child-led , informal learning -website, book recommendations?

[ZZZenAgain]

Have been thinking I would like to learn more about how this works. I cannot really imagine the day to day mechanics of it but I think it might be something I could try and weave into my own dd's lifestyle/education in some way. I wonder although I am not really authoritarian at all if I am not a bit controlling when it comes to what dd should learn/know and whether this is a bad thing.

I notice left to her own devices for instance she is intellectually very inquisitive (like all people I suppose who have time and energy to feel interested in things). I am con fused as to how this works in reality. I mean things like: how far do you back off, how much to leave dc to find things for themselves or do you put thingsi n their way and see if they get interested?

For instance at the beginning of the Easter holidays I had my dd signed up for a 3 day sewing course (learning to use the sewing machine for a couple of hours each day). She loved it and was thrilled with the projects she made. She was free to choose what from amonst some options. After that she wanted to get my old machine down and try things out.

So in child-led informal style leanring, would this have been the wrong approach from me because I came up with the idea and I fdecided she should learn how to use a sewing machine. Do you see what I mean?

The books I see quoted a lot seem to spend a lot of time discussing toddlers/pre-schoolers but dd is already 10 and although it i interesting, it is not really that relevant for us. Can anyone recommend anything to learn more or give me any tips about how they experienced this/did it?

And interestingly I am one of those people that SDeuchars mentioned where pouring a curriculum into my head did not lead to success for me in Maths qualifications. I failed GCSE maths-getting a 'U' -ungraded- twice!!

Much of what I have described above I have learned as an adult, when it was relevant and interesting and when I explored the concepts with my children and we learned together.

As I said I've been doing it for ten years and Lucy was the third child, so I am well practised! [Wink] I also had the advantage of meeting very many autonomously educating children and young people, and I saw it in action and succeeding.

We have done no formal maths whatsoever.

I really think that all these things click when the child is ready - reading at one point; writing at another point, maybe; the idea of multiplication at another time; addition at a different time. etc etc

I've had to let go of a lot of expectation of what other children are doing at age X, because sometimes mine are average, sometimes they are way earlier, and sometimes they are way later. [shrug] With one of mine, addition just clicked from out of the blue. It was as if the conversation went "rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb oh yeah now I totally grok how to add and am going to demonstrate it on a regular basis". There are some skills that my youngest has taught my oldest, because they were ready for those skills in reverse chronological order. I am so glad my children have the freedom not to know whether they are on the clever table or the thickies table in any particular area of life, yk?

We were chatting to a (schooled) boy the other day, just a bit younger than one of mine, and he was talking explicitly about the phonics stuff he was being taught at school - in really abstract and technical terms, and there was a bit of me that was thinking "hang on a tick, my lot are learning reading and writing without any explicit conversations about it - we don't have to learn this stuff as if it is a foreign language" (but then, maybe we don't have to learn foreign languages as if they are foreign languages either. Anyone been on poisson rouge lately? There is some fab language stuff on there at the moment for littlies) It was very odd. In some senses he was way ahead; and in another, the learning in that area that I was witnessing in my own offspring was apparently completely effortless, where he is clearly doing hard grind at it every day in his literacy hour.

Hi, I haven't read all of the responses so forgive me if I'm repeating.

I've just read more stuff than I care to mention about 'informal learning' for my MA dissertation and the bible is definitely Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison's "How Children Learn at Home."It's a really easy read and yes, suggesting activities and possibilities for learning is absolutely compatible with 'informal learning.' Along with providing lots of conversation about whatever children are interested in, it's probably the mainstay of the informal approach. Informal learning doesn't mean the absence of parents in the learning process. It just means that parent's understand that children will only learn, and pursue, the things that interest them; it doesn't matter who suggested it in the first place. :)

If you want more reading, try "Free Range Education" (Terri Dowty) and "Free Range Learning" (Laura Weldon) and, as someone else mentioned, you can't do any batter than reading John Holt. "Teach Your Own" is fabulous and what got me interested in HE in the first place.

Enjoy.

Thanks all, a lot to think about and I'm waiting for my book order.