Interest led for 7th and 8th

[mothergooseof4]

I have and am planning to use MFW Explorers to 1850 for this next year to use with all of my dc. My oldest will be going into 7th. I have always been interested in doing more interest led schooling, but have never had the guts to actually do it.

 

So, I was thinking this afternoon that if I ever plan to do it, now would be the time for my younger two. But, would it work for my oldest? If I required math, writing, grammar, Spanish, Bible and maybe a root study would it prepare him for high school and beyond if I just required that he always be reading something history and science related? Or, if he truly followed his interests and he focused all of his interest-led studies on technology, what if I just did a book that gives a basic overview of history? What would an interest-led education look like at this age? Honestly, I would like to require the skills and then just say, "Okay, you have two years to study anything that you like, but you must be actively studying something."

 

Also, would it be difficult to transition to a more structured high school experience? I am thinking of continuing with MFW for hs.

[PeterPan]

I gather someone shuffled you over to the hs thread, but I thought you deserved a response here. :)

 

If I could suggest, I think ideas about interest-led learning really need to fit the student. You have to look at your student and determine the amount of structure *they need* to be successful. It's not like some concept that you just plunk from one family onto your own and it fits. You also have the structure *you* need to be successful. That may range from free-style learning all the way to something more prescripted like "you have this chunk of 2 hours daily to work on your interest-driven stuff and all I ask is that at the end of the day you have some output to show for it, where output equals a paragraph, something you make, or something else you devise." You have ranges of structure, kwim?

 

One way to create structure but freedom within what you're doing (MFW) is to show him the toc and titles for each week in the MFW year and ask him to select the ones where he'd like more freedom and the ones where he'd like to just do what they suggest. That would be a way to *ease* into that freedom, kwim? It would acknowledge his interests in some areas without burdening him with creating a whole year plan and feeling upset when he doesn't accomplish it. And it acknowledges that, to a degree, it really doesn't matter particularly WHAT gets covered on the topic. As long as the Civil War gets covered, you don't care if he learns food or weapons or battles or only the music, lol. So let him pick the weeks *he* wants to drive (with the freedom to have more time for those weeks) and let him delineate the weeks he's less interested in where he's content just to read what MFW suggests and move on. That's my advice. :)