Growing Your Children’s Passions in Your Homeschool

Posted by HeatherW | 0 comments

Have you ever really thought about what makes your child’s heart sing? I bet if you thought about it, you could name the thing that would do it. For each of your kids. Isn’t it delightful when you can capture it easily enough and share it with your child?

That’s what our daughter’s art desk was all about. I knew it would make her heart sing. She spends hours and hours there working with paper and other craft media to create. It wasn’t a fancy birthday present, but I knew it would speak to her heart long after the other presents were forgotten.

One of the things I think is important as a parent is to engage our children often enough that we really know what they are passionate about. How do you know? How do you find out? Does it require expensive lessons and lots of venues for trying out lots of things? No, I don’t really think so. I think the resource it requires the most of is our time as parents. When we invest time in our children, it’s easy to figure out what brings them joy.

We have four children and as they have grown older we have no doubts as to what they are passionate about. Our oldest is just about 11 and he loves games. He is a gamer for certain and one of his favorite things on this earth is to play games with us and with his friends. He loves science, math, reading, playing baseball and soccer and following Virginia Tech Football (Go Hokies!). The younger two boys are still growing and the more time we spend with them, the more we get know the things they love most.

I already mentioned our daughter loves to create- she loves to do art and to craft things. She loves to sew and to learn American Sign Language. A common theme for her is creating with her hands. She is so talented at using her hands and it shows. We feed these passions as much as we can without adding too much to our schedule.

The concept of not adding too much to our schedule really brings me full circle to my post from last month on Keeping the Home in Homeschool. How can we fuel our children’s passions without racing around constantly?

In his book, The Hurried Child ,David Elkind discusses the phenomenon of busy children. Children who are on the go so much, families rarely enjoy a common time together. I think one thing I struggle a bit with even as a homeschooler or maybe because I am a homeschooler is all the music lessons and sophisticated things we can get our kids into…is my child at a disadvantage if I do music appreciation and basic music theory but not push formal instrumental lessons or choir training? One of the best things we can do for our kids is to learn what makes their heart sing and to pursue that with our time and resources- rather than every little thing that comes along. Do you value/use/remember every opportunity you had as a kid? It’s not likely. In fact, I would almost say I’m at a deficit because I joined everything and tried many things. I still do it as an adult. I want to try a lot and to be good at many things. Thankfully, my husband is around to keep me in check. Though he would argue I still do too much. Less is better is his motto.

There’s a big difference between a kid who enjoys soccer recreationally and probably is even very good at it and the kid who is serious scholarship material. Do we invest gobs of family time to soccer at an intense level in that case? Real talent, aptitude and desire is really different from- this is fun. This is fun can be handled differently with pickup games and friends. That changes the atmosphere of the activity and how often it must be done.

One reason our family has chosen to do 4-H over Scouts programs is because it’s a unifying activity. Our daughter and our sons can participate together as a family and we don’t have to run all over to drop some boys here and our girl there. They can pursue their interests in 4-H in our homeschool and proudly take their work to the fair every summer.

I mentioned last month that our children are generally permitted to be in one “thing” of their own at a time/per season. So, when new opportunities arise, we have to make choices. Recently, my daughter was able to take a sewing class at a local refashioning sewing classroom. She adored her time there and can hardly wait to return. Before we enrolled her in a class, she had been sewing for a year. Her grandmother started a project with her last summer and she did so well with the machine that we signed her up for co-op sewing classes. There were two that semester- one a beginner class and one an advanced class. I figured the advanced class was an independent study and she could work at her own pace no matter what it was. Once I knew she was on fire to sew, I had no problem spending our resources of time and money on the outside class.

For us that is the key…introducing activities at home before investing a lot of money and especially time outside the home. Our son wanted to learn to play the guitar so we invested in a basic child’s guitar and some instructional books. It’s been a terrific way to teach basic music theory and it gives both of us a chance to see how strong the desire to play guitar really is. If it is strong and it shows, then we can look for lessons for him in a way that is the least disruptive to our family life.

Our children are well aware of the one activity rule and they make decisions based on what they really want to do rather than indulging in it all just because it is fun. When our daughter finished her sewing class this week she very excitedly announced she was willing to give up softball in the spring to continue with the sewing shop.

The concept of pursuing our children’s passions in our homeschool is something we work on daily. It is the goal toward which we want to be purposeful. We certainly have our children in activities outside the home things like soccer and baseball and sewing occur in regular seasons at our house. It is important to know our children well enough to know what makes them soar- even if it is only for a short season. The fact is, even if I wanted to indulge my children in all the activities (whether long term like a sport or short term like a fun outing) they might choose, I simply cannot accommodate the time or the financial resources four children would require to do so. Not to mention that an overscheduled family cannot spend much needed time together. Instead, we work hard at home to fuel the passions we see in our children and make wise decisions about how we can further pursue a delight for them in an outside venue. Isn’t that one of the hallmarks of homeschooling? We enjoy the freedom to explore more with our kids and to help them find out what it is they enjoy- without outsourcing it all the time.

And in turn, this leaves us more time in our homeschool to explore the extraordinary. Enjoy the journey. Passionately.

Heather Woodie is a homeschooling mom of four kids ages 10, 8, 6, 3 and wife to a handsome chemical engineer for 13 years. Before raising a family, she taught middle school science and has a masters degree in curriculum and instruction secondary education. Now teaching at home means the chance to provide the extraordinary for her children. Between family and homeschooling time, she is working as volunteer staff for MOPS International as an Area Coordinator for NY State. She’s been homeschooling four years and you can read about those adventures on her blog, Blog She Wrote.