five minute education

When we learn alongside our children, we foster a sense of wonder in them and in ourselves at the same time.  We guide them.  We ask questions.  We wonder.  Guided learning is powerful, efficient and effective.  

Five minutes of walking beside our child, regardless of the topic or subject is NEVER five minutes.

Imagine taking a thin slice of onion and putting it under a microscope.  You focus on it with your child and look at it up close.  You probe it and talk about it for five minutes.  Five minutes is not five minutes.  Your children will ask you so many questions that it will almost drive you insane for the next two days.  

It's the same with language or math, science or history.  Anything.  Look at language up close through dictation.  Spell out a few words together.  Talk about them.  Talk about the sounds, the rhymes,  the punctuation, the shape of the letters, how the words make you feel, what they mean.  Which words are doing words, which words are things, which words describe.  Who wrote them, why he or she wrote them.  Probe the words, dissect the words, look at them up close for FIVE MINUTES.  

When you go for a walk, on the road or in the city, or in your backyard - your children will plague you (and I mean that in the nicest way imaginable) about the natural world. Why the sky is blue, why the leaves are rolling around, why the mosquitos want to bite you, why the birds eat worms when worms are probably yucky, why the lightbulb isn’t working, why the wind blows. This is science. Observe, ask and wonder, speculate. You are forming the foundation for the scientific method from infancy.

Five minutes is not five minutes.  Do this every day and you have a literate child on your hands.  

In five minutes.  Imagine spending five minutes a day, just on yourself, reading something interesting.  Imagine a whole year of reading something you didn't know before for five minutes at a time.  Imagine learning something about your computer or your car or gardening or politics or space for five minutes a day.  That's a lot of learning in a year.  

Do not underestimate the power of five minutes.