By Karen Latham
As I sit down to write this, my seven year old son comes into my room with the comment every mother is all to familiar with… “we’re bored!” He has a friend over to play and the friend is asking to watch TV or play a video game on our outdated, dusty Wii. I redirect him, reminding him of the dominoes he has not played with lately. His friend’s eyes light up at the mention of dominoes. They head to the toy room to play.
“I actually did it. I pulled the plug. It is to this day one of the hardest and most rewarding things I have done for my family.”
Karen Latham
Here in “Lathamland” we have six offspring ranging in age from 23 down to 7. We have homeschooled for the last 10 years or so, stepping slowly out of the school system starting in 2010. Round about 2009, I remember being in the basement watching a show when the spirit told me in no uncertain terms that it is time to cut the cable. Two years later I actually did it. I pulled the plug. It is to this day one of the hardest and most rewarding things I have done for my family. Did we complain? Sure. Did we cry? On occasion. Did we get over it? Yep! And we have not looked back.
After cutting out the screens I allowed only one movie a week; the Friday night movie, and occasional gospel related shows and movies on Sunday. That means Monday through Saturday was screen free time. My children were provided games, open ended toys for building and creating, and books, lots and lots of books. We started the evening tradition of family read-alouds, where I was sure to pick entertaining books! Any comments of ‘I’m bored’ are answered with ‘well, what are you going to do about that?’ Kids are amazing. When we stop organizing their time, they learn to be curious and creative and innovative. They learn all on their own, and they love to share what they have learned!
Take the case of my son. At ten years old he hated to read. It was a struggle every single day to get him to do his required reading for school. All he wanted to do was play outside or be on a screen. It was even hard to get him to sit and listen so that we could read to him and help him reach his public school reading benchmarks. Acronyms started getting thrown around like ADD and OCD. It was so tough! When I brought him in from public school, it was because he spent six weeks begging to be homeschooled like his older sisters. I refused at first, but in the end said I would allow it on a trial basis. The trial was eye opening.
That reluctant 10 year old discovered Brandon Mull and Rick Riordan, a phenomenon I have since dubbed ‘the Percy Jackson phase.’ He learned to love reading when there were no other options competing for his attention. He read outside and upside down and under the covers when he should have been asleep in bed. He became a voracious reader. One day I took the kids to our local thrift shop and let them buy as many books as they wanted for their own collection and they each came home with 10-20 books they were interested in. My husband came home from work that day, and instead of walking in to kids sacked out in front of a screen, he saw them sprawled out reading, surrounded by a pile of books! He said to me “what have you done to the children?!”
What have I done, indeed?
With the direction of the spirit, we have continued in this way for the next 12 years.
https://www.facebook.com/walkbesidemelearning
