Dinos and Delight-Driven Learning

"I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas." --Agatha Christie

Have y’all ever noticed how little kids get on these obsessive sprees about a certain topic?

Here’s a way to exploit—er, I mean, UTILIZE—that obsessive focus for school! It’s basically turning learning into a game.

Our dining table, on any given day.

My kids each have gone through a phase where they love dinosaurs. I mean, L-O-V-E them. To exploit this obsession for educational purposes, we read a lot about dinosaurs (of course) and we play matching games, both with matching our toy dinos to a book or flash cards (Dollar Store!) or both. (Caution: For names and pictures, these cards are great, but they often contain factual errors or impressively exaggerated assumptions in information. For more trustworthy dinosaur resources, check out here or here.)

Sometimes we race to match the most dinosaurs, sometimes we compete to see who can name more facts, sometimes we roll dice to name that many things about the critter. Want to know about Spinosaurus? Ask my kids. Seriously.

Source

This is a very basic and primary example of an educational option known as "delight-driven learning." That is to say, when something fascinates your child, you let that drive and desire power the learning about it--and as they get older and have more tools available to them (ability to read, for example) they can pursue their delight-driven without your help. But when kids are little and unable to gather or utilize materials, it's easy to provide an environment where the natural play (or delight) of the child is enriched and expanded into a great educational experience! I promise they will remember the data more than if you try to force-feed it to them in a more traditional way!