We all want for our kids to love learning, to feel motivated, to put forth their best effort, and to take ownership for their work. Those were among our big goals before beginning to homeschool a year ago. And there are sundry ways I've seen growth in those areas. But one concrete thing we've done that has spurred big strides toward those important goals is a new routine we started this year: individual project time.
The First Project...
It all started one day late this summer when W was helping my friend dig potatoes in her garden. He asked if she had ever made potato gnocchi and described how much he likes it. (It's a favorite dish in our house that my husband and I learned to make in a cooking class in Italy before W was born. W likes it so much he usually requests it every year for his birthday dinner-- with pesto-- and helps make it.) She said she hadn't made it, and told him he should show her how over Zoom or FaceTime sometime, like a cooking show.
He got really excited about that idea of showing how to make this treasured dish and kept talking about it at home that night. I started tossing him ideas about how he might present it like a real cooking show. Then it occurred to me that I he'd never seen a cooking show, so he didn't have any reference points for the format. I asked if he wanted to watch a few cooking shows to get an idea of what they are like, and the kinds of things the hosts do. We Amazon Primed an episode each of Rachael Ray's 30-Minute Meals, Julia Child's The French Chef, and Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa. We paused the shows occasionally as we watched and I jotted the observations W made on a piece of paper. As we watched, he realized that Ina Garten had messy hands one second after tossing onion rings in batter, then they were magically clean the next! He also noticed that all of the cooking show hosts tended to just demonstrate how to do something, and then the camera skipped ahead to when that step was all done; we didn't see every single thing that happened. Armed with this big idea, and several other ideas he got from the shows, W decided he'd like to make a video to send to my friend B, and to share with anyone else who might be interested in making his favorite dish. He was excited to include just the important steps, not trivial stuff or the lengthy process of forming every gnocchi piece that he decided might get a little boring over FaceTime. So he started planning.
He decided he wanted to first make a practice video to try out the whole process. I was rooting for practicing by making something like a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, or a piece of cinnamon toast, so he could really focus his efforts on delivery and process, but he was adamant that since no one needed how-to videos for those things, there was no point in them. So for his first cooking video he made a favorite accompaniment for gnocchi: pesto. He wrote the ingredient amounts on a card and taped it at eye level across the room so he could refer to it while he worked. Using my phone, I filmed the process in lots of short videos. We worked out a signal so I would know when he was ready for me to stop recording each time. We spent an entire afternoon at this. But his energy never flagged. I think the thought of creating a type of thing he'd never made before (a "show"), and of making something that other people would see (he kept asking if I could put it on YouTube), was hugely motivating. He incorporated all sorts of ideas he'd gotten from watching the celebrity chefs. He noticed and tried to emulate how "nice" they all sounded, like they were talking right to us, and how they all made it look easy, and how they tasted their food on the show, and made it sound delicious. Because Ina Garten had started an episode about making a steak dinner by driving to the butcher shop, W decided to start his pesto video at the source-- out in our garden picking the basil. Because each of the hosts we watched, but especially Rachael Ray, just kept talking the entire time she worked, filling the air space with friendly chatter, he tried hard to share tips or little stories here and there as he worked. The shows all included close-ups of specific techniques, so he directed me to zoom in at specific points as well.
The day after filming, we researched together and figured out how to edit the videos. We don't have any special software so ended up using the Photos app that is included in Windows 10 on our computer. W was completely delighted by how simple it was to "trim" out the bits he didn't like. I had never edited video before in my life, so this was all new to me as well, but I felt we both learned a cool new skill that afternoon. Once we figured out how to do it, he did all of the clicking and was very much in charge. Finally, the next day, we stitched the videos all together, he played around with adding a special effect or two and voila-- he had his very own cooking show! He was proud of his non-scripted but well-thought-out first show and couldn't wait to sit us all down after dinner that night so we could watch it.
