The Tennessean featured a short article a few days ago: Home-school notes: Learning moments mix into holiday festivities. In the article, author Kristen Kindoll describes how she shifts learning opportunities during the holidays.
"I began to incorporate themed projects", she writes.
Some of us homeschool using themed projects as our core method, because that is the way our students best learn. When auditory processing challenges combined with reading and math delays make reading and worksheets torture, themed projects aka project based learning is an effective (and fun) alternative. Education Nation devotes quite a few pages to the "why bother" and "how to" of project based learning. There is information on project based learning, the importance, and some of the challenges, at edutopia.org.
Back to the newspaper article. Kindoll continues, "Planning the Thanksgiving meal together, I could correlate the importance of incorporating the food pyramid principles. As my children played with new gifts, I found a great backdrop to the occasion with listening to Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol."
I love those ideas! I'm always looking for ways to incorporate information and academics, in context, into what we already do. Moms sharing ideas, sharing how they incorporated content delivery outside of the book and worksheet, is so very helpful for me as we help a child on the autism spectrum make an important discovery that she is, indeed, a learner.
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Oh, I had a moment like that yesterday. In the book The First Transatlantic Cable, a reporter was boarding a ship to Port-Aux-Basque, Newfoundland. When we looked it up on the map, I explained to her how I have taken a ferry from there to Nova Scotia when we moved back to the USA after having lived in Newfoundland for three years.
Part of a Charlotte Mason education is to tie in our personal experiences (teacher and taught) into a story to show them how one can make personal connections.
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