Here's a great little reflection piece of advice from I Take Joy:
"Do not fill your schedules with unnecessary activities and lists of textbooks and unnecessary busy work--it will wear you out and demotivate your children. Instead, delight in great stories, teach the word passionately. Greatly value and treasure words and ideas and history in front of your children so that they will fall in love with language and knowledge."
Children are already so motivated to greatness... this is easy for them and harder for us. My discipline and self-control--with regards to media, book choices, and time management--will bear exponential amounts of fruit in the girls. Motivation to keep going.
1 comment:
I would negotiate the content of their curriculum with my children in advance of the school year and as the year went on. It prevented me from doing exactly what you say: filling their time with busy work. They got to decide what they wanted to learn (within the state-required framework, of course), and they always went far beyond any imposed curriculum would have done. Shane, at 12, was reading literature from many countries (Aeschylus, Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, and Shakespeare's sonnets were his favorite that year). He was also working on Euclidean geometry, a subject that is not normally touched even in a high school program. Letting kids participate in designing their curriculum is extremely motivating for them. For adults,too. (I oversee adult programs now, and they, too, get a say in their curriculum that supercharges their learning batteries.)
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