We were outside in the yard earlier this morning, visiting with friends. The kind of unstructured hangout where the adults are half-watching kids who are fully feral in the best ways, climbing and hunting frogs and turning sticks into farm equipment. Nobody was doing school. Structured education was the last thing on anybody’s mind.
And then my eldest peeled off from the pack, walked up to his friend’s mom, and announced: “Hey, did you know the wild turkey can run up to 25 miles per hour?” “I didn’t know that,” she responded. “And it roosts way up in trees?”
She did not know that one either, so that’s what she told him. My kid, satisfied, turned to walk back to the little marshy part of the property filled with frogs.
Except he didn’t. He got two steps, spun around, and delivered the closer: “And in French they’re called dindon sauvage. Like savage dinner!” Cracked himself up. Then he was gone, back into the sticks and the mud, leaving my friend with these random facts she hadn’t asked for and me just as stunned that he’d chosen that moment to talk about our lesson and share what he’d learned!
Here’s what was great. Those facts came from our Wingspan biology lesson (the same one we give for free), the one we did weeks ago, the one I’d half-forgotten. He didn’t memorize them for a quiz. There was no quiz. He just played a game about birds, with a short lesson added that enhanced the learning from the game, and now apparently those facts come spilling out of him at backyard hangouts whether anyone’s ready or not. Ha.
That’s the whole goal though, I guess, isn’t it. That’s what we keep saying around here: how to learn, not what to learn. You can quiz your way to a kid who voluntarily does a turkey fact-dump for the neighbours… but have you ever met a kid who actively begs for more quizzes? I haven’t. I have met tons who beg to play more board games though! That kind of learning only happens when the learning never felt like a struggle in the first place.
My kid’s still got froggy mud under his nails. He has no idea he was showing me, in the best way possible, that what we’re doing matters, and works. He was just being a kid, enjoying life and learning, and retaining that knowledge in such a wonderful way.
If you’re sitting there wondering how a person even starts doing this, here’s where I’d begin.