Episode 2 - Creating A Learning Culture in Your Homeschool

Karen and Michelle are homeschool moms who discuss the importance of creating a learning culture in homeschooling. They believe that being lifelong learners gives individuals an advantage in a rapidly changing world. They emphasize the importance of constantly using our brains to make learning easier and more fulfilling. They also discuss the benefits of learning together as a family and exploring topics of interest. Karen and Michelle highlight the importance of modeling excitement for learning and actively participating in assignments with children. They encourage parents to create a safe environment for children to ask questions and explore different viewpoints, rather than shielding them from opposing beliefs. They believe that teaching children how to think critically is more valuable than simply filling their minds with information. I'm Karen, and I'm Michelle. We're sisters and homeschool moms. Welcome to the Layers of Learning podcast, where we talk about family-style homeschooling. Hi, this is Michelle, and I'm here with Karen. Hello. So today we are talking about creating a learning culture in your homeschool. So I think the world is changing really fast, and people who make a life out of learning have a big advantage over people who sort of stagnate or who don't read, who don't learn, who don't move forward, because the way that our even our technology is changing so quickly, you're constantly having to learn and get ahead of that curve. It's a struggle. It's kind of like exercise, I think. If you're constantly consistently exercising, it's pretty easy to do it. But if you stop for three months and then you try to start, your muscles are all in pain. Our brains are the same way. If we're constantly using them, it actually becomes easier to learn and to get new skills and to adapt with the changing world. Yeah, and beyond just the usefulness of it, it's more fulfilling. It's more exciting. It's more interesting to be someone who is constantly seeking and learning than it is to be someone who just stagnates, who stays where they were when they began. This world is massively fascinating. If you talk about any topic and then you delve into it a little bit, it is amazing what you can learn. It brings you joy to really constantly learn all of the time. And that's a gift that we can give our kids. If we can teach them to be lifelong learners who are always excited about whatever it is they're interested in at the moment and curious, that's a gift that we can give our kids. Yeah, and right back to a really practical aspect of this is that kids who like learning are much easier to teach. You don't have whining and dragging of feet when you have a child who's like, wow, I want to learn about ancient Egypt. I think that's actually what helped me be motivated to create a learning culture in our homeschool. I didn't want to have kids who whined every time I gave them an assignment. I needed them to understand our expectations and to not only do it on their own, but be excited about it because I don't want to drag through our days. That's a sad homeschool. And when you're homeschooling every day, you've got to have a family that's excited to learn together or it's dreary. Yeah, and I think learning together is really a huge key to this. So if you're cramming and then lecturing with your kids instead of reading the books with them and learning with them, then you're kind of going about it the wrong way. Yeah, Charlotte Mason said, education is an atmosphere. And I absolutely love that. We can't just give our kids assignments and expect them to be excited about learning. We have to create that atmosphere that helps them to be excited. And part of that, the biggest part, I think, is mom has to learn, too. Mom can't just say, I'm the teacher and these are the assignments and here's the homework. Check it off. Get it done. That is not exciting and that's not going to create a lifelong learner. Yeah, and in reality, some of that's going to happen in your homeschool. You're going to say, just do your math. That will happen. But the goal is to kind of have this attitude where you're modeling the excitement of discovery. And there's some really concrete ways you can do this. For example, if you are learning about frogs, you get some books from the library and you read them together about frogs. Mom does not have to have read them ahead of time. You just sit there together, gather your children around you and you read about frogs. You come across something really interesting, like, oh my gosh, there are poison dart frogs in South America. Let's go learn more about them. And then maybe your child is like, I love poison dart frogs. And you're like, well, let's make a craft. And you can make a poison dart frog craft. And that's how you model this excitement of discovery and learning. Yeah, a lot of people in the homeschooling world call these rabbit trails. Go down rabbit trails. Let whatever is exciting at the moment in your homeschool become a pathway for you to explore and learn more about. Don't feel so pressured to stick by a lesson plan or an objective that you fail to explore. Instead, just explore with your kids and be excited. You don't have to have everything so pre-planned that then you feel like a failure if you don't get through your plan. You can plan and have a framework, but you don't have to have a word-for-word plan with everything pre-read and previewed and checked out. Just get in there and learn with your kids. Yeah, and something, Karen, that you do better than I do is that you will often actually do the assignments