Homeschool: Wisdom

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. Of such is wisdom.---William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

This quote really hit me between the eyes. I've been trying to fill pails for years. Now I am trying to explore how to light a fire. As I think of ways to light fires for my kids, I'll let you know what works. I have an idea or two that I'll share now.

My kids hate writing assignments. They complain they are not relevant to anything and they don't see the purpose in it. The curriculum calls for writing stories and that sort of thing. For me, resisting the temptation to become a slave to the curriculum is very difficult. I have had to get it through my head that the curriculum is there to serve me not the other way around. So with that in mind, when my kids come to a writing assignment I have started thinking more about what they would like to write about or research and assigning that. For example, my daughter was supposed to write some paragraphs...just for the sake of writing paragraphs and formatting them correctly to pass the exercises in the curriculum. I told her for that assignment she could decide on a career path that she would like to explore, research it out and write me a paper on what she learned about that career. She was more than willing to do the paper. Before she was complaining about it.

My son was assigned a story to write. He hates doing them because he can't think of what to write. Writer's block. But he loves to do Lego Animation Movies. So I told him to write a Lego Movie script for his writing assignment. He did that willingly because he knew he could then use it to make a movie.

As I come up with more ideas of how to light the fire for my kids, I'll post them. If you have some ideas of your own, please share them.