self-directed? you’ve got to be kidding!

Father Bear works in tertiary education.
Mother Bear talks about our children becoming self-motivated learners.
Father Bear asks if she realises just how many kids come through who are truly intrinsically motivated.
Mother Bear realises it’s a rhetorical question, but, all the same, suggests that our different philosophy worked out through different methodology might produce different results.

Together we are waiting. Our children are too young to tell, but the signs, so far, are good ones.

When our children are little we just live life and they come along for the ride. Developing a love of learning is far more important to us than producing high quality academics At That Stage. We encourage curiosity and creativity, language skills and reason, healthy appetites and habits of love, obedience, excellence, attention and concentration, orderliness and neatness, diligence and redeeming the time, and self-control.

Although we have not required the children to study certain things or complete particular projects, we have had at the back of our minds a range of options and possibilities, understanding that no one child would ever do absolutely everything on our list. When our eldest turned 12 we gave her a folder with all that *mind stuff* in it, hopefully as another form of inspiration. That seems to have worked too. She is directing her studies largely from those suggestions. And more than that - her younger brother asked for a folder as well…..

Not only has our family used the folder, but other families have taken it away for a wee nosey too. Now it is available here online for you to have a look at if you would like to.

I hesitate to put it out there in the public arena, because I fear that parents will expect their six year olds to be ticking items off, to be studying seventeen subjects every day, entrepreneurially running a business and wanting to practise teh violin for three hours before breakfast. I earnestly desire that it not be a burden; I hope that making our little system available will be a longterm inspiration to you, an encouragement and perhaps even a help……always remember to ask yourself what will work for YOUR family! And, if I may say so, let little kids play when they are not helping with lots of chores and leave the academics until they are ready to take responsibility for their own studies. (That’s why the rest of these pages are written TO OUR CHILDREN…..you’ll be a proverbial fly on the wall peeking into our lives through these pages).

“Happy hearts and happy faces,
happy play in grassy places.
That was how, in ancient ages,
children grew to kings and sages.”
~ R.L.STEVENSON