Child-led, or Delight-directed Learning

This is the theme for today's Teaching Creatively Blog Hop.

So just what IS delight-directed learning?

In a nut shell it is using what the child is interested in, in order to help train and/or teach them what they need to know.  That's it.    It's nothing too fancy.  :)  I use it in my homeschooling, but not exclusively.

I cannot say that everything I teach my son is child-led.  it isn't, but let's say I'm teaching him math.... What does it matter to me if I take something he loves...say SPIDERS and I make up a story about spiders, but in order for me to continue to tell the story he has to help the momma spider figure out just how many babies she has left, and how many things she needs to protect them from?  (after all wolf spiders are known to carry their babies on their back)   What does it matter?  He's still learning math...he's just engaged in it because it's important to know how many baby spiders are left because they need to avoid all the big spiders, the birds and such like that like EAT baby spiders.   (that is what we did last year).

This year, is different, my lad has a fascination for all things angry birds.  He loves battles and armour and fighting and protecting and helping.   OH MY.  :)   He's very boyish in this regard.  :)   He's learning to be a protector of the household and that's a good thing, and if I can tie this love into doing schooling.... tis a good thing is it not?

For instance lately we are studying Canada.  We live in Canada so it's a natural thing to want to do.   Studying the First Nations people comes into play with that.  So I tie in his love of drawing pictures, with knowledge of the different types of First Nations people (who had to hunt and fight and protect their families), with his love of angry birds and voila...we do art, history, science, math, geography, language arts and it's all tied up into battles, protection, and angry birds (and their pig counterparts).

Here the lad is drawing a pig shaped igloo, with a boy pig making sure smoke can come out the top while calling directions to the dad pig who is hunting for a seal. He's got the angle of the snow bricks down pat, and creating a story from what he knows using characters that he loves.

Sometimes delights have to be delayed.  For instance, last year the lad mentioned he wanted to learn to play jazz.  Go figure Jazz?   He heard a CD and loved it.  Since then I've been trying to figure out how to add music to our homeschool so that he can indeed LEARN how to play jazz.  We listen to music but that's about as far as we gotten because I inquired into lessons to learn and it's out of my budget.

BUT this year, I'm part of the Schoolhouse Review Crew and I have the JOY and PRIVILEGE of teaching my boy music at home and he's having a blast.  Today he kept running his fingers up and down the key board.  He's gaining confidence and asking questions.  He's delighted about learning music.  The music program that we have I will continue to use and hopefully by the end of the year he'll be doing some simply jazz tunes and I'll have fulfilled a promise to teach him some jazz.  :)   And then we'll move on to the guitar I think as I think they use the guitar in jazz too don't they????

enjoying learning to play music he is. :)

Delight directed learning, is simply to learn what your children like and follow it.  Tie it in however you can.   If they are learning to read and find Dick and Jane boring, well then find a similar level book about whales, spiders, princesses or whatever.   Get them interested and curious and they will learn, guaranteed.  :)

Just have fun with it, it's really not that hard.

How do YOU use delighted-directed/child-led learning in YOUR homeschool?  I'd love to know, leave a comment and we'll talk. :)