What is Lifestyle Learning?

When I first started homeschooling my children over a decade ago, we used a very traditional method that looked similar to what might happen in a school room.  We essentially “did school” around our dining room table. 

However, over the years as our family grew and our lifestyle changed, the traditional methods became less and less effective.  We began to branch out, trying new approaches, and settled into something entirely our own: a lifestyle of learning.  

Lifestyle learning capitalizes on our children’s natural inquisitive energy and fosters an environment where kids are always learning; where there is no separation between school and life – where learning just becomes a lifestyle. 

It allows us the freedom to use any and every learning style available to us without being defined or confined by any of them, and in the meantime, we create an environment where our children love to learn.

Why Choose Lifestyle Learning For Your Child

Your children are individuals and each one learns in a unique way.  Lifestyle learning empowers you to embrace that.  There is no mold to fit them into.  Instead, they are free to learn, to play, to create, to explore…they are free to be children. 

 As naturally curious beings, lifestyle learning allows them to organically grow in creativity, ingenuity, individuality and intellect as they pursue the things that interest them. 

Studies reveal that children have the natural ability and drive to find answers when they are presented with situations that are new or confounding to them. 

 Lifestyle learning gives us, as parents, the freedom to:

•  Embrace their questions
•  Try new things
•  Explore new ideas
•  Adopt new approaches

With this kind of perspective, every experience becomes a learning adventure.

There is so much to be said for letting a child have questions and the space to find the answers.  They will fail sometimes, but failure isn’t failure when it’s part of the learning process; it motivates and refines their search.  With lifestyle learning, even mistakes have purpose, because they are helping your child reach their ultimate destination.  When a person is free to both explore and fail, they are existing in the kind of environment where engagement, joy, and a love for learning bloom.  

Benefits Of Lifestyle Learning

There are so many benefits to lifestyle learning – I could go on for days! – but since a homeschool mom’s time is precious, let me just give you a few of the key things we have loved the most about it:

•  It’s fun.
•  It’s flexible.
•  It plays to each child’s strengths.
•  The retention level is high.
•  It builds lifelong learners.

Lifestyle Learning Is Fun

There is nothing quite as powerful as curiosity and interest when it comes to igniting a passion for learning.  Why?  Because it’s fun to explore something we haven’t seen before or to discover something new!  With a lifestyle learning mindset, kids are learning, but they feel like they are playing (more on this later in the article). 

Here is a sampling of the kinds of skills and activities my kids have pursued on their own, simply because they had fun doing it:

•  Developing science experiments, evaluating the data, and retesting their hypothesis as they change elements of the experiment 
•  Sketching, painting, and pretty much any art experience they can get their hands on
•  Math skills like fractions, multi-digit addition, and money skills
•  Nature studies of all kinds – birds, bugs, plants, gardening, solar power, the solar system, and more
•