There are three important question that a mother needs to ask when deciding on the lessons to give to her children. What should they learn, why should they learn it and how should they learn it. That's what I read in Home Education. When I was still starting with our homeschooling journey, I was so overwhelmed. There is simply so much to learn, so many books to read, so many people in the history to know, so many literature, artworks, and music compositions. Where do I start?
That was my main question. Where do I start and how do I even begin? I was looking inward to find the answers on how to educate my child. And that was why I felt too overwhelmed. When I read Home Education, I learned that planning for my daughter's lessons should take into consideration the following:
the children's lessons should provide material for their mental growth, should exercise the several powers of their minds, should furnish them with fruitful ideas, and should afford them knowledge, really valuable for its own sake, accurate, and interesting, of the kind that the child may recall as a man with profit and pleasure.
The first part was that it should provide material for their mental growth. I now have fully understood that food is for the body as ideas is for the mind. Ideas are the sustenance that our minds need. We always read quotes saying we must feed our minds. That we should supply it with great ideas, positive thoughts, intellectual things. All because we become what we eat. Children's minds have so much room for their mental growth. They are consistently learning and are consistently gobbling up everything they see, hear, read. When preparing or deciding on what to teach our children, we must take into consideration if they would grow into good citizens of the world when they grow up.
As much as possible, I am very mindful of the books that my daughter reads. I always ask myself, would this book help her grow? Does it give her enough necessary mental nourishment that is good for her? In our homeschool lessons, I make it a point that there is one or two books that is a grade level higher than her current level. This way, she would not be complacent with her learning, she will learn to focus her attention more intently so that she could understand and remember the lessons.
Not only should they be given healthy food for the brain, they should be served a banquet of ideas. The best way for them to grow is to make sure that they exercise the several powers of their minds. Every lesson, every subject, every book we read during our study time needs to be narrated. Narration trains her brain to focus and pay attention while I am reading for I never repeat anything I have read aloud. This is to make sure that she develops the habit of attention.
It also helps her compose her thoughts when it's time for her to narrate the story. Children are natural talkers. They talk all day because they have so many things to say. The moment they learned to talk, all they want to do is to communicate. It is innate in them. Our job as parent educators is to make sure that they get used to remembering the details of the story they want to retell, they are able to put the events in proper order, they learn to use their own words when narrating, and of course, they develop the skill of formulating their own opinions based on what they listened to.
The lessons should include topics that would give them fruitful ideas. The living books we read are full of living ideas. Each planting seeds of ideas in the reader's and listener's minds ideas that grow and flourish the more these ideas are received. Aesop's fables may be short stories but my daughter had learned so much from that book.
The lessons from the banquet of feast I serve her seem to find a way to relate and connect [the dots] in her mind. As we plot the dates in our accordion timeline, she sees how so many artists were born in Europe during the time when Philippines was struggling under the Spanish occupation. While she was learning that, she was also learning about the different currencies all over the world. Each of those, she connects and make sense on her own, strengthening these connections and relations of ideas in her mind, helping her remember each lessons vividly.
Most importantly, the lessons during the study time should provide the children with knowledge and that they receive such rich and interesting knowledge with so much enthusiasm that it sticks with them even when they grow old. I've asked so many of my previous co workers before if they still remembered what they learned from Physics, or Trigonometry, or even in Music theory. Most of the time, they draw blank. I myself don't remember much about the lessons I had during my schooldays. And I was a grade-conscious student. I should be otherwise, I'll lose all my scholarships.
A lot of students study because they want to get good grades, finish school, and be an employee so they can earn money. Not a lot of people would say "Oh, I loved learning because of all the knowlege I gained." Most of us chose the courses we took in college because we think that's the degree that would help us land the job we want.
I remember a topic discussed in one of the homeschooling seminars I attended. The most fatal mistake that an educator can do is to view education as a gateway to the child's future vocation. It wasn't worded that way, but that's the gist of it. We are used to acquiring education so that we can use it for our dream job. While that is not entirely a wrong thing to do, it still would be very much beneficial to a child if she wills to gain knowledge for the sake of getting knowledge. That she sees it important because it is. That she feels it is interesting and that even when she is a grown up, she will still have that ability to pull that knowledge from her memory, all because she received it properly during her education.
