Self-Initiated, Independent Study

Self-initiated, independent study?  WAIT!  Does that imply that I, as the teacher, do no work?  Mmmm...not quite.  Does it imply that a five-year-old is taking ownership of her education without any prompting?  Mmmm...I think it does mean that.  Baffling!  It is the kind of moment that makes Momma/Teacher smile from afar....smile with tired eyes at a very late hour....but smile nonetheless.  My five-year-old takes after her daddy.  She is a wee bit nocturnal.  I am not sure if it stems from her Daddy's Apache helicopter flying gene or if it stems from her colicky first year of life when she literally NEVER slept (ugh..there I go using that "never" word again....OK....she slept SOME....just not very much).  Regardless, Brynn is a night owl.  I am not.  I am a morning person.  I have zero problem getting up when the alarm clock goes off, but I can assure you that I am ready to crash by 11:00 p.m. exhausted to the core, non-functioning, can't-keep-my-eyes open-any-longer EXHAUSTED.  So, it was Daddy that first clued me in that our oldest child was reading secretly into the late hours of the night.  Of course it was him that clued me in because I had already fallen asleep, and, he, the nocturnal one, was still awake and in his prime.  With baby belly growing bigger, this momma is having an increasingly more difficult time sleeping.  Hence, I am slowly being forced into the nocturnal lifestyle, and I, too, have noticed that our oldest child is reading A LOT after bedtime.

Did I mention before that I have a plethora of children's literature?  It definitely increases our weight for Army moves, and as far as I know, the Army does not make moving weight modifications for former elementary teachers who just cannot seem to part with literature.  Our girls LOVE it though, and they peruse through books all the time...even, apparently, into the wee hours of the morning.  Most recently, Brynn has become very engrossed in the Magic Tree House books by Mary Pope Osborne.  She can read the series independently now, and she is even a member of the website where she collects passport stamps after completing the comprehension quizzes online after each book.

Here's the site:  http://www.magictreehouse.com/

I have always been a proponent of this series.  It is highly imaginative, transports kiddos to different time periods and places, and delves into some really interesting topics that motivate children to WANT to learn more.  The other night, at a very late hour when a five-year-old should have been sleeping, I discovered Brynn reading The Magic Tree House Fact Tracker #7: Titanic from our "library" at home.

http://www.magictreehouse.com/bookdetail-Titanic#bookdetail-Titanic

She was enthralled with the book and could not glean enough facts about this massive ship that set sail in 1912.  Brynn had many questions about the great ship and the time period that it set sail, but she also had an abundance of knowledge that she had acquired from her self-initiated, independent study.  I supplied the materials, her interest was peaked, and she was on her own maiden voyage of READING TO LEARN.  I took her lead, revamped my lesson plans for read aloud for the week, and we began to do more and more research about this ship that set sail so many years ago.  Each day, she was engaged, inquisitive, and retaining more information than I could ever imagine a Kindergartner learning.  The key to learning is always motivation, and, oftentimes, the key to motivation is delving into a person's interests.

So, throughout the week, we reread The Magic Tree House Fact Tracker #7: Titanic together, we listened to online documentary stories of survivors, researched more facts online, learned about how the sunken ship was finally found, and watched the recovery expedition.  We talked about the people aboard the boat and the different jobs that people had to keep a ship running.  We discussed the class structure and why some rooms aboard the ship were fancier than others.  We learned about icebergs, geography, the ocean, and ship-related vocabulary.  And, eventually, we pulled out The Magic Tree House #17: Tonight on the Titanic by Mary Pope Osborne:

No icebergs were hit during this self-initiated, independent study.  The whole learning process was definitely a maiden voyage that did not result in a sinking ship.