One thing that’s working this week

Low-input, high-output: my kind of homeschooling

Regular readers will know that we are taking some time off from our usual formal daily learning, and I’m ok with that. It helped to decide that this is exactly what we should be doing, rather than fretting that we should be doing something else. The phrase that had been going round and round in my head recently was ‘you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink’, and I was tired of dragging my horses to the water only for them to determinedly stare at the sky. And I realised that I also just plain old tired, and maybe so were the children, and perhaps we had a small vicious cycle going on.

So we’ve broken the cycle, hurrah! Everything feels much more contented again. We’ve gone back to unschooling (moving between unschooling and formal learning seems to work quite well for us), which has forced me to be a bit more imaginative. I’m not really ‘spreading the feast’ as Charlotte Mason said, rather I’m letting the children forage, but occasionally I make sure there’s something tempting in their path.

This week I wrote lots of multiplication questions on bits of brightly coloured paper, folded them and put them in a jar. The jar has a big question mark on it. Next to it is an empty jar, with a big check mark. The jars sit on the table, and when the children sit down to eat they can take a question out. If they can answer it, it goes in the ✅ jar. I don’t make them do anything. Sometimes I remind them the jars are there. If they pull out a question they don’t like, they can put it back. I’m on hand to help them work it out if they’re stuck and want my assistance.

Not pictured: the enormous amount of junk that perpetually accumulates on our multi-purpose table.

It’s very relaxed, and has led to some good discussions about maths. One child said: “Wait, is multiplying… just adding over and over again?” and I managed not to say “YES! As discussed hundreds of times over the past twelve months or more!” But I was thrilled because coming to that understanding by yourself is infinitely more valuable than being told it (and maybe our current relaxed, freewheeling mood is conducive to these kind of lightbulb moments?) Or as Jean Piaget said:

Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself.

And:

In order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it.

Which also puts me in mind of a JS Mill quotation that my husband used earlier this year in Cramming vs. Curiosity—SATs, JS Mill, and the secret to original thinking:

That which has been known a thousand years may be new truth to you or me. There are born into the world every day several hundred thousand human beings, to whom all truth whatever is new truth. What is it to him who was born yesterday, that somebody who was born fifty years ago knew something? The question is, how he is to know it. There is one way; and nobody has ever hit upon more than one—by discovery.

Of course question jars are nothing new. It’s not rocket science, but then, we’re not rocket scientists. It’s free, and endlessly adaptable (foreign language vocab springs to mind, or more/less challenging questions depending on your child’s changing abilities). And education that happens alongside food always seems to be particularly relaxed and enjoyable. Not bad for five minutes’ work, some bits of paper and a couple of jars.

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