that you're assigning your children. So you'll have an art project and you will actually do the art project, not just sit there and watch while they do it. Yeah, I have a sketchbook and I sketch every time my kids do. I have my own notebooks, you know, my own history notebook. And when my kids make a map, I make the map. When my kids do a project, I do the project with them. Fairly often I do it with my youngest because he's still not quite writing independently. And so sometimes he and I will do it together. I get in and really do the projects with my kids, and I love it. It makes me excited about learning too, and it's contagious. When you're excited about what you're doing, it rubs off on your kids. Yeah, so the next thing I think that you can do to create a really, a learning culture is to have it be safe to ask questions and explore. As the mom or the parent, don't be afraid of your children coming across something that is maybe contrary to what you believe. If you come across another point of view, you should use that as another learning opportunity, not as something to run from. I think this is really interesting because I hear in a lot of homeschooling circles, moms talking about, oh, do you recommend this book? And oh, what do you think about this? Does this have not appropriate content necessarily? Because we avoid inappropriate content. But they talk about their own slant. Does this support my beliefs and what I want my kids to believe? I cringe a little bit when I hear that because I want my kids to be exposed to lots of things and lots of ideas, and then we have a chance to talk about them and decide why do we believe the way that we believe? That discussion is important. If you just shield them from everything and say, I'm not going to teach them that evolution exists at all, that can be a real disservice. First of all, there's nothing scary about evolution. We need to learn the concepts that are out there, whether or not we believe in them. And hiding parts of it from your kids is not doing them a service at all. I think it comes down to seeking truth. Whether or not I believe in evolution or whether or not I believe in the Bible doesn't matter. It does, but we should be teaching our children why we believe what we believe, but we shouldn't be shielding them from something that is different from our beliefs. And as that lifelong learner, we still need to be willing to re-examine our beliefs to wonder, am I really right? You need to actually ask yourself that question. You're modeling that for your children again. I think it's a really shallow belief system that can't stand any challenge. You need to be able to say, this is why I believe it, and I know it. I believe it deep in my soul. And until you can do that, you really don't have much of a belief system, and that's what you want to create in your children, not simply a rote, well, my mom said, because someday they're going to come across someone who's presented them with a different point of view, and how are they going to react to that if they've never been exposed to it before? So this was an interesting thing that happened not that long ago in our homeschool. We were doing Unit 3-1 and the history component of it, and we were learning about a lot of explorers. And I filled up our library book basket with lots of books about many explorers, but we had probably eight or nine books about Christopher Columbus. And it was really interesting as we were reading through these books to see the different slants that people take on Christopher Columbus. In some books, he was a hero. In some books, he was an absolute villain. And there probably wasn't much in the middle. There's not much in the middle. It's really one way or the other. And instead of pre-reading those books and deciding what slant I wanted to teach my kids, instead we read a variety, and we talked about the slant. We said, look, what is this author trying to convince you of, and what did they use as a tool to convince you? What were their tactics? And then we read the next book. What does this author want you to believe? And it was far more powerful to teach my kids how to think. That is what creating a learning culture is. You're not trying to fill an empty brain. You're trying to teach a brain how to think. And when we can take different viewpoints and not shy away from them but really discuss them, that's creating the kind of learning culture that you need. I was an adult before I figured that out. I was after college before I understood, oh, authors are people who have opinions. And I assumed, well, it's in a textbook or it's been said in the news over some microphone. I thought it was true. It must be truth if they printed it. That's right. I was well into my 20s before I realized that there was bias in everything. And I feel like that's a little bit of a disservice. And I'm so proud when my children say, oh, well, did you hear that, Mom? He believes such and such. And he tried to convince me because they can see through that at a young age. And I think that's because of the way that we have modeled in our school that we look at other points of view. We look at many different ideas. And we are able to examine them. Fairly often people write to me, customers write to me, and they'll say, hey, is it okay if I share this resource? It's about dinosaurs. Is it okay if I do that? Or this is a kind of a more conservative viewpoint. Or this is a more liberal viewpoint. Can I share this book? Can I pin it to the unit Pinterest board? And I say, yes, please do. I want all of the viewpoints. I embrace all of the viewpoints because it gives me an opportunity