Love of learning

[Scuff]

For those of you who had your kids in school or other life circumstances that squelched the love of learning, What did you do/not do to reignite that fire? Curious. The more I read about "giftedness" (not much so far) I see the imporance of not letting them get bored/restrict their learning. What a delicate line to walk! I don't think I've done this too much, but to a certain extent, maybe. DS was always so full of questions and I put him off a lot because I didn't know and didn't always want to take the time/energy to help him find out. He still is, or course, but I may have lost a bit of his trust in finding answers. Now that he can read, he reads about stuff, a lot. but how did it work for you? How did that spark get relit?

[threetreasurs]

How old is your son? These things do ebb and flow with age so it would help to know before responding.:)

[Northernmom]

For my son, who had lost his love of math through years of repetition at school, hiring a private tutor reignited that passion again. I hired an enthusiastic person who just loved math and gave him free rein to explore all the interesting concepts without working through the drudgery. I didn't care about gaps in my son's learning, this was just about making it fun again. It was the best thing I have ever done!

[Scuff]

He's 7 1/2 and in 3rd grade.

 

This child (well, all 3 of them, really) I just don't know what to do with sometimes. I want to let them race ahead, but I'm also so scared of creating holes and not laying a good foundation. (I know, dumb) It's hard to know what to do in math. He could add when he was two and multiply at 5, which he figured out on his own. But he still needs practice with these concepts and hasn't yet memorized much of his addition facts. I've switched him math curriculums a few times, I'm afraid to do it again. But we did R&S this past year and it is just boring and below what he could do and too much. To spend a whole year addition/subtraction facts. Ugh. Which he knows better now, but he could do so much more! And I'm sure it'd be more fun (he used to ask to do more pages but now he just does it to get it done) I was just thinking, though, that I should let him have more of a choice in this and let him pick the math curriculum he wants to do. I bought my wiggly dd MUS and he's loving it and wants me to get him some too. That would be easier to tell how fast he should move with it too.

 

I was just concerned, as I read some stuff, that I haven't really been helping him learn all he wants to learn. The boy can drive you mad with questions. Sometimes I just don't want to do the work to help him find the answers. But I don't want him to loose that.

 

It's probably just new school year doubts. I have seen a few things that I need to do differently, though.

[RJH]

My 7 1/2 year old math lover is doing Teaching Textbooks. He really loves that program. Not too much repetition.

[scrappymom]

WOW Scuff! It's like we have the same child. My daughter is a "gifted" almost 8 yr old in gr 3.She's ALWAYS telling me about stuff, or asking me things that i don't know...but she doesn't mind looking it up... I pulled her out of grade 2 in apr and that was it for us. She could read before going to JrK(canada here)(she was 3 and 3/4!).....and the school could just not help us enough....

She reads TimeKids Almanacs before bed and in the car, and our classroom is a non-fiction scientific book haven!! She loves to create things with k'nex and lego, or look for bugs outside and study them...

We knew that she was "different" when she asked for NO toys for her 5th christmas...she asked for a space station, and astronomy books, etc etc...

SO, we've always just let her be, get her as many books as she wants at the library, let her lead the way on ISP's, etc etc...now that we have her out of school she is back to her normal self of STARVING LEARNER.

 

(oh, and sorry i can't help you with what you can do for math etc with your child cause you're in the states and i'm in canada, we have no mandates/restrictions here, so i put her to where she is challenged)

[Nan in Mass]

Not that I've been entirely successful. What I did is separate out the boring skills part from the rest of the subject. We do the boring bits in small doses very regularly. So for example, with math facts, they drilled for 10 minutes each day, separately from doing math. I didn't worry too much about "careless errors" when my son was your son's age, just pointed them out or had him try the problem again. I separated technical things about writing, like puncuation and spelling, from writing a report, too. I corrected the content of a history report but not the technical problems. I only corrected the technical stuff when he was doing "writing". I know this isn't very efficient, but it did keep school from being too much of a drag. There came a point about middle school where I had to sit on him to make his work more accurate and presentable, but I still only do that in certain situations. I didn't insist of memorization in things like history because my sons hate memorizing and would read about history a lot less willingly if they knew that what they read they had to remember.

 

The other thing I did was make a separation between "school" and the rest of the day, during which they often are learning, but not under my direction. School has set hours so they know when it is going to end. I "steer" how they learn during school and they get to steer out of school. This is a far from ideal situation, but the more I read the homeschooling boards and the older my children get (14 and 18), the more I think I made the right decision. I may not have created the ideal of self-driven learners, but I haven't killed their curiosity or their willingness to learn, either. I don't have the most academic-minded children, and they aren't so bright that they don't need lots of practice and lots of help mastering something like algebra. I've managed to make them learn a lot of skills they wouldn't have otherwise, skills without which they would have been able to go on to learn at an adult level. They are mostly grateful for this. I have happy, willing homeschooling teenagers who still learn things on their own and even exhibit quite a lot of enthusiasm during "school". They also appear to be going off and discussing "school" things with their friends and coaches and other family members. It seems to have been a fairly good compromise between unschooling and traditional-style homeschooling. And it certainly was better than what happened to my oldest public-schooled son, who turned from a curious active child to a teenager who refused to even consider going to college until after he'd had a big long break from it and found a way to do it on his own terms. Terribly, terribly sad.

 

-Nan

[Kissy]

With my son I have let him skip ahead if he knows it..he does have to show me he knows it. We use Singapore math and he does a 5 minute drill on computation daily (I call this warming up his math brain). he likes doing the drill and has enjoyed seeing his improvements on a daily basis it is timed so it is like a race. I grade him but only on what is done example if there are 100 problems but he only gets 40 done I grade him on 40 problems. It makes his confidence soar and he has been getting much better. he hates to write so we have been doing some fun creative writing projects and I have let him write about pokemon a time or too just to get him writing. My son had lost his spark in public school and he came home last year and it went ok but not great..this year his spark is beginning to come back..the best advice I have is be upbeat and willing to try anything. You know your child best and you will find what works just keep trying. It is well worth it when you see them like school again and like learning.