By Daniel Yordy
One of the chief problems with weaving learning around what children naturally enjoy is that it is not long before “stilted” learning exercises make what started out fun to become boring. Yet learning cannot be all fun and games; discipline is also a great value. My 16-year-old daughter notices a huge difference between her piano students who practice a lot, partly because they enjoy it and partly because their parents make them, and those who practice little. It is a real eye opener for her.
The key, I believe, is to place something of great value, something that is real, at the core of your child’s learning experience.
And for most children, if at all possible, that would start with raising an animal, or for some, gardening or nature exploration – especially if there is a chance to win a prize, such as the fall fair, or a dog show, or to put food on the table, not just for immediate family, but for relatives and friends as well. “Johnny grew all this in his garden, and harvested it and cooked it as well!” “Wow, Johnny, this is the best corn on the cob I have ever tasted.”
And so I place the Natural Project as the largest and foremost project in a child’s learning experience.
A child will develop a relationship with a horse or with a flower garden or with the woods and streams that cannot exist with any part of the mechanics of the classroom. And it must be their own dog, or their own corn plants, not some “group” experience where there is no personal ownership.
It is that relationship with something real and something needful that will sustain the encroachment of “learning” sneaking in around the edges.
I remember as a boy lying in bed, too tired to get up, knowing that my pigs were hungry, and that they would be hungry all night because I had forgotten to feed them and I was too lazy to get up. I know that, over time, having the responsibility for the well-being of a living creature worked something important on the inside of me, something the modern classroom can never duplicate.
When there is some great end or goal to be reached – learn to repair small gas engines so you can build your own go-cart; or learn how computers work, then build your very own; or learn some construction math and design, then build a tree house in that big tree in the back yard – then a child is much more ready to tolerate “learning” so long as it clearly helps them reach that larger goal.
The Sports Category is an easy one. Most every kid loves some sort of sports, and learning more about football or becoming an expert at camping and exploring the wild or something similar appeals to every child. There is such a wide range of possibilities in the Sports arena and every kid seems to choose something different, when it’s them doing the choosing. Yet I find that sports are some of the most wasted learning opportunities in all of education. Almost nothing is ever added to just playing the game, or running around and throwing a ball, when there is so much that could be added that most kids would respond eagerly too. What coach teaches his students to referee or do the sports casting on the loudspeaker or takes them to watch a professional game together, studying all aspects of what made the winning team great, or takes them on a field trip to the locker room where the professionals would tell them what it’s all about?
My choice as a kid would have been backpacking and exploring the woods and mountains of Oregon. I did that anyway, why could it not have been my schooling? I got so excited when I wrote the Backpacking Project Guide recently, for a boy who lives next to the Olympic Mountains of Washington state. I so wished I were young again, and that doing projects were my education.
While raising an animal or playing a sport are in themselves real, science and math do not exist on their own – except for a very small group of personalities. Yet both are completely divorced from their purpose inside modern education. This is the primary reason, I suspect, why kids just do not relate to science and math in the classroom (or much of anything else). Kids need it to be real.
You have noticed that Project-Led Learning is built on doing projects in a range of categories, ten in all. The ten categories are Natural, Physical (sports), Scientific, Logical/Mathematical, Technological, Vocational, Literary, Artistic, Social, and Spiritual. Writing Project Guides for real kids gives me further insight on how learning works inside the full range of real life experiences. I will share more of those insights across the other categories next time.
Daniel Yordy has worked with teenagers for over thirty years, both on the job, doing a wide range of activities with young men and women from construction to woodworking to gardening to milking cows, and in school, public, private, and home school. While obtaining his Masters Degree, he pondered the difference between the dictates of “modern education” and the practical reality he already knew produced far superior learning results than anything contrived in the modern (pretend) classroom. The result is Project-Led Learning, a weaving of the objectives of education into the actions of real-life, personal projects that contribute to a young person’s life and family.