After that, armed with all these new skills, he jumped into making the gnocchi how-to video he had set out to make originally. That one took an even longer afternoon to film, as gnocchi is a bit involved to make. But the video editing process was smoother his second time around and he was equally excited by the result. W's final pesto and gnocchi cooking shows are linked below. The first is ten minutes, and the second eighteen, so I know that only a couple of grandparents out there will probably want to view these in their entirety, but I can't not share them here because I am so proud of the effort that went into their creation. These are dedicated to my friend B and her family, with thanks for inspiring a grand idea, and with hopes they can enjoy a delicious gnocchi and pesto night in the near future!
W's How to Make Pesto Video:
W's How to Make Gnocchi Video:
The cooking show project sprouted from a little idea and carried into our first couple of weeks of the school year. It was so motivating for my son, so full of learning and excitement for learning. It was interest-based and followed its own natural timeline defined by the process. I helped with some research and resources and was an extra set of hands where needed (and M was his assistant in one video) but it was W's project, his creation. The whole experience was so positive and it gave us a model for project time, a new homeschool routine that we've all be enjoying since.
Project Time
Three or four afternoons a week, we reserve the last hour or so of the day for project time. It is a time for my kids to follow their own interests with me available to help as needed. But, instead of being just a choice time to do whatever they feel like (which can easily turn into not doing much at all), focusing on it as a time for projects-- time to create a product or work toward a goal-- has made it feel wide-open to them, yet purposeful. Project time is for dreaming big-- for learning a new skill, for making things happen that we might not get around to otherwise. Sometimes I suggest an idea for project time and we do it if they are interested. But for the most part, the kids guide and plan what will happen during project time. Occasionally a great project pops up spur of the moment, like when the kids discovered tons of wild grapes in our yard and made juice and jam with them that afternoon. But in general we try to plan ahead. I check in with them over the weekend about what they want to work on in the coming week so we have a rough plan and the materials we need. Because project time has become a routine and because they love it, they are often interjecting in conversations these days, "Ooh! I could do that for a project!" I love hearing that. It's nice having a set aside time to allow them to make a habit of attending to the things they are interested in, and of following through on those thoughts. We do project time at the end of the day so as long as we don't need to be anywhere, they can keep at it as long as they feel like.
Project Ideas
Projects W (age 10) has done, in progress, or in mind for the future:
- Filming and editing his own cooking shows to teach others how to make some favorite dishes
- Harvesting wild grapes and making juice and jam with them
- Making jewelry with polymer clay
- Studying presidential speeches and debates by watching and discussing current and past ones
- Drawing/carving pictures on shelf fungus he collected
- Learning to whittle objects out of wood
- Figuring out how to keep minnows he caught as pets for a few days
- Making a diorama of a specific battle, inspired by some he's seen in museums
- Making specific weapons out of cardboard
- Gift making for family birthdays
- Making a coconut cake (Ina Garten's, of course)
Projects M (age 5) has done, in progress, or in mind for the future:
- Memorizing "Let it Go" from Frozen
- Drawing Elsa using different online drawing lessons describing how to do so
- Learning how to play the board games Robot Turtles and Qwirkle
- Reading books to learn about doctors/nurses/doctor's offices/germs
- Making applesauce, and cookies
- Assisting in her brother's pesto-making video
- Harvesting wild grapes with W and making jam and juice
- Writing a letter and mailing it to a friend
- Learning how eyes work (?)
- Doing something to do with outer space or the moon or astronauts
- Making Halloween decorations for our porch, inspired by some exemplary houses near us
- Making a grapevine wreath
- Taking nature photos, perhaps to make a photo book
- Giving her dad and brother a haircut after watching how-to videos, with only slight assistance from me
- Putting together a particle-board shelf from Target
- Performing a magic show
- Making an owl box or bird house
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| Finding all the cool stuff to photograph |
Project Time and Younger Kids
Project time has been a little different with my 5 year old. For one, shortly after filming those first cooking videos for W, I realized that, unsurprisingly, it was hard to be available to help both kids with separate projects at once. It all depends on what the projects are, of course. But I wanted them both to have their own time to delve into things, and count on having a hand from me when needed, so I have actually been finding other times in the day to fit in M's project time so it is not at the same time as W's.
