As I surf through the internet, books, and other resources that talk on homeschooling, I am beginning to find a consistent pattern. Many people associate homeschooling with worksheets. Everywhere you go you find downloadable worksheets or printable papers. And for like every single topic.
Your child is learning to to add: worksheets with adding problems. Your child is learning the states of America, worksheets with the states names and capitals. Your child is learning about plants, worksheets where you match a leaf to the correct tree. Constant, constant worksheets. Homeschooling seems to be all about the content. Ways to know the content, ways to teach the content, ways to make sure your child memorized the content. Content is key. But is this biblical? Is this how Jesus, the Master Teacher, taught? Did He focus mainly on content, or was there more then that?
If we take a look at Christ major sermons we see a much different story.In the Sermon on the Mount(Matt 5-7), Jesus does not focus mainly on the content, or making sure that his content is known (memorized) by his students. In fact, 65 percent of the Sermon on the Mount is application of the content! The Upper Room discourse(John 13-17) is overwhelming in its amount of application. Over and over Christ shows Himself the be the application king!
This is also shown all over scripture. The heaviest book in content in the entire New Testament is the book of Romans, and it contains 50 percent application. 50 percent! Ephesians: 50 percent, James: 80 percent, 1 Peter: 60 percent. The Bible is chock full of application, and Christ used it excessively.
Christ instead of just handing his students content, would illustrate application of the content using scripture, history, personal experience, and a lot of imagination. Think of all the times he illustrated his point with a mental picture. Lilies of the field, hairs of the head, Good Samaritan, sparrow of the air, planting of the seed, etc.
So shouldn't we as Christian Homeschoolers be striving to teach as Christ did. As it has been proven to work. Think about when a human being learns the most material in the least amount of time. As a baby. A baby learns to walk, to talk, to watch the world around them, and many other incredible things in a very short amount of time. Do we print out worksheets to show our children how to walk? Do we print out worksheets of their vocabulary words and make them review them? Or do we simply let them apply what we are teaching them.
So as you prepare to be a mother someday, or already are one, I challenge you to take a serious look at Christ's effective teaching, and apply the same type of teaching to your life. If you want to read more about teaching effectively, you can read the book: 7 Laws of the Learner by Bruce Wilkinson
Change your teaching today, and watch the children learn!
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