days, parents and educators are seeing the value of teaching kids to enjoy science well before they are able to delve into the details.

I was very impressed by Conrad Wolfram’s 2010 TED Talk about math education. He talked about how he got his elementary-aged daughter doing calculus on their computer. No, she isn’t a math super-genius—she was using modern tools so she could access the fascinating application of calculus without having to be able to do the computing required.

The traditional sequence of learning holds that kids “can’t understand” the theoretical ends of math, science, literature, or any intellectual pursuit without having the basic skills that underlie the theory. So in our schools, we require our kids to be able to do long division before we start them on algebra, and we expect them to be interested in how plants grow long before they start wondering what plants—and everything in the universe—are made of.

Wolfram’s talk clarified for me what a lot of homeschoolers (and some brave teachers) have been doing with all sorts of disciplines, not just math. We are literally flipping education on its head, rejecting the traditional pyramid shape of Bloom’s Taxonomy and refusing to start at the bottom, where kids learn facts and basic skills. Instead, we start somewhere in the middle, either at “analyze” when our kids ask a great question or at “apply” in order to have fun through experiential learning.

My daughter has always been interested in chemistry (perhaps she inherited that from her Grandpa, who literally “wrote the book” on polyvinylidene chloride (PVC)). Fundamental to her interest in chemistry is what has had the scientific-minded mixing and stirring, heating and agitating for thousands of years: fascination with the way substances react with each other.

So last year we started on the study of chemistry, not the kid-chemistry you see in “science fun for kids” books, but the actual study of what atoms and molecules are, and why they interact and react the way they do. I am not taking a stand on whether my 9-year-old understands what we’ve studied the way an 18-year-old would—that’s actually of no great concern to me. She has a good number of years before she will have to take a test on this stuff. What I will say, however, is that she has been inspired and excited by what she’s learned, and there is nothing more thrilling than to see a child make a prediction, do an experiment, and laugh with joy at the fact that her prediction was dead wrong. She might even be able to remember why her prediction was wrong, but I see that as less important than the joy she has taken in learning about the building blocks of the universe.

Below are a few of the materials we have used. If you can recommend others, please leave comments!

Books

A friend recommended The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe, and given how much use it gets, I should have sprung for the hardcover edition. This book has taken up residence on the table behind the couch (where we keep current reading materials) for a year and a half, and it’s still going strong. The author is a collector of elements, and book is a fascinating compendium of his collection, from an old Kodak camera made with zirconium to a tube of toothpaste made with radioactive thorium.

A new addition to our library is Wonderful Life with the Elements, which just came out from No Starch Press. This little book is a charming translation of a Japanese elements book for children, and benefits from retaining many of its Japanese characteristics. The elements are identified not only by their Latin names (with real International Phonetic Alphabet transliterations, which is rare and very much appreciated in this house)—we also get Katakana transliterations and the Kanji characters for each element. Though we are unlikely to use these features in any practical way, I love the cultural connections this book makes. Even more, the book looks at elements from a variety of less common viewpoints. It starts with vivid graphical illustrations of how much of each element is present in various domains, from the universe to the sun to the oceans on Earth. It also explores the difference between environmentalism (caring about what we do with elements because of how it affects the balance of life on earth) and understanding that except for exploding nuclear bombs, what we do makes no difference to the elements themselves. Each element is given a persona with different body shape, hair style, clothing, and other features to denote the features of each element. My daughter is enjoying reading both of these books side-by-side!

We bought The Disappearing Spoon: And other true tales of madness, love, and the history of the world from the periodic table of the elements on the recommendation of other parents. Our daughter listened politely to one story then asked to move on to something else, but I know that other kids have enjoyed it so I’m recommending it anyway!

Posters

We love the Periodic Table of the Elements in Pictures, free if you download and print it yourself or available for purchase pre-printed. Completely different than the visual approaches of the two books above, it also offers food for thought and imagination, while also presenting factual information. This poster taught my daughter about the Noble Gases.

You can buy a poster and more accompaniments to the first book above at periodictable.com.

Curriculum

We have really enjoyed using the free Middle School Chemistry curriculum from the American Chemical Society as the spine for our studies. Although my daughter, who isn’t a great fan of handwriting, didn’t complete all the worksheets, we have worked through most of the experiments, which are designed to be easy to do at home or in a badly equipped school. The curriculum also links to online multimedia displays, many of which are basic moving diagrams that show the interaction of molecules, but some of which are really simple but effective demonstrations of the physical properties of various molecules. Our favorite is the popping water balloon.

