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Preparing For Home Education in 2024 or 2025?
Thematic Education will outline the whole years learning
program covering all subject areas and resources, provide an editable document for reporting and recording and give you valuable advice on lodging your Homeschool application.
THEMATIC EDUCATION AND NATURE AS A LIVING TEACHER
THEME - DIRECTED AND INTEREST - LED LEARNING
Thematic / Interest driven instruction involves organizing your curriculum and home schooling program around a theme or a rich and engaging topic that crosses all learning domains.
Integrating your home schooling curriculum through theme - based learning and focusing on interests enables homeschoolers to meaningfully link different disciplines so that they will develop big and important ideas.
Educational researchers are learning that students learn better when provided opportunities to develop deep knowledge about a few big ideas rather than a superficial knowledge of a broader range of ideas and information.
Themes can vary in nature and scope, however, they should be motivated by the students and relevant to their lives.
For example, A theme might focus on ocean life and students can learn about salt water, waves, the tide, and ocean animals through a range of activities that happen in different contexts.
NATURE AS A LIVING TEACHER
A long, long time ago, maybe two hundred thousand years ago, and in a few places still today, the native people who lived off their land schooled their children – but they did it invisibly.
Our ancestors’ children didn’t go to school.
School surrounded them.
Nature was a living teacher.
There were many relatives for every child and every relative was a mentor.
Stories filled the air, games and laughter filled the days, and ceremonies of gratitude filled mundane lives.
Do you remember learning to talk? Probably not.
Spoken language happened around you all the time, and allowed you to experiment with words, make mistakes, and every single day grow vocabulary. Mentoring with the language of nature happens just the same. With stories, games, songs, place-names, animal names, and more, you invisibly and subtly stretch your students’ language edges.
Using nature as a living teacher allows the child to soak up the language of plants and animals as naturally as any of us learned our native language.
The developed world we live in largely ignores the need for connection with nature.
Childhood today is dominated more and more by indoor focus and technology.
Fears of strangers and dangers keep children tightly supervised.
Growing population replaces wilderness with houses and roads. Growing emphasis on test scores and schedules keeps kids busy in structured activities.
These things each have value. But collectively they result in no time left for children to bond with nature.
Not only do kids get the short-end of the developmental stick, but the natural world has fewer people who know and love it, fewer adults who have nature built into their habits of awareness, and therefore fewer humans who care to be good tenders of their habitat.
Playful, meaningful connection with the wild world outdoors needs to be a fundamental ingredient of every childhood.
We cannot let it invisibly slip away.
We must consciously choose it for our children.
We’ve never needed to more than now.
Combining both a Thematic - Directed and Interest - Led Learning Program with Nature as a Living Teacher, encourages you to straddle both the human-made world with its vast scientific vocabulary and technology, and the instinctive, imagination-based world of our ancestors.
Both worlds offer rich, educational potential.
Hi,
I'm Cindy Richardson
Registered Nurse & Qualified Child Care Professional
Coming from a background in nursing & child care I am aware that
play improves the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional
well-being of children & young people.
Through play, children learn about the world and themselves.
In the primary grades, play opportunities enhance children's mastery of academic concepts and builds motivation to learn.
In fact, two of the most important things that play can develop are interest and motivation.
Encouraging these in the early grades brings children on board in contributing to their own learning.
Theme-based learning is so much fun for children!
They are learning about topics that are meaningful and relevant to their own lives.
This creates what is known as intrinsic motivation, in other words, children learn because they want to learn, not because they have to learn.
When children want to learn, the quality of their learning is unquestionably superior.
Theme-based learning also requires hands-on approaches, including project-based learning.
This makes it an active approach to learning, enhancing the level of engagement.
As we age we define play in other ways.
We call play our interests and our strengths.
Basing our learning around a theme, interests and our strengths mimics exactly what we do in real life.
Adults rarely pursue careers that require them to be average at everything, but instead we pursue jobs in areas of interest and strength.
Fostering an independent and autonomous learner who was skilled at decision-making, problem solving and planning was my goal when starting out on our home school journey.
I searched many years for the perfect homeschool educational program that would give my son the opportunity to practice making meaningful choices about his project or inquiry topic and how it is undertaken, in conjunction with adult support and facilitation.
This would allow him to demonstrate greater engagement, motivation and a positive disposition toward learning.
This brings us to today. The here and now.
Master Neuzerling started high school studies at the beginning of last year.
I am still searching for an educational program that fits our needs.
I have decided to stop searching and use my knowledge, qualifications and life experiences to formulate my very own Theme/Interest directed home school program that is goal based
and showcases the importance of nature as a living teacher.
I have used the Australian Education Curriculum as a guide and resource to complete my unique home school syllabus.
I look forward to sharing my ideas, knowledge, tools and resources with like minded homeschoolers.
Please join us on this journey as we unfold all the benefits that a Thematic approach brings to learning and home education.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
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