Encourage Delight-directed Learning

Delight-directed learning is all about fostering the love of learning in our children, creating lifelong learners who can adapt to any situation. This style of learning has many benefits for both you and your children: it can improve cooperation with your teenagers, and reduce burnout when they are more involved in what they do. It can make learning more meaningful to your children, because information makes more sense when applied to something they care about. Delight-directed learning can give you inspiration for your core classes, as well as electives. It gives colleges exactly what they want, too—passion from teenagers, interests that last for years.

Identifying Passion
Unfortunately, teenage delight or passion can be annoying sometimes! The good news is that the annoyance you feel can be a way to identify delight-directed learning in your children. What is it they do everyday when they should be doing school? Usually, the very thing that annoys you is also your child’s delight-directed learning.  If you’d like help in discovering and directing your child’s interests, I recommend my online resource, Delight Directed Learning.

Providing Opportunity
In order to discover their passions and interests, your children need the opportunity to be delighted in something, and they need to have enough time in the day to pursue what they want to do. Finding a mentor is one way to help your children discover their delight.  If your child is interested in science, perhaps you have a friend who works in an industry somewhere who could mentor them.  Providing opportunity can mean that you do school for four days a week. That can be shocking to people, but I did school with my children for four days a week, and then their fifth day was their time for delight-directed learning. We managed to cover everything!

Covering Core Classes
Delight-directed learning can encompass more than just electives for your student.  If you want to cover core classes, such as English, delight-directed learning can be used to accomplish that as well. Depending on the interests of your student, you could choose poetry, creative writing, science fiction, or sports communication. You could do a speech and debate class, or an expository writing class.  You could study social issues literature, or Russian literature—the list is endless!  You can incorporate delight-directed learning in your child’s science coursework, too, and study astronomy or mycology. Many, many subjects can be covered in this way.

Whether it is questions about delight directed learning, honors courses, CLEP, or the ACT, I am here to help.  My Parent Training A la Carte courses can help you become fully prepared for your next step in homeschooling.