Out of the philosophy of Project-Led Learning, Mr. Yordy has devised a series of Project Guides in ten different categories of learning. You can find out more about these exciting Guides at http://www.yguideacademy.com/ProjectLedLearning.html
One of the chief problems with weaving learning around what children naturally enjoy is that it is not long before “stilted” learning exercises make what started out fun to become boring. Yet learning cannot be all fun and games; discipline is also a great value. My 16-year-old daughter notices a huge difference between her piano students who practice a lot, partly because they enjoy it and partly because their parents make them, and those who practice little. It is a real eye opener for her.
The key, I believe, is to place something of great value, something that is real, at the core of your child’s learning experience.
And for most children, if at all possible, that would start with raising an animal, or for some, gardening or nature exploration – especially if there is a chance to win a prize, such as the fall fair, or a dog show, or to put food on the table, not just for immediate family, but for relatives and friends as well. “Johnny grew all this in his garden, and harvested it and cooked it as well!” “Wow, Johnny, this is the best corn on the cob I have ever tasted.”
And so I place the Natural Project as the largest and foremost project in a child’s learning experience.
A child will develop a relationship with a horse or with a flower garden or with the woods and streams that cannot exist with any part of the mechanics of the classroom. And it must be their own dog, or their own corn plants, not some “group” experience where there is no personal ownership.
It is that relationship with something real and something needful that will sustain the encroachment of “learning” sneaking in around the edges.
I remember as a boy lying in bed, too tired to get up, knowing that my pigs were hungry, and that they would be hungry all night because I had forgotten to feed them and I was too lazy to get up. I know that, over time, having the responsibility for the well-being of a living creature worked something important on the inside of me, something the modern classroom can never duplicate.
When there is some great end or goal to be reached – learn to repair small gas engines so you can build your own go-cart; or learn how computers work, then build your very own; or learn some construction math and design, then build a tree house in that big tree in the back yard – then a child is much more ready to tolerate “learning” so long as it clearly helps them reach that larger goal.
The Sports Category is an easy one. Most every kid loves some sort of sports, and learning more about football or becoming an expert at camping and exploring the wild or something similar appeals to every child. There is such a wide range of possibilities in the Sports arena and every kid seems to choose something different, when it’s them doing the choosing. Yet I find that sports are some of the most wasted learning opportunities in all of education. Almost nothing is ever added to just playing the game, or running around and throwing a ball, when there is so much that could be added that most kids would respond eagerly too. What coach teaches his students to referee or do the sports casting on the loudspeaker or takes them to watch a professional game together, studying all aspects of what made the winning team great, or takes them on a field trip to the locker room where the professionals would tell them what it’s all about?
My choice as a kid would have been backpacking and exploring the woods and mountains of Oregon. I did that anyway, why could it not have been my schooling? I got so excited when I wrote the Backpacking Project Guide recently, for a boy who lives next to the Olympic Mountains of Washington state. I so wished I were young again, and that doing projects were my education.
While raising an animal or playing a sport are in themselves real, science and math do not exist on their own – except for a very small group of personalities. Yet both are completely divorced from their purpose inside modern education. This is the primary reason, I suspect, why kids just do not relate to science and math in the classroom (or much of anything else). Kids need it to be real.
You have noticed that Project-Led Learning is built on doing projects in a range of categories, ten in all. The ten categories are Natural, Physical (sports), Scientific, Logical/Mathematical, Technological, Vocational, Literary, Artistic, Social, and Spiritual. Writing Project Guides for real kids gives me further insight on how learning works inside the full range of real life experiences. I will share more of those insights across the other categories next time.
Daniel Yordy has worked with teenagers for over thirty years, both on the job, doing a wide range of activities with young men and women from construction to woodworking to gardening to milking cows, and in school, public, private, and home school. While obtaining his Masters Degree, he pondered the difference between the dictates of “modern education” and the practical reality he already knew produced far superior learning results than anything contrived in the modern (pretend) classroom. The result is Project-Led Learning, a weaving of the objectives of education into the actions of real-life, personal projects that contribute to a young person’s life and family.
Out of the philosophy of Project-Led Learning, Mr. Yordy has devised a series of Project Guides in ten different categories of learning. You can find out more about these exciting Guides at http://www.yguideacademy.com/ProjectLedLearning.html
