For the LOVE of learning!

One thing that I absolutely LOVE about home education is the fact that the love of learning can be cultivated and not squashed! I remember being a child and I loved learning, but I really did not like school.

I really love being able to cultivate my son's love for learning. He's so excited about learning new things (both of them are, but I don't quite consider myself homeschooling the baby yet - though I know that I'm teaching him a great deal!)

Right now my oldest is excited about learning to read and learning to count to one hundred. Not only do I get to be the one teaching him these things and watching him learn but I get to go with the flow and teach him as he has the interest.

Taking advantage of that is amazing! He doesn't have to feel pushed into learning something that he has no interest in yet, nor does he have to be held back and wait for something the school system is not ready to teach yet.

Isn't this the way learning is supposed to be?

It really is an adventure because I don't always know what is going to work when teaching him something. I was baffled at how to teach him to read because I was trying various "systems" and it just wasn't clicking.

Then I had the thought to sit down and write out the word AT. He sounded it out pretty quickly and then I added an "S" in front of the AT and he sounded out sat. He was so excited! We high-fived and I wrote out a bunch more AT's and started adding new letters in front of them.

In no time at all he had sounded out all of the three letter AT words in the English language! He was so excited and as soon as he could he started showing people his list and reading it to them.

We went through the same process with the IT words and he was equally excited!

Now he's focused on learning how to count to 100 so today I'll teach him 30, 40, 50 and so on. Now that he grasps the concept of 21, 22, 23... he can apply it to learning the bigger numbers. I think that he'll be able to count to 100 if not by today then by the end of the week for sure!