Surviving At Home

I’m reading an interesting book titled Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learningand one of the author’s suggestions is to really pay attention to what your kids like and focus their activities around those interests. The idea is if your child really loves something, she’ll want to read or learn more about it and this interest in learning will (hopefully) carry over to her schoolwork. Sounds easy enough but I’ve discovered there’s some creativity needed on the parents’ part to really make this happen.

At the moment, my 10-year-old is interested in computers, especially computer games. Although we have many educational CD-rom games, the online games are her faves (no chatting or chat rooms allowed!) But I’m finding that’s a tough interest to encourage because we don’t want her becoming a couch potato nor do we have the $700+ to send her to computer programming day camp this summer (and that’s the price for one week! Yikes!) Instead, I think I’ll search around and find some math game sites for her to try and set our handy dandy timer to limit her playing time. Maybe I’ll let her play with designing and writing her own blog to help improve her writing skills.

My youngest is five and her passion is horses. But that’s also a toughy because I’m not quite ready for her to take riding lessons and we’re definitely NOT getting a horse for a pet, despite her pleading. Since she loves to read I’ll have to search out some horse books at the library.

I’m hoping to save some money on camps this summer and come up with some fun yet educational things to do with them (hence the point of this blog, to share my ideas) so I’ll have to think about some more of their interests and how we can all become involved in this learning process. I’m a little worried, though, because these are merely one idea per child and we have a full 12 WEEKS of summer vacation coming up. Is this what homeschooling moms face?

Time for some serious brainstorming!

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