Also, because she's younger, the things she names that she is interested in are either really big and somewhat unrealistic (as in "I want to learn how to be a doctor"), or quite small and manageable in one sitting (as when she pulled a game off our shelf that she'd never played and asked if I would teach her how). She doesn't always package her ideas neatly for planning sake so I have to decode a bit some of the wishes and interests she expresses; I end up often suggesting the particular form projects might take to her, inspired by her interest or comments-- whereas W, being older, often names not just the interest but the goal or product as well. In general, so far she has done a greater quantity of projects that are shorter-term than W, while W has done generally fewer and longer-term projects.
Other Homeschool Project Time Tips
Here are some guiding principles I've learned about how to do project time well. Not every project is big and grand, but they all follow a similar path.
Start with compelling questions or interests. Tune into your kids to hear these topics as they come up, even if they won't always state them clearly. (Although after a bit, they will start saying as part of daily conversation, "Hey! That's something I could do for a project.")
Name a goal (what they hope to learn or be able to do) or a product (what they want to create). Motivation seems to stay higher when we aren't simply fiddling around with a material or topic, but working toward something. That doesn't mean the goal can't evolve or change. But I think having a stated starting goal keeps things focused. Also, feel free to suggest things, especially for younger kids who might have a harder time clearly stating goals or reasonable project ideas, but don't force any project or topic. The whole point is that it is interest-based.
Find mentor examples of the thing they are trying to create (when it is a product). We watched cooking shows to learn what made them effective, which was fun and easy to do. But whether a kid is aiming to complete a piece of writing for a certain purpose or make a birdhouse, starting by studying the craft and examples of the type of thing they want to make is powerful. They can examine and appreciate but also ask questions: what makes this good? What makes this work well?
Figure out what they need to know and gather resources accordingly. We needed ingredients, and had to learn how to edit video. (We returned repeatedly to an article about using Windows 10's video editor on a web site called howtogeek.com, which made W laugh every time.)
Let the process, and how long their interest in it holds, guide the length of time it takes. For smaller forays and/or for younger kids, one or two sessions on a project topic might be plenty, but other things might fill project time for weeks.
Share with an audience if possible/applicable. There's nothing like celebrating a final product by sharing it with someone outside of your own home to make it feel real and worthwhile.
...It's funny because I have realized a lot of things about our project time fit with the big ideas of PBL (project-based learning), an initiative in education that some schools really value. I even took a training in PBL through the Buck Institute for Education several years ago. Yet as a parent I often used to feel frustrated with how much time was spent on PBL in my son's school. It felt like the projects would drag on and on, the kids would lose motivation for them along the way (and not every kid was invested in the whole-class projects in the first place), and the amount of time and energy devoted to them would take the place of learning basic skills that should have been taught consistently, in the primary grades especially. I always felt that, while you can learn a lot through a project, and projects are memorable, the bottom line is teachers in a classroom have a bigger responsibility to teach a lot of important skills that aren't all going to come up organically through a teaching philosophy that focuses on project after project.
Aaaand stepping off my old soapbox now, clearly I have started to see first-hand more of the benefits of learning that is project-based. One of the biggest is the confidence and self esteem that results. My kids are so pleased with themselves for what they've accomplished during project time. They use the phrase "my project" a lot in conversation and I see them swell with the knowledge upon completion: I made this. They show ownership in the products themselves, but also in their own learning-- by constantly naming things they want to do during that part of the day, and eagerly working on things they care about. I think project-based learning may be especially beneficial and workable for homeschool, and especially when each kid gets to define the project based on what they see as interesting and important. We aren't following any official PBL procedures at home though. We aren't using any rubrics (true PBL educators love rubrics; there is even a "rubric rubric" on the website I linked to above), nor are we doing any busy work related to the projects or formal reflections after the fact. Just things they're excited about, for the sake of learning and creating. Our own incarnation of project time, and the way it helps them love learning and celebrates individual choice and agency, is a big part of the energy of our homeschool this year.