Last updated on May 22nd, 2024 at 12:15 am
The Natural Learning Approach or natural learning is well explained in its name. When I started homeschooling, my past experience was teaching in the classroom to elementary, middle, and high school students. While in my mind, my hope for homeschooling was to learn through a slower-paced environment where learning was child-led, I had no idea what that looked like.
I started off the year prepping like I would for the classroom. I wrote the daily schedule, separated subjects, and prepared lessons accordingly. I felt well prepared until we started school and quickly realized the structure wasn’t working for us. While this type of structure is just right for other families, it wasn’t for ours, so we began the journey of finding a rhythm that made sense for us.
What is Natural Learning?
Natural learning is the belief that all children learn on their own unique timeline when given the support and space to do so. Like infants and babies, children learn so much by absorbing what they see, hear, smell, and sense around them. They acquire new skills and abilities as they become interested in them. When children are ready and motivated, their learning potential is limitless.
What does Natural Learning Look Like?
Due to the nature of natural learning, there’s no one way it should or could look. With that said, there are some principles or pillars that you might see across the board of natural learning.
Observe
Observation is huge. It is imperative to observe your child in order to best support them on their own timeline. Observing their interests, strengths, struggles, and the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ they do things is so important to understanding them. Understanding our children as unique individuals is foremost important, but careful observation helps to understand where they are at and where they are going.
Teach
Once you have observed your child and identified their interests, teach to those interests. Teaching should be flexible and encompass their questions and wonder. Wonder is a powerful thing that children are filled with, and cultivating curiosity and awe is so important for lifelong learning.
Encourage
Encouragement is the key to guiding your child in learning. Natural learning emphasizes child-led learning, but the environment and tone are up to you to set. Choosing an encouraging spirit is key. Forcing learning is counterproductive, but encouragement leads to discovery, and learning is authentic and long-lasting.
Connect
Connection is always the goal in learning and parenting. It’s easy sometimes to feel that connection is secondary to learning, but natural learning will flourish if connection is the primary goal. Without connection, learning is nearly impossible if we don’t feel it connects to our interests or needs. Think about the phrase kids are notorious for saying, “When are we ever going to use this in life?” It’s not that they don’t want to learn, but it becomes a pointless task if they don’t understand the purpose of learning it. This is true for kids and adults alike.
Trust
I have a huge amount of trust in my kids, but I have never had it tested quite like when I started following a more natural approach to learning. I don’t know if my educational background made it more difficult, but truly trusting that my kids will learn what they need to learn each day without stress and force was difficult to accept in the beginning. If you grew up in the school system, as I did, the structure was familiar and safe, and letting go of that felt scary. If you give your kids a supportive, rich environment to learn, trust that they will thrive.
How Do We Implement Natural Learning Into Homeschooling?
As mentioned above, natural learning will look different for every person. Our environments are different, our children are different, and their interests and what drives them are each uniquely different. We are only a few years into embracing natural learning and are still experimenting together each day to make learning personal including myself. If you are stumped for ideas of how to make it work, here are a few things we do.
Mix and match learning tools
We pick and choose what materials will best assist in learning that day. Some days, it’s a math workbook that explains a complex math topic. Some days, it’s playing a card game to support mental math and strategy; some days, it’s songs for memorization.
Talk about everything
We discuss what’s happening in the world, our community, our bodies, and our family, which always leads to lots of questions and, in turn, learning.
Get the kids involved
The kids are involved in every aspect of our home, including cooking, folding, sweeping, dishwashing, and meal prep. Part of appreciating their environment is participating in making it run. Caring for your home and belongings teaches so many skills.
Prioritize time outside every day
Learning through nature and free play outdoors is a huge part of their daily environment. We shoot for midday to when the sun goes down to be outside. This time is unstructured, and the kids ride bikes and scooters, play basketball, football, and other outdoor sports, and spend a huge amount of time outside with neighbors, creating games, talking, or playing group games.
Take daily walks
I need them just as much as the kids. We normally walk through other neighborhoods, to a park, or to the store to pick up small items. Observing the season, spotting animals or insects, and discussing homes are always part of the walk.
Prioritize travel
Travel is one of our favorite ways to learn about different cultures, ways of life, people groups, and landscapes in a new environment. Travel doesn’t always have to be far, but anything outside the routine of life feels like it supercharges learning. Travel isn’t cheap, so we try to go light on purchasing toys and games throughout the year to make room for the experiences of travel.
Bring kids with us wherever we go
When we run errands, visit people, wash the car, go to the post office, or do daily errands, we try to take the kids along. Of course, there are times when we do these things alone, but there is so much to learn in experiencing daily life responsibilities.
Provide access to lots of books
Stories are a powerful teaching tool. My motto is that we can never have too many books. The kids love reading aloud, independent reading, and even just looking at the pictures to learn about everything and anything they are currently interested in. Anything we don’t own, we look for deals on, or check out from the library.
Cook and bake together
We love good food, and there’s no better way to get it than to make it yourself! Cooking incorporates many skills, such as following directions, learning measurements, and understanding how ingredients interact with and affect each other.
Plant a yearly food garden
It’s not a big garden, but it’s a place for the kids to learn how food grows, how water and sun affect plants, and how to care for our earth. There have been so many great lessons from this tiny garden, and I am learning alongside them.
Conclusion
While that list is not exhaustive, it’s just a few ways that we implement natural learning. There’s nothing off the table, so I hope some of these gave you a few ideas of how to embrace natural learning in your home.
Natural learning is all around us. Kids are always learning. I still have to be careful of the way that I frame learning math or reading because it isn’t a single separated subject as it’s so often taught. The more I embrace natural learning, the more I see the endless opportunities for learning in everything we do.
For related reading on holistic education, check out this article.