to learn from other points of view and other perspectives. And it gives my kids a more balanced view of everything instead of trying to mold a tight wedge that they have to fit into. So when we were choosing the topics for our layers of learning curriculum, the specific things we would talk about within each unit, and also the specific books that we would recommend, we did filter them in terms of we're not going to have inappropriate content, you know, pornographic or foul language that we would expose your children to. But we did not filter them for viewpoint. So we will often recommend books that have a creationist point of view, and we will also recommend books that have an evolutionist point of view. We didn't filter it. Sometimes we mentioned when that came up because we want you to be aware as a parent so that you can go into it with an idea of, okay, I need to teach this to my child, or I want to choose this book, but I want to skip this book, just based on what your preferences are as a parent. But we didn't filter ideas. And we did that intentionally. We want you to have many ideas. Another thing that we did is that we often ask open-ended questions where we may not even know the answer. We didn't have to think of the answer. We just gave you the question for you to think about, deep questions that have to do with your world view, your beliefs, your foundational understanding of the way that the world really is. And these are things that parents should be discussing with their children. I also want to point out that besides us not answering the questions in the curriculum, I also don't answer the questions for my kids all the time. I love asking them open-ended questions that I don't have an expected answer for. That creates a learning culture. It's me saying, I'm a person. I don't have all of the answers. What do you think? Let's talk about it. We're learning together. Yeah, and I think that questions are the first step to curiosity. And they're the first step to learning. They're the first step to discovery. So every now and then I'll come across somewhere, usually online or something, and someone will say, how dare you question science? Or something to that effect. I'm like, what do you mean how dare you question science? Science is all about questions. That's the whole point of science. That's what it is. That's the definition. I think another way that we can create a learning culture in our homeschool is to make sure that we surround ourselves by tools for learning. My home is full of books and craft supplies and science equipment. And it is all allowed. It is not put away where the kids can't touch it. They are allowed to get it out, not just during school or not just when I'm watching like an eagle. They can get it out whenever they want and explore with it. We have a microscope that just sits there and a whole set of slides and they can play with it like they can play with their toys. We learn all the time, not just during school. Yeah. And so we do teach our children how to take care of those things and to clean up after themselves. Although, you know, there's always the mom job. That's not perfect. That's not perfect. But we do let them just use these things. It's not hands off. We let them get into the craft supplies. I have one son who really loves crafting. My youngest, Harrison, he loves any kind of craft project. And he's like, Mom, can I use the paint? Yeah, Harrison, you don't even have to ask. Just go use the paint. And I keep having to tell him that he's very polite. That's good. But I'm like, yes, just go use it. You can use anything you want to, Harrison. He uses our hot glue gun. He's 10 and he's been using it for a couple of years. I just taught him how to use it properly. He understands that it's hot and it will burn him and he uses it right and he puts it away when I tell him to. I have to keep a constant supply of baking soda and vinegar because there's a volcano going off frequently in my kitchen. The kids just build them. And glue for the slime, right? We have slime, oh, at least weekly, there's some new recipe of slime happening. My kids love to create and I love that they love creating. I want them to feel free to always be creative and learning and doing projects and exploring. That's my goal for them. So if I'm constantly stopping them and saying, don't do that, don't make a mess, don't touch my stuff, that doesn't provide any freedom for them to learn. And I want to create a learning culture. Right, because you bought the microscope for them, right? You didn't buy it for yourself. So let them use it. If it's getting dust on a shelf, that's not fulfilling its purpose. We want them to be engaged in learning and not just during school hours. It's got to be all the time. And young children really can learn how to take proper care of things. Even a five-year-old can be taught how to carry a microscope correctly and how to put slides in and out without breaking it. So I remember years ago, I think it might have been even our first year that we started blogging. So probably like eight years ago, you wrote a post that was so eye-opening to me, Michelle. You wrote about exploration stations. Do you remember that little post? Yes, yes, I do. You had taken spots in your house and you made little stations where your kids could learn about things. And you changed them out from time to time. I remember you had a tiny dresser and in the drawer, they'd pull it out and there were little musical instruments and like recorder music and things that they could explore and play with. Those instruments are all broken now, but they got good use. That is