by Joanna.
I was frustrated, our 11 year old son was not retaining anything I had been teaching. The work we had done seemed to be forgotten the next week. I felt like "what's the point?" I was sliding down the usual slippery slope of doing 'school' at home. Education was becoming meaningless to him, as it had been for all my schooling years.
It was then that I remembered something interesting that I had come across a few years back. POI, point of interest, the crux of the philosophy is this, that when we are interested in something then it's like we begin to massage a certain point of our brains which then in turn opens us up to having a deeper understanding of the subject that has caught our interest and in turn gives us the ability to actually retain the information and store it for use whenever we thin we may need to recall it.
This made perfect sense to me as I looked back to my schooling years, it was only the subjects of interest that I could recall. As for the rest, gone with the wind.
So it was that our home schooling journey took a massive turn, I decided to try POI education.
In a nut shell we start by raising a subject, say my son has science to do for that day. He reads the chapter and then instead of answering the questions at the end he gets to choose 3 points of interest, any 3 points that caught his attention. He then in his own words writes as little or as much as he wants expressing what he has learnt. The results have been brilliant. I have been thrilled by what he has come back with and not only in his work but his attitude toward it also.
What we also do is run with any POI the children might have, so if time permits we address that interest straight away. For example my son had been watching Lilo and Stitch and took an interest in Elvis (he sings some of the theme music) so we hopped online and watched a few You Tube videos of Elvis. We then looked up a website with information about his life and ultimately his death; this got us thinking about how fame and fortune are not all they are made out to be. I could not have sparked that spiritual conversation with my own ideas without my son shutting down in defense of 'mom is talking spiritual stuff at me' attitude.
I would encourage everyone to try a POI day. It gives your children freedom to be the individual God created them to be rather than just tick the box according to the curriculum.
