How to Make Child-Led Learning Easy in Homeschooling
Raising animals has provided many amazing learning moments for my animal-loving family. But you don’t need a farm to have the same benefits - child-led learning can be as simple as being in nature, slowing down, and observing.
Child-led learning or interest-led learning is the concept that children pursue their own interests instead of having adults drive every aspect of their education. My company NorthStar Educational Explorations makes secular homeschool curriculum resources. One of our guiding principles is to help homeschoolers craft self-directed education. Giving kids agency and autonomy is one of the best ways to raise free thinkers who know how to follow their own path in life. It's also more inclusive to neurodiverse learners and is a way to decolonize education because it shifts the power structure for the adult to the learner. But how does child-led learning work in homeschooling? How do you help your kids find their interests, develop passions, and foster a love of learning?
My son recently put together a lemonade stand. He was very excited to earn some pocket money. Entrepreneurship is an amazing project-based learning activity.
Outside of the school classroom, self-directed learning is the norm - most adults and kids are in charge of (or at least highly involved in) their own learning based on their interests and goals. My professional background before homeschooling was in unconventional, highly collaborative learning settings - leading urban planning workshops with adults, doing hands-on environmental education with a community nonprofit, and working at theater camps with kids, to name a few. In these settings, education happens as it's needed, and all learning is in pursuit of shared goals.
You CAN facilitate self-directed learning activities in the homeschool if you focus on helping your child find their interests. Over time, some interests become passions, and children can develop goals from those passions. This can range from "I want to become a marine biologist" to "I'd like to play the guitar." With a goal in mind, children and their helpers can start identifying and understanding skills that might be needed to pursue those goals. In this post, let's start with step one of this process: find and identify interests. I'll follow this up soon with another post that addresses how child-led learning can work with regard to external expectations such as state testing and pressures to attend college in the future.
A great STEAM unit to introduce kids to the engineering design process.
How do you help children identify and pursue their interests?
Here are my top tips from my experience as an educational facilitator and homeschool parent:
1) Share new things with them
A class, a book, a short video, a field trip, or a hands-on activity can all be great ways to expose children to new things. Your children might even find passion in things you wouldn't have expected. My 9yo son, for example, loved this one philosophy book I brought home, so now he's reading philosophy for fun.
Who knew? Sharing your own passions with your children can be an especially fulfilling way to bond and help kids find new interests. Just be sure to keep your expectations low. Present the opportunity and then back off and be willing to drop it if it's not a "hit" with your child.
Simply looking at a flower is an opportunity to explore plant anatomy and learn how bees pollinate flowers
2) Observe your child
Listen closely and notice what captures your child's attention. A child who frequently finds insects in the yard might be interested and enjoy exploring topics in biology. Telling elaborate stories might develop into a passion for writing. Avid drawers might enjoy projects or a class to deepen their skills. Not everything will become a passion, but you can facilitate new passions if you notice their current interests and provide opportunities to explore them at a deeper level or seek similar, and related things to share.
3) Leave room in your days
Over-scheduling is so common in this modern era of parenting. One of the benefits of homeschooling is leaving room in your lives for boredom, creativity, and personal agency for your kids. It’s easier to notice and foster interests if there is time to be flexible when opportunities arise. It's also easier for kids to find unexpected interests when they have an opportunity to decide how to spend their time versus parents scheduling their whole day.
A rock-lover might appreciate a few resources like these books
4) Gather resources
Helping your child select a few books on the topic, finding or borrowing a special tool, and seeking out some kid-friendly videos or a few hands-on activities can all be great ways to foster a new interest. We use the unit study approach for homeschooling, and some interests are a great fit for a full unit of study. Others are more of a quick dip into the topic. You can find a pre-made study or build your own.
5) Don't overdo it
When you expose kids to new things, sometimes it won't be a hit. Adults might misunderstand the interest, or our kids don't really know what they are signing up to do. So don't overinvest time and resources into new activities. Check-in frequently with your kids and be flexible if something isn't working out. Our family rule is that if we agree together to sign up for a class or camp, we finish it. But we don't commit for longer than a month, so we have the option to decide whether to continue. Perseverance is an important life skill but developing that skill is about finding passions and pursuing them. As adults pushing too much tends to make our kids resist. Encourage and coach, but don't push.
I love baking with the kids. They don’t always want to help, but I make a point to offer them the opportunity to be involved.
Here is a personal example of how to apply these tips - Recently, my son started mentioning that he liked taking photos. I found an old camera for him, and we started taking photography walks together. Next, I might suggest a book or video about the topic. If his interest continues, we will discuss what he'd like to learn next, and I can help him gather books, activities, and resources to guide further exploration. Essentially, this becomes a unit study we create together. I am the facilitator, but he is in charge of deciding what happens next and whether he wants to keep pursuing this. You can choose to do this for most of your studies or use curriculum for some topics and have a more flexible interest-led learning approach for others. We've tried both and see the benefits of both approaches. My son has explored making his own comic books, researched chicken biology, made bottle rockets, experimented with marshmallow slime, and so much more since we started taking a child-led learning approach in our homeschool. Science and storytelling seem to be big themes in his interests so far, and it will be interesting to see how his passion unfolds and develops over time.
My son is interested in learning photography, so I gave him an old camera of mine to use.
I hope this helps you in your journey to help your children find and develop their interests! And if you are looking for more support, we make secular homeschool unit studies that are a great fit for child-led learning. Try taking a look at the store with your child and let them pick based on which topics interest them or which activities look fun! Happy homeschooling!