It happens whenever someone is engaged, interested and challenged. The holy grail of active learning is when it's self-driven - where no-one else dictated or controlled the activity. There's plenty of talk of spontaneous learning, where the stars align and suddenly - bang - there's a magical moment where a child just starts learning. How can I get this magic?
Being spontaneous takes planning. We spontaneously made a rope swing to entertain ourselves at a youth hostel last month - because I keep a rope in the car for emergency rope swing adventures (or towing).
You can spontaneously stop at a National Trust place to paddle in the river if you have already remembered to put your membership card, spare clothes and a towel in the car.
You can spontaneously do science experiments if you have food colouring, candles, bicarb, tums, sand, etc... in the cupboard.
You can spontaneously do art if you picked up air drying clay and acrylic paints last time you went past HobbyCraft.
You get the idea. Spontaneity is an illusion but I do embrace self-driven learning. As my confidence continues to grow so does my comfort level with flexibility. For two mornings this week I've stood back and let the boys get on with it, to see what they'd do. It was enlightening.
Day 1
The boys found a box of balloons and started blowing them up and letting them go. W googled balloon hacks on YouTube and they tried experiment after experiment : the fire-proof balloon was a favourite, as was the static water-bending trick. They added coins to the balloons and span them.
They filled them with water - but had to solve the issue of how to get the water in. Attaching to the tap resulted in split balloons and a large puddle in the kitchen. A revised system with a plastic bottle worked quite well but so did taking a mouthful of water and just blowing. When they had enough of being soaked they filled the balloons with rice to make stress balls.
I found a bag of balloon modelling balloons and dogs, hats, giraffes and a snake followed as they read the instructions for a dog and then went freestyle. They decorated some with sharpies.
Time spent : 4 hours. Intervention : virtually zero (I had to get towels for the floor and I dug out the modelling balloons)
Day 2
The boys decide to start W's stamp collection. The boys read and followed the instructions for how to add stamps to an album, categorised some of the stamps, asked their Nana for more stamps, soaked them off the envelopes and dried them. One stamp was for 500 Zimbabwean dollars so thinking they'd hit the big time, checked how much it was worth in GBP. A disappointing £1.10 - however K added to the value of the other UK stamps and was delighted to find it totalled over £13.
After stamps they decided to do some Reading Eggspress challenges and did comprehensions to earn animal cards and then traded them, with a discussion about which category of animal they were each collecting. The peacock was listed in flying birds and W wasn't sure peacocks could fly so he looked up a video to check they could.
They moved on to HomeByMe and worked on their houses, W made a pod house with all amenities based on a tiny footprint. K worked on the interior design of his office.
Time spent : 5 hours. Intervention : Zero, except for being a willing audience as they showed me what they had created and how to do the stamps.
So what's the formula for engaged, interested children? Luck is a big part of it. They had slept well, eaten a good breakfast and were in a chipper mood. We've had a good week. This keeps brotherly bickering to a minimum and created an atmosphere conducive to getting on with stuff. Rules are vital. If there wasn't a rule that we don't play computer games til the end of our school day then I'd have been reporting 5 hours of Minecraft or CrossyRoad. Environment helps. The kitchen was (relatively) tidy for a change and I'd shuffled some activities they might have forgotten about into sight - like how the supermarket guys rotate the fruit so the oldest is at the front.There's a knack too, to intervening and directing just a few moments before everything descends into chaos. The active learning utopia has a limited shelf life; being self-driven is tiring and after a while you need someone else to take the reins, or provide snacks, or both. Balance is the key; both days we did formal literacy and maths after lunch.
Most of the discussions I read about this type of spontaneous/ free/ self-driven learning are play based and sadly that tends to mean the discussion is restricted to the under 5s. What a shame. Play, at any age, presents some of the best opportunities for analysis, planning, resilience, creativity and team work.
When learning is deep, relevant and active you can't tell where play stops and learning begins.