the peril of the learning culture where your kids can grab anything, you're going to have some casualties. But they learned along the way. Yeah, and it was all just noise. My children are not musical, but we learned that, right? Well, you also had different exploration stations about other topics like the planets or bugs. And you would hide, not hide, but you had them in little nooks and crannies in your house so that your kids could find these little things to pull out. Yeah, so one of the things we had was a backpack and it was full of bug hunting stuff. So there was a bug identification book and a magnifying glass, a bug net and a jar and a notebook with a pencil and stuff. And they could take the whole backpack outside with them and it was just hanging there with our coats in the normal spot. And they would just take it out with them and they could go play and do bug hunting. And I would change those exploration stations out every couple of months, probably like seasonally. I love that. When I read it, I just went, yes, and I wanted to empty out drawers and start filling them with learning things. And that totally excited me. And so I started to do that around our home and it was awesome. All of a sudden, my kids were looking for things to learn about. They started searching for the little nooks and crannies that had whatever mom filled. You know, I had one with rocks and we had a whole mineral kit and some rock identification things and things to do, little scratch tests. And it was so neat to watch them get excited. It was like a treasure hunt. And they try new things that maybe they wouldn't have because it's this present. It's this exciting discovery that they get to go use it and they get to do it on their own. It's not assigned. It's not assigned. And it's like turning, I don't know, it's turning learning into a game. It's turning into toys. So it was fascinating to me to watch when we did the rock unit. They already felt like little experts. It was so fun to see them go, oh, I did this scratch test. I had instructions for it in our rock kit. And then they were pretty soon teaching their siblings about it. And they got more excited about it because they had had some exposure, too. So when it was part of our assignment, they were already thrilled by it. Yeah. And I think that that is key in another way, is that your children need to try things. And a lot of it needs to be independent because they can't know what they like. They can't discover their personality and their strengths and their talents unless they get the chance to try things out. And the less structured it is, the more they will come to know if they really like it. It's like you don't discover who you are until you're alone. And that's kind of that concept that you have to let them go on their own. Everything can't be an assignment. You need to let their personalities shine. One of the things that I think also helped us create a learning culture, and we touched on this just barely, but books. You've got to fill your house with books. Yeah, and go to the library a lot. Books are a present at our house. Even if you get nothing else for Christmas, you're going to get a library book. You're going to get a book in your stocking, not a library book. I would love to give a library book. This is due back in three weeks. Merry Christmas. What a great idea. What have we been doing wrong all these years? That freed me up. I love that idea. That's brilliant. Next Christmas is going to be awesome. Can you imagine boxes full of books? That'd be so much fun. I think that every single room in your house has books, and just about every room in my house has books. Yeah, we keep having to build new bookshelves. In fact, I have a plan for this spring, new bookshelves. More bookshelf projects? Yes, we have books everywhere. Not only do we have them, but the children see me reading them. Every week we go to the library and it's a treat. I count audiobooks as books. Half my kids are dyslexic. They have a little trouble learning to read. They all love books, and it's because we're so immersed in them all the time. That's a huge, huge way of learning. It's one of the primary ways that human beings learn and pass on information, is through the written word. Just like Exploration Station is one of the fun things that we do, I have bookshelves all over my house too, but I have a couple of spots where they're especially concentrated. We have an office that has a huge library in it, and you can find a lot of our non-fiction books especially there. But we also have book baskets, and I've got baskets throughout my house, and those I trade out. So the kids, when they go to the book basket, they'll always find something new. And it's a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, and we have one that's specifically for our library books so that we don't lose those library books and have to pay fines. But we have others that get changed out for holidays, and I have holiday books and just various topics. I'll grab a couple of books and put them in there, and my kids pick them up because they're in the book basket, whereas they might not pick them up if they just sat on the office shelf. So if you can put them around your house, just like the Exploration Stations, it helps them to be excited to find out what's there. Yeah, my bookshelves seem like they're in a perpetual mess, but I look at it and I go, oh, they're reading them. If the bookshelves stayed tidy, then I would know the kids weren't reading them. And sometimes I'll be surprised. My oldest, the oldest who's at home now is CJ, and he's like, Mom, when we do our next Read