Online fun

No budding chemist should miss the hilarious videos of The Periodic Table of Videos from the University of Nottingham. Featuring university chemists doing weird, dangerous, and sometimes amusingly boring things with the elements, these videos create unforgettable illustrations of the properties of the elements.

My daughter loves The Happy Scientist, who does a wide variety of videos on science subjects. (Fee-based but very reasonable.) She based her science fair experiment last year on his video of making a density column.

Related blog posts:

• Math stories
• More math stories

I was at the river the other day with hordes of other homeschoolers, splashing around and having fun while our public-school brethren are going full-swing into homework and test preparation. A mom who is starting her homeschooling life this year with her 8-year-old daughter asked a very good question: What with all these fun activities, when do you have time to homeschool?

There are lots of answers to that question – as many answers as there are homeschooling families. But I gave her the answer that helped me a lot when I was new to all this: All you need is 15 minutes.

In school, time is taken up by a variety of things: organizational activities like getting from one room to another, preparation activities like finding the right books and making sure everyone has a pencil, parts of a lesson that have nothing to do with 80% of the kids in the room, like when a few kids are having trouble learning a concept, discipline problems when the teacher’s focus is taken off everyone in the class but one child. School children spend about 6 hours in school per day. Very structured homeschoolers figure they cover the same material in less than 3 hours per day.

Then there’s the rest of us.

I love structure. The homeschooler I want to be stands in front of her kids and imparts wisdom. Her kids sit with happy, upturned faces and drink in her observations and ideas. They open workbooks, start on page 1, and continue until the workbook is finished later in the school year. They homeschool every morning, starting at 9, and are done by noon. Then we’re off to do fun activities in our community.

Then there’s the homeschooler I am: I have a general idea of what we are going to do when we’re not out of the house. Those ideas have something to do with making sure that my kids learn the 3 R’s along with their creative explorations. I make plans, and my plans have an effect on our homeschooling, but they are not carried out with any regularity or structure. I seldom “teach” my kids things—we explore and go off on tangents. My best-laid plans are the ones that never go anywhere.

The homeschooler I am has been very influenced by the idea that there are “teachable moments” in kids’ lives, and that good teachers recognize those moments and go with them. When you have two kids instead of a classroom, teachable moments are more likely to go on weird tangents, and that’s fine. But no matter whether you are teaching a class of 30 or a single child at home, teachable moments seldom last that long. The rule of thumb I got was you should figure you only have 15 minutes.

There are two different ways in our house that those 15 minutes play out. One way is the “schoolish” way: You know your child needs to go the next step in fractions, and you want to get to it sometime this week. In homeschooling, you don’t have to schedule it at any particular time, so you watch and wait. On Monday, you go out and do a big art project with friends and when you get home, your kid just wants to read alone, and that’s fine. On Tuesday, you have all sorts of little things you need to take care of, and your friend has an appointment and asked you to take her three kids, so you write off the whole day. That’s fine.

But then on Wednesday, things seem calmer. Your child has finished a book, and then you talk about what you’re making for dinner, and then you say, “Hey, let’s look a little bit more at fractions.” Or, in my case, I usually present it as, “This is something I think is so totally cool about the way numbers work.” We recently got a whiteboard and I’m wondering why I resisted for so long – my daughter loves to do interactive math explorations on it. (And she also doodles horses, which I’m OK with, too.) I may get her to do some problems on paper, or more often I leave that for another 15 minutes. And then we’re done.

That’s all? A kid can really learn all she needs to know about, say, common denominators in one 15-minute session? Of course not, and that’s where 15-minute rule #2 comes into play. If we have talked about a math topic, we’ll almost always have a chance to talk about the same topic when we’re walking in the woods or measuring a piece of wood. This is when we actually use the theory on the whiteboard. 15-minute rule #2 is the non-structured side of learning, and it’s when the stuff she learned really starts to stick.

Like all things in homeschooling, this is not the answer to all your problems or even the right way for all families to do things. But it is a suggestion I got years ago that seems to work in our house. Maybe it’ll work in yours, too.