Monday, March 11, 2013

Delight Directed Learning

Many individuals make the mistake of confusing delight directed learning with unschooling. Over the past year even I have fallen into that category from time to time. Delight Directed Learning simply means that you take the interests and passions of your children and structure their lessons/education to that area. I would like to share a back story to let you the reader understand why we choose to use delight directed methods on and off throughout the year.

We have home educated for 7 years and have used many different methods. Like most HE families we started with textbooks/workbooks. We then moved on to Charlotte Mason for a couple of years, unit studies and lapbooking thrown in when we needed a break from it all. Okay, here is what changed our line of thinking and educating. What do you do if your child is not inclined to academics and absolutely nothing "academically" excites or interests them? All children are different. Ours happens to be very gifted in the fine arts (dramatic, singing, and drawing). God made her that way and who am I to try to change that and make her miserable in the process. To make a long story shorter - this is were we as a family decided to go the route of delight directed learning. Does this mean she always picks what we will study? NO. Does this mean she doesn't have to learn all the basics? NO. What it does mean is that her four sciences for high school might not look like all the other kids. It might look like oceanography, horticulture, marine biology and so on. Whatever her current interest may be for that year. For one simple example I recently purchased a book about molecular biology for next year, but it is in manga format. My daughter is crazy about all things manga/anime/Japanese. So it stands to reason she might learn a little more about molecular biology through a manga comic book.
Cosplay costume for MoMocon as Pinky Pie
One more example of this type of learning in our home is that we art journal or notebook all our learned information as opposed to essay writing or answering questions. Grace loves to draw so this allows her creative side to come out while learning. We used this with our Shakespeare study and currently our ancient history as well as other topics of science.
Shakespeare Study Art Journaling

To wrap it all up, I believe that Delight Directed Learning can fit right alongside all other methods of home educating. There are many blogs, books, articles and websites devoted to Delight Directed Learning. Go do some research and follow some of your own rabbit trails. That is the essence of Delight Directed Learning, as adults we do it every time we pick up a book of interest to read or watch a great documentary on the television. Why not let our children do the same.


Be sure to visit Teaching Creatively Blog Hop to see what other families think of Delight Directed Learning.

1 comment:

Sara @ Embracing Destiny said...

My daughter would love the costume! She is a huge My Little Pony fan. =0)