How I plan learning for a child who refuses anything that looks educational

To be honest, it can be incredibly difficult to plan for this kiddo.

It’s not as simple as, ‘Here are the goals or outcomes we want to achieve, here is a suitable lesson, and we’ll just dedicate a couple of hours to focusing on that before we begin milling the home-grown organic spelt for the sourdough.’

We are registered for home education in Queensland (not to be confused with Distance Education), and I’m grateful that we have the flexibility to teach and learn in a way that works for us. That flexibility is, really, why this works at all. We are still expected to have some sort of plan, and reporting comes at the end of the year. When I wrote ours, I aimed to broadly align our learning with ACARA outcomes while also acknowledging one rather important detail. Master 6 (M6) often refuses to even look at an activity that resembles schoolwork.

So how do we do schoolwork?

Well, we dress it in a tutu, stick on a moustache, and call it a party.

I’ve learnt that, for us, planning is less about deciding exactly what we will do at 10am on Tuesday and more about knowing roughly where we’re heading and having plenty of different ways to get there. I plan possibilities rather than hours. I keep the learning outcomes in the background, collect resources and ideas that might help us work towards them, and then choose from those depending on what M6 is interested in, or willing to tolerate, at the time.

Sometimes we can squeeze in a couple of worksheets or a reading activity if we set some ground rules. For example, the television doesn’t go on until we’ve done X. Other times, anything resembling a worksheet is apparently an outrageous personal insult. On those days, learning might take the form of a game, a household activity, a short video, an excursion or simply a conversation about something we notice while we’re out.

We have an annual pass for the local aquarium, where we try to learn about at least one creature each visit. We enjoy walks through the botanic gardens, where we might talk about insects, trees or whatever else catches his attention. Our backyard backs onto bush, which provides plenty of opportunities to observe the natural world without me having to formally announce that we are now commencing Science.

Books and short videos are also wonderful. Last month we learnt about Australian nocturnal animals through reading. Another day, we did a basic volcano experiment from a science kit I’d picked up on sale at the plaza, then watched videos of real volcanoes erupting. Was my discussion about acids and alkalis slightly over his head? Almost certainly. Did he have fun, become interested in volcanoes and remember quite a lot about them afterwards? Yep.

Sometimes I’ll take something that looks suspiciously like schoolwork and change the way it is presented. When we were learning the days of the week, for example, we learnt a song first. Then I printed the days individually, and M6 arranged them from Sunday to Saturday before placing the correct day on the calendar. Technically, it was a printed activity, but because he could move the pieces around rather than sit and fill in a worksheet, he was much more willing to participate.

Maths can be a little trickier. I buy inexpensive workbooks from places like Aldi or dollar stores, but I don’t necessarily work through them from beginning to end. I flick through and choose activities that seem likely to interest him at the time. I learnt early that learning ‘out of order’ is much more useful than refusing to learn at all.

The workbooks give me a starting point, and then I can expand on whatever catches his interest using more hands-on resources. For example, I discovered through one of those workbooks that M6 was quite interested in learning the names of 3D shapes. So instead of simply completing the page and moving on, I printed a sorting activity from Twinkl, and we went around the house finding real objects that matched the shapes.

Household activities provide plenty of learning opportunities too. Take baking a cake. We read the recipe—I try to use recipes with plenty of visual cues—find the ingredients, measure them and combine them. We can talk about numbers, quantities, temperature and what happens when different ingredients are mixed or heated. He practises reading, maths, following instructions and an everyday household skill.

And, importantly, we get cake.

Thankfully, learning to read is something that has come naturally to M6. However, keeping the momentum requires constant switching of activities. Computer programs such as IXL and Reading Eggs have been useful when he’s willing to use them.

This way of learning does mean that I can’t always predict exactly what we will cover each week. Instead, I keep track of what we do and the skills or outcomes it connects to. Sometimes the learning comes first, and I recognise the curriculum connection afterwards. That has probably been one of the biggest changes in how I think about planning.

The plan still matters. I need to know where we’re going—I just don’t need to dictate the exact route we take to get there.

In our case, flexibility isn’t really optional. It’s what allows us to keep moving forward. To be honest, I’m quite enjoying the challenge.