In which I am interviewed on Rhythm of the Home

i had an interview blog, too! :P http://inspirationboards.blogspot.com

hi amy, and thank you so much.

there are multiple questions here that we have to tease apart. project-based homeschooling is a separate issue from acquiring basic skills. you can do projects and still do curriculum. for example, math. projects are a great way to *use* math and inspire kids to acquire and practice their basic skills in an authentic way — but learning math takes effort all by itself, separate from project work.

some unschoolers let math wait until the child wants to learn it, no matter how long that is. but i wonder, from your description, if your daughter might have developed a confidence issue. maybe she pushes it away because she doesn’t feel confident that she can master it. a perfectionist (i am one and i spawned one ;) tends to panic and quit if they don’t immediately excel at something. the thing about filling-the-ol’-bucket kind of teaching is that kids practice from day one and they just slowly acquire the ability. it doesn’t matter if they’re good at reading or writing or doing math — they’re all at the same beginning level in preschool or K and then they all practice, practice, practice and they get the skills. when you leave it to occur naturally, maybe that works for many children, but i wonder about the perfectionist. (being one myself.) we don’t like to practice. we don’t like to be bad at things. and the older a child gets, the more they don’t want to be bad at something — especially something that other children their own age or younger can do with ease.

how does a parent encourage the amount of practice needed to aquire these basic skills? i think by making it clear to your child that they *are* basic skills. the great thing about projects is that immersing children in work they find really interesting — their self-chosen work — makes them self-motivated. they want to acquire and use skills because they have real, concrete things they want to do and they need skills to do them. using math authentically during project work can show a child why math is important, what it’s used for in the real world, and why it’s worthwhile to learn it in the first place. but learning math requires more than project work (unless it’s a *very* math-centric project!) — it requires sitting down and doing a lot of memorizing and practicing.

so how do you help your daughter build a strong self-worth? maybe sit her down and talk about this very plainly. lay it out there for her. ask her how she feels about her basic skills and if she wants to work on them. i wrote recently about how we do learning conferences with our sons — this is something we’ve done for a long time. you probably want to ease into it. you don’t want your daughter to feel on the defensive or pressured. you want to make it clear that you want to help her learn what *she* wants to learn, but i think (because she is a perfectionist) you also want to make it clear that you are positive she can learn these things when she is ready to work on it. you have no doubts about her ability. maybe if *she* has doubts, she’ll confess them to you and you can work on that.

alternatively, you could look for a deep interest and get started down that path and then ease into the conversation about basic skills, in the hope that her desire to do her work will get her over that perfectionist bump.

i like an open dialogue where learning is something that we can all talk about, and we see ourselves as capable people who make mistakes and then do what needs to be done to fix them. kids *and* adults. :) we’re resilient. we’re determined. there’s a path and we’ll look till we find it. the world is full of interesting things to do and we want to figure out our talents and our purpose — and have *fun* while we’re doing it. we work as a team.

it sounds like you might have a few doubts and maybe a little hesitance of your own. :) maybe the two of you can talk about what *she* wants and what *you* want for her and then make a plan together. if she knows that you have total faith in her and if she knows that it’s not a matter of what she’s automatically great at but what she’s willing to *work* for, hopefully she’ll figure out that she can do anything she wants to do, with your support.

please let me know how it goes, and feel free to e-mail me, too — lori (at) campcreekpress [dot] com.