Education is a life. Or, Sneaky ways to get your kids learning
Kerri Christopher offers some ploys to ‘trick’ children into reading and other forms of learning.
A few months ago I read this fabulous piece about author John Steinbeck’s method for getting his boys to read the books he wanted. One of his sons wrote:
[My father] actually once bought this lowboy cabinet and locked all the books he wanted us to read in it with this gigantic key and hid it on top. We went through that in about two years. We’d sneak down every night with flashlights and unlock this thing. We were about eight and nine. And my father said, “Don’t ever let me catch you touching anything in that cabinet.”
The article is worth reading in its entirety – but the summary version is that he was sneaky. Very sneaky. And his sneakiness was predicated on knowledge of his boys’ own predilection for sneakiness themselves. It takes one to know one, as they say.
One of educational theorist / practitioner Charlotte Mason’s key principles is: education is a life. Children can learn anything, anywhere!
Baking bread is educational, walking in the woods is educational, having to order from a waiter at a restaurant is educational. (This of course works so long as you believe that education is more than mere memorization of facts or passing tests at school.)
Unfortunately, many children are part of an educational system that tends to foster a strong divide between ‘learning’ and ‘living’. And of course, sometimes even wonderfully classically educated homeschool kids just don’t want to memorize their Latin declensions.
In short, sometimes kids (and adults) just aren’t in the mood. And sometimes if – let’s just say – they are unruly children, moody tweens, or angry teens, that ‘just not in the mood’ phase can last an uncomfortably long time.
What then? Well, then I think it’s wise to get a bit sneaky. Look: we know that education is a life, and we’re hoping that when they’re our age, they will know it too. But between now and then, it never hurts to implement some more, shall we say, clandestine strategies.
I’ve been watching families do this for a long time: unbeknownst to myself, I’ve been keeping a mental list over the decades, because when I sat down to think about it, I had more than a few ideas.
Obviously, you know the children in your life and whether/ when these are good strategies to try. My suggestion is to approach it experimentally: some of these will work for some kids better than others, in different seasons of life. If one doesn’t work, try another.
Let’s start with reading. Everyone wants their kids to read fluently, read willingly, read more, read more widely. It’s a life’s work. Here are some tips.
Reading
The Cliffhanger
If you have a kid who enjoys being read to, but is a bit of a reluctant reader or still struggles a bit, try using the cliffhanger method.
Read aloud in regular fashion, but just when things are getting good, stop. You need to make dinner, do the dishes – something – so you can’t read anymore right now. Leave the book with the child and head to the other room: see what happens. He may pick it up for himself just to see what’s next!
Strewing
This is a classic technique based on basic human behavior. People get comfortable with what they’re exposed to, and they’ll often do the easiest or most convenient thing if they’re bored and there’s nothing else more exciting going on. (Any other voracious cereal box readers from back in the day?)
Leave out books you want them to read in various strategic places. Don’t be afraid to think beyond the coffee table: tuck something in a couch cushion, leave it on a stair, prop it on the back of the toilet. (More on bathrooms in a bit.) Leave lots of varied types of books around, and just see what happens.
A Box of Whatever
If you want a child to read more, it might be a matter of helping him find something he likes. Sarah Miller suggests putting together a box of books that varies widely, and asking him to choose something interesting from it. Pay attention to what he gravitates towards, and then stick a few more of that type in to see if he goes for those, too.
Try to keep it curiosity based and pressure-free. The goal is for it to feel like a discovery process for the child, not a burdensome exercise.
A Curated Box
Sometimes you’ll get a binge-reader who wants to read nothing but Nancy Drew. You’re delighted she’s reading voraciously, but concerned that much of it is fluff. There’s nothing wrong with the fluff — you just think she’d be better off with a wider diet.
In Book Girl, Sarah Clarkson details how her parents offered just that, by putting books in a particular order in her book box. She had to cycle through poetry and history and mythology before getting back to good old Nancy again.
I think this particular method is helpful because it shows goodwill towards the child’s preferences. Formulaic mysteries aren’t forbidden: they’re just given alongside many other meatier forms of literature.
Book Club
Sometimes kids discover Captain Underpants and want nothing more. This mom decided to start a book club with her teen boys to get them reading more classic literature. One of her top tips is to read a book that the adult hasn’t read: that way, it’s less like being in a modern day classroom and more about ‘the delight of exploring an epic book together’. Also? Be sure to always have snacks.
Family Reading Culture
Of course, most children aren’t going to be reading regularly if there isn’t a culture of reading in the home. I’m always a little bit sad when a mother says “I’m so busy I can’t remember the last time I just sat down to read!” because it means that her children don’t witness her sitting down to read: they don’t see that it’s a normal and delightful part of life.
One mother of nine, who had her babies long before the internet was a thing, talked about how she used to nurse them for as long as possible because it was a delightful excuse to sit and read for hours!
But life is busy, which is why one family decided to have periodic binge reading parties. They got a hotel for the weekend and made it really special (I think they even watched movies together at night), but the point of the weekend was that everyone would just read for hours.
If you can’t get a hotel, you can find other ways to make it special: buy everyone a bag of their favorite candy or salty snack to munch through; take blankets and snacks to a park or lake; set up lawn chairs in your living room; start the party late so everyone gets to stay up past bedtime.
It doesn’t matter as long as it’s special, and everyone has a book they’re excited about. If you have little ones who don’t read yet, this might be a good chance for siblings to take turns reading aloud to them, or to use an audiobook. You could even get corresponding audiobooks for picture books, so they can enjoy both mediums.
Languages and Memorisation
But there are other types of learning which can be encouraged in ‘sneaky’ ways. One of them is language learning, to which one could add other forms of memorization.
I have friends who speak several languages; I’m not one of the lucky ones who can manage anything but English fluently, and even that’s been tested by going back and forth between the US and UK! But no matter what your natural abilities, learning a language takes a lot of memorization, implicitly or explicitly.
Use Frequented Spaces
One very good way to make language learning easier is to make use of the living spaces the family already inhabits.
In that delightful classic, Cheaper by the Dozen, efficiency expert and father of many Frank Gilbreth decides that if the children don’t want to study in the summer, he’ll help them learn Morse Code without studying.
After lunch, he got a small paint brush and a can of black enamel, and locked himself in the lavatory, where he painted the alphabet code on the wall.
For the next three days Dad was busy with his paint brush, writing code over the whitewash in every room in The Shoe [the family’s holiday home.] On the ceiling in the dormitory bedrooms, he wrote the alphabet together with key words, whose accents were a reminder of the code for various letters…
When you lay on your back, dozing, the words kept going through your head, and you’d find yourself saying, ‘DAN-ger-ous, dash-dot-dot, DAN-ger-ous.’
He painted secret messages in code on the walls of the front porch and dining room…
We went into the bedrooms and copied the code alphabet on pieces of paper. Then, referring to the paper, we started translating Dad’s messages. He went right on painting, as if he were paying no attention to us, but he didn’t miss a word.
In a perhaps less extreme version of this method, I knew a father of seven who kept laminated Latin and Greek declension cards next to the toilet, and only let his teenagers play video games if they were set to German.
I’m not sure if this practice of using the most used room in the house tends to be particular to larger families, but mother of nine Simcha Fisher recently shared how she discovered her children memorizing poetry.
When we were at the Fairbanks and I pointed out the Robert Louis Stevenson document to the kids, I reminded them that he was the one who wrote At the Sea-Side (“When I was down beside the sea/A wooden spade they gave to me…”) which is the poem that’s been hanging in the bathroom for several years, and my favorite poem of all time; and one of my kids said, “Oh, I have it memorized. I stare at it every time I take a dump!” So I guess you could say [looks smugly at fingernails] I really know my stuff, parent-wise.
This made me laugh! I guess one of the best perspectives to have is a humorous one. It will go a lot farther than a dour disposition.
And of course, if education really is life, the possibilities for learning are endless!
Whether you home educate or not, these posts are worth a read and offer some interesting ideas explaining what worked for them in the education of their children. Here are a few samples.
“Talk a lot. Listen to classical music while you make dinner and let them just hear it as a matter of course. NEVER announce that anything is ‘educational’. Your kids will avoid it like the plague. Just love what you love – music, books, the recipes you enjoy making. They will pick up on your joy in two seconds flat.”
“I asked our youngest what advice he would give parents who are starting out with homeschooling. He reflected briefly then said simply, ‘They should take time to connect, sit on the couch together and read, so that they can be happy when they do school together.”
“Be diligent, of course, but also relaxed and responsive to your own child’s developmental stages. Wrap your arm around your child and make things cozy, and just do five or ten minutes of reading work a day. And then let him or her run off to play.”
This is a slightly edited version of an article which was first published on Kerri Christopher’s Substack blog By the Sea. For the original article, click here. It is republished in Adamah Media with the author’s permission. For other articles by Kerri, including her Cultivating Clarity blog, see here.
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Kerri Christopher
Kerri Christopher is a writer, speaker, life consultant (and occasional professor of theology) living in Oxfordshire. After realizing how many of her students had trouble with discernment, she founded Clarity Life Consulting to help individuals learn to discern well, discover their priorities, and make better plans to move forward with purpose and peace. She writes regularly about discernment and decision making on her substack, Cultivating Clarity.
