Love of Learning Lost? 5 Things to Help Your Kid Rediscover the Joy in It4 min read
Do you notice of late that your kid is not as active in their learning in homeschool? Maybe they’re getting constantly distracted or just not putting in the same level of effort as before. Chances are, you kid may have lost love of learning. This is when you will need to reevaluate some things at home.
Your kids may not be enjoying themselves anymore as they study. All the ‘just for fun’ workbooks and activity books you bought are just laying there on the table and gathering dust.
Schoolwork becomes more of a burden when kids don’t find the joy in it anymore. This is the same for both your kid and yourself.
It may have been some time since this happened and you may not know what went wrong.
If you’re finding yourself questioning everything to the point where it’s driving you crazy, just… breathe. Take a deep breath!
If your kids and you have been having way too many homeschool struggles lately that just don’t seem to go away, it’s time to take a step back and examine.
Examine why they lost love of learning. Why is it not as fun as it used to be? Why is it not as fun as you’d like it to be?
Take a few days (or even weeks) to contemplate everything.
Talk to your spouse, a trusted friend or family member. Process your feelings. Try to analyze the past few weeks and understand what has been happening.
Contents
Why Could Your Kid Have Lost Love of Learning?
As a homeschool parent, you have many responsibilities. You have to take care of your kid’s learning schedules, your own work schedules, and many other things that come with being an adult.
Sometimes, we may even lose track of how much we’re trying to be in charge of. And sometimes, you may find that you don’t like to say no to more responsibilities. Parents are supposed to be superheroes after all, aren’t they?
But it’s time to realize that parents are humans too, and that sometimes it becomes impossible to wear every possible hat at the same time.
You just cannot do everything at once and hope to stay sane at the same time. And that’s okay!
On reevaluating, you may realize that there are underlying reasons. But sometimes, looking for solutions is hard when you don’t know where to look.
3 Ways to Recover Love of Learning
Do less
If you want to live out this beautiful, harmonious, restful, calm, inspiring and gratifying homeschool that you have always envisioned for your kids, then you are going to have to do less.
You cannot run a homeschool, a home, write blogs, be a community leader, make the meals, scrub the bathtubs, do the taxes, pay the bills, and get involved in various house projects! Nope.
You will have to do less on a given day if you want to keep yourself sane.
As a homeschool parent, taking the time to enjoy teaching, learning, playing and growing with your kids should be your topmost priority right now.
Everything else that seems to hinder this goal can wait a while.
Do what you love
Are you doing what you love?
Have you somehow detoured from your original love of learning?
What do you and your kids really love?
If your kids love nature, going for walks, planting gardens, reading stories aloud, composing poems, finding places on the map, exploring art and history, enacting Shakespeare, baking cakes, doing fun craft projects, then the best thing to do is align your lesson plans accordingly.
Remind yourself that your aim is to learn, not to school. If you wanted your kids to do mainstream schooling you would have enrolled them in a public or private school. But no, you want them to learn and you want them to love it.
Maybe it’s time to throw those workbooks out for a bit. Visit a local library and get anything and everything that will rekindle your kids’ love for learning; cookbooks, encyclopedias, Romeo and Juliet, and everything else.
Let go and change things up
It’s time to let go of everything that just doesn’t inspire or fuel anyone’s love for learning.
Change things up a bit if you need to. Go outdoors. Play board games. Work on art and craft projects. Organize a family puppet show inspired by favorite literary characters. And most importantly, just have fun again!
Keep in mind…
Homeschooling is a tough endeavor. You’ve taken on something amazing: to shape your kids to be self-sufficient individuals when they grow up.
Sometimes, we tend to lose track of the bigger picture. That’s okay. It happens to the biggest CEOs and even country leaders.
The first step is in identifying whether something is wrong. As always, make sure to talk to your kids throughout. It is important that they feel more involved in their learning. It could even help you tailor your homeschooling plans better.