Aloud, can we read The Iliad? Um, The Iliad. Really? Yeah, I really want to read that one. Okay. Let's look for a good translation then. Hey, I remember when I was young, Mom always took us to the library every week, and I remember thinking, she limits us to only three books a week. I don't know if I can do that. So I would search for the biggest, fattest book so that it could last me through the week. Yep. If you make it a treat, reading can be the most powerful tool for learning. Another thing that our mom did that we both do is that she would read aloud. It is such an amazing experience to have this shared book. You all have this shared experience. You can talk about it forever. You can talk about this book that you've read, and you all have this discussion, and it really makes the kids love books. They love stories before they can even read. So I still, when I think of Mom reading aloud, I always think of our wooden rocking chair. She had a wooden rocking chair that she sat in, that sat in our living room, and she'd sit in the rocking chair, and we'd sit around her, and she'd read to us. And I still, when I think of it, I can feel it. It took me back there to that happy place when I was little and Mom read to me, and I fell in love with those stories. Bridge to Terabithia. Summer of the Monkeys. Those are still my favorite books, the ones that Mom read to us. The books she read to us are my favorite, too, and they will always be part of me because she took the time to read to us. That's a gift for your kids. It's the best gift that you can give your kids. Yeah, and if you struggle with reading, again, audiobooks are books. If you can't, for whatever reason, read with your children, you can do it while you're in the car if you don't have time to sit there at night and read. Everyone has different situations, but making that learning culture out of your home really should become a priority for you. Another way that we can make a learning culture is to really let our kids' personalities shine through. Every single person is creative in some way. We're not all creative in an artsy-craftsy way. Some are creative scientists. Some are creative writers. Some are creative mathematicians. But we all have something creative in us. And if we can help our kids bring out their creativity, we will create lifelong learners. I think most people are creative until they are stifled in some way. They've been told, nope, you're doing it wrong. And then they stop. Okay, I'm doing it wrong. I'm going to stop. And we need to be careful about doing that with our children. There is definitely a place for following directions and for teaching them to obey. But we need to make sure that we keep that mix where they're allowed to color outside the lines, figuratively speaking, or literally. But maybe not on the walls. We can have boundaries but still allow creativity. I try to be really mindful when I give my kids assignments because I am at heart a teacher and I still try to assign my kids and have high expectations. But I try to be mindful that I let there be some choice also. So, for example, if I give my kids a writing assignment, I might give them a topic but let them decide how they're going to present it. It might be a story. It might be an essay. It might be a play. It could be a PowerPoint presentation. On the other hand, I might let them choose a topic but I give them the format. So, you get to choose whatever topic you want that we're learning about right now in our unit but I want you to create a PowerPoint presentation. And it needs to have at least ten slides. It's got to be edited and you need to add transitions and I can be really particular about that but they get to be creative in another aspect of it. So, I kind of divide up the assignments and I say, okay, let's have some expectations and let's have some creativity. Put them together and you've got a really great learning tool. So, an example of that was math which you wouldn't think, I mean, how creative can you get with math, right? But my second son, Timothy, has really got a brilliant math brain. He just gets math, which is foreign to me. It's like math is a foreign language to me but he just gets it. So, when I was teaching him how to do his various math programs or problems and we were working them out together I would say, no, no, no, you're supposed to do it this way and he'd be like, mom, I got the answer, see? I just did it this way and he would explain it to me and I didn't even understand how he got the answer but he understood it. He was finding it in a creative way. He was finding a different way to find the answer in just the exact steps that I think it should be or the way the textbook shows it. I also remember when your kids were younger they struggled sometimes with having an entire math sheet in front of them. Do you remember? You were telling me that sometimes that was overwhelming and so you would take it and put it in a different format. You let them pick and they would do one problem at a time and we also do things on the chalkboard sometimes so there are different ways of showing creativity it's not just art or music sometimes we think the arts are the only place to be creative but that's not true we can be creative in the kitchen we can be creative in the way that we set up an essay there's different ways of thinking of creativity a lot of it is really flexibility that it must be done this way and you must check off these boxes instead opening your mind and saying what's another way that we could do this that might work for my kid and let them contribute and give some ideas too that's not not expecting them to obey you do expect them to obey and you give clear expectations but you also listen to them and get their input and play on their strengths remember to praise them praise them for their outcomes oh you did a great job on that project but also for their process wow you did that in a way I never would have thought of I am so impressed praise them for their creativity and for their desire to step outside the rules or the box or the exact assignment as long as they are still being obedient and completing it you need to be able to remember I have a daughter that is a real perfectionist I have to praise her mistakes I have to say you made a mistake and you have figured out a way not to do it and you are still going at it you are impressive I have to praise her for that because otherwise she gets so discouraged that she shuts down if we are going to be creative people we can't shut down we have to keep opening ourselves up I have a girl who has needed help seeing that I am constantly looking for praiseworthy things that my kids do whether they are mistakes whether they are strengths it doesn't matter there is a lot to the learning process that you can praise even if it is not the outcome yes I think that is really important to add praise in so I think there is one more thing that I would really like to highlight take your children on trips do a family vacation go some place you have never been do a field trip to some place you would never think of my kids went to the buck knife factory which is located near us here and it is their favorite thing well of course they are all boys boys have a thing for knives but they loved watching the factory it was amazing on a family trip over to the Oregon coast we went to the Tillamook cheese factory and on that trip we went to the Oregon coast we saw the ocean which we don't live near the ocean so that was new for my kids we went to an aquarium where they got to see live sea creatures we went to the redwood forest down in California and then we went on down to Yosemite and through San Francisco and everything my goal is now to work at the Tillamook cheese factory I hope that works out for him but he never would have realized that he loves that that he's excited about that if we hadn't gone on that trip so I think it's important to have going places and doing things having experiences is part of learning last week I had a really awesome chance to take our family to Washington D.C. and so we spent a week just exploring the National Mall and we've been doing year 4 so we've been learning about government and the beginnings of our nation in America and the National Mall we did the geography unit from 4-11 about symbols and landmarks and there was an entire exploration that was creating a map of the National Mall and so we learned about each of the spots on the Mall and then we went there it was amazing to go there it brought everything to life if you go wherever you go that's true if you read a book about frogs and then you go to the neighborhood pond and see a frog all of a sudden the sparks are flying in your kids heads and they connect all of what they're learning with real life and it matters the more that you experience the more curious you are about the world the more you go places the more you want to go places the more you try things the more you want to try things we did laser tag for my son's birthday this year I've never done laser tag my kids had before but I was like that was awesome I loved it if I hadn't tried it I'm like this old mom with 6 kids but I was like this is a new experience for me and I learned from it it was fun shall I have a question for you then you are a homebody a massive homebody so how do you mesh that with going places? well I think that being a homebody doesn't necessarily mean you don't want to go places it sometimes means that you don't want to be in large crowds or you don't want to be places with strangers I like going with my family I would not enjoy going on a large tour I would hate that but if I go places in my way then it works so creating a learning culture really we talked about how this is a fast changing world we have to be able to adapt with it and my real whole goal for my kids at the end of our homeschool is to create learners I'm not nearly as concerned about them passing a test or meeting a requirement as learning how to learn that's a skill that they'll use for their whole lives so today we talked about some important points I think if you want to create a learning culture you have to learn together you have to model it for your kids you have to let them ask questions and explore and you have to ask questions don't be afraid of biases in books don't be afraid of someone who believes something different than you learn about it, embrace that with books and learning tools and let creativity in your kids shine go places, explore see this world as a massive opportunity for learning and if you are modeling that for your kids they are going to become lifelong learners right along with you thank you so much for joining us next time we're going to be talking about how to create a family school which kind of dovetails right along with what we've been talking about today we both have big families so we have some experience in it and some trial and error and we're excited to share with you some of the things that we've learned along the way so we will see you next time thank you, bye bye thank you for joining us today come and visit us at layersoflearning.com and on our Facebook group make sure to tune in next month for our new podcast in the meantime we wish you happiness in your home school have fun learning