I’ve heard the term thrown around the homeschool circuit, “delight-directed homeschooling,” but what exactly does it mean? Delight-directed homeschooling is a method of homeschooling that uses a child’s natural interests and aptitudes to facilitate learning. At first glance, one might think that this is just a fancy way to describe unschooling but I beg to differ. I’ve met unschoolers and I’ve met delight-directed homeschoolers and the way that their days look are completely different.
The primary difference that I have noticed is parental involvement. The unschoolers that I have met were brilliant, motivated, and self-starters. They taught themselves math through coding and created intricate board games from absolute scratch. They were not lacking in any sense of the term but their parents were not a part of the learning process. The children were.
With delight-directed students, I noticed that the parents honed in on their interests and developed the curriculum from there. The parent was in charge. They had requirements that the child had to complete but they were based on the interests of the child not a set curriculum blindly assigned by the parents.
Maybe you’ve taken the delight-directed learning path as a homeschooling parent yourself. You know that your daughter loves horses so instead of assigning her the specific book report in the lesson plan you allow her to do a research paper on horses. I started taking this approach when my children started entering science fairs. I would let them pick their topics and they would thrive as they worked on them. Why can’t this method work all across the board, with other subjects?
Once I tried history. I listened to my children and have taken requests to do medieval studies, Viking units, and even a study on the Queen of England. Recently I went back to old ways and chose the topic and though they are working through the material, they are not as engaged. My eighth grader finally came out and said, “How many times do I need to learn about the Boston Tea Party. I want to learn about British History.” How often do you hear a middle school student request to learn about British History? I am listening and in the process of planning such a study. At first, it was tempting to interpret it as complaining but the more I thought about it, he was right. I let him talk about it and he made a good point, we are always learning about American history or ancient world history but nothing in between. My fault yes, but I am taking into account what he has said and am going to teach on something that will hold his attention!
For science, we have gone through more of a structured textbook style over the years. Yes, there were experiments and plenty of them but as we get into the older grades many of the experiments are the exact same and my kids are getting bored. They love science and I refuse to cause them to despise it because of choosing the wrong curriculum for them. I asked them what they wanted. It became clear that a good, quality chemistry course was the answer. I happened upon an amazing book that teaches you how to set up a home chemistry lab for only a few hundred dollars. Yes, this is happening and we are in the process of getting this prepared for the kids. My husband and I are still the teachers and in charge of the experiments but if I hadn’t listened to them they may have been forced to work through a textbook with super simple experiments that would not have challenged them in a way that was best for them.
Delight-directed homeschooling does not put the child in charge but allows them to be a part of the process. If you haven’t tried this method yet I highly recommend giving it a chance, even if in just one subject. Who knows? You might become hooked.
