If you peruse my blog, you will see that over the years we have mainly used history unit studies and a maths curriculum. We chose this way because a history unit study can cover almost every subject under the sun. Now, I have to admit that for the most part, these unit studies were curated by yours truly. However, in addition to all the work we did together, each child chose a project to focus their afternoons on. This project was their self-directed learning. Including both self-directed learning and mum directed learning utilised the advantages of both and reduced the disadvantages of only using one of these methods. In this post, I will be writing about the advantages we have found of self-directed learning as a homeschooler.
Be Mindful of Your Goals as a Homeschooler
Homeschooling is necessarily different from sending your children to school. At school, it is both the government and the teachers who ultimately decide what you learn and how you learn. In a homeschool, you and your child get to choose both of these things.
I think one of the most useful and important things you can do as a homeschool mum is to ask yourself what you would like your homeschool to achieve. There is no right or wrong answer here. For example, if it is important to you to replicate school, then the choices you make will reflect this. If you want to create an environment of learning around the clock then your choices and your imagination will inform how this is achieved. If you wish to unschool, making a decision to step back and honouring that decision will likely help you to realise your unschooling dreams. All this to say, you need to know where you are going before you can plan out the route to get there.
I have copied an excerpt of the post below. This gives you an idea of where we stand regarding our own goals:
We wanted to bring up hard working, independent thinkers and followers of dreams. And that is exactly what we got”
I will be writing about the advantages of self-directed learning in this post. My next post will cover the disadvantages. Both the advantages and disadvantages need to be read with our own personal goals in mind. Your goals may be different and this may alter the advantages and disadvantages accordingly.
Advantages of Self-Directed Learning
As I was preparing this post, I knew I did not want to simply invent the wheel. There are many posts out there extolling the benefits of self-directed learning. Most are either regarding the adult working world or are referring to a classroom situation. The advantages of self-directed learning in these conditions are listed below. These I think do apply to homeschooling as well. However, the ones I shall be focusing on are the advantages I have found as a homeschooler.
- Increases motivation and engagement
- Encourages independence and autonomy
- Helps to identify personal learning styles
- Promotes the development of critical thinking skills
- Enables constructions of problem solving skills
- Fosters an attitude of life-long learning
I’m sure there are more, but these are the most frequently mentioned. For this post though, let’s take a look at the advantages of self-directed learning for homeschooled students.
The Child is Free to Follow their Curiosity
Our whole homeschool is based on history unit studies using top quality literature as our starting point. We would study one culture or period of history at a time. It always astounded me that each of my five children would be interested in totally different aspects of each unit study.
Learn More! Click on this link if you’d like to see how we used history unit studies to teach our children science.
Project based learning was the method I chose to introduce the children to self-directed learning. They chose a topic, skill or area of knowledge they wanted to find out more about. They’d do a bit more research on the topic until they had narrowed down the focus of their project. There really is no better way to get your children on board with their learning than to hand the reins over to them regarding what they are learning.
During our Egyptian unit study Thomas chose to look at mummification (we mummified a whole chicken). Lillie chose hieroglyphs. And Charlotte chose Egyptian art. Their end of unit presentations were fabulous! You’ll need to scroll down to the end of the above post to see the presentations.
The Child Fully Engages with their Learning
For me, this is one of the biggest advantages to self-directed learning. As a busy homeschool mum of five, I was always looking for ways of extricating myself from the process of learning. Don’t misunderstand me. I had no desire to be fully hands off. I mean it when I say just how much I love homeschooling. But there are only 24 hours in each day. To have a few hours free to focus on housework, getting dinner prepped or teaching the younger ones was gold to me.
Of course, there is a balance. In general, I tended to focus my efforts on mum-intensive school in the morning. Then in the afternoons the children worked on self-directed. Allowing the children complete freedom regarding what they chose to learn generally meant I was not required to cajole, persuade or bribe the children to actually do the work. This is a massive benefit to a homeschool mum!
Our Edwardian presentation was a full-on experiential display! With demonstrations of force-feeding a suffragette (played beautifully by Lillie!) and a stop motion film of the sinking of the Titanic, Abigail and Becca managed to get the whole family involved and their presentation of their own individual projects was full-on, fun and (hilariously) funny!
The Child is Empowered in their Own Life
What’s not to like about this? I think empowerment is so important for everybody! Every one of us has only a finite number of minutes on this earth, it’s incredibly important to feel we have at least some say on how they are spent. Empowerment offers so much in terms of self-assuredness, encouraging our students to dream and take control of their lives in order to achieve those dreams.
Lillie’s African Jewellery Project was a particularly successful solo project. Do click on the link to see how she learnt the African skill of creating jewellery made from paper and then did a presentation and teaching session for a large group of people. Her jewellery was then offered for sale to all the people who came to her presentation. The link above is to a post she wrote herself about her project aged 13. And, here are the links to African Jewellery Party Part One and Part Two, when she presented in front of 24 people!
I will be writing more on the topic of project-based learning. Suffice it to say, working independently on a project with the need to present it in some form and open up the room for questions and discussions is full-on learning. This depth of learning simply can’t take place by reading textbooks. And that is a hill I’m willing to die on.
In Conclusion
To complete a self-directed project, a child is able to choose what he wants to study, the methods of study and the depth of study. He is faced with making 101 decisions to obtain the information, organise it, problem-solve the inevitable complications and issues which will crop up and manage their time. Perhaps the most important lessons a child will learn is found in how he chooses to display and communicate his project. At the end, there is so much goodness in every aspect of a self-directed project.
I hope this post has been helpful to you. My next post will be covering the potential disadvantages of self-directed learning and how to navigate them. If you have any specific questions you’d like me to address in future posts, please do email me or leave a message below.
Discover more from ANGELICSCALLIWAGS
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.