So, how do I use interest led learning? My girls are both very curious about how things work. Whenever they hear us talking about things they usually want to know about it too. They love being outside (except when its really hot). We love to garden and include them in the process. They help pick out our plants, plant the seeds, water the garden, and pick the vegetables/fruit. They have learned about butterflies and chickens just from playing in our back yard.
We have a butterfly garden in our back yard. This has been an amazing learning experience for our girls. They love watching the butterflies. They have a book to help them identify the different types. We have picked specific plants to attract certain butterflies. We have milkweed to attract monarch butterflies. The girls have watched videos and read books about them and they are definitely their favorite. Little Einsteins and Wild Kratts both have episodes about monarchs, Disney Nature has a movie called Wings of Life that is available on Netflix. SM received a butterfly habitat from Insect Lore. We ordered the Painted Lady caterpillars and watched the transformation. We have used the habitat 3 times since March. The last time we did things a little different - we watched a monarch butterfly lay an egg on a milkweed plant that happened to be growing in a pot. We put the whole pot in the habitat and watched the process from the egg hatching to the monarch butterfly. Its a great learning experience and they don't even realize they are learning.
We also have chickens. We have 4 hens that are laying and we have 3 pullets that should be laying within the month. We bought all of them as chicks. The girls learned to care for them and help collect eggs. The girls go out and play with them daily.
We are responsible for our own reading curriculum with Classical Conversations. We used this for reading. I'm not going to lie and say it was wonderful the whole time. SM really enjoyed it at first. At Lesson 74 the book took away the reading hints and SM had a complete meltdown. After explaining that this was how other books would look she eventually got back to doing the lessons (although still with a fight). The Lessons have a sound review, saying the words/sounds, rhyming section, reading sentences/stories, picture comprehension, word finding, and sounds writing. We did not use the sounds writing section because I thought that would be too confusing since I was working with her on spelling and writing in other areas. There were some Lessons that just seemed too long and we would split those days up. At the end of the book there are recommendations for what to read next. Now we go to the library and pick out leveled readers for her. I've also added a few videos of SM reading from Lesson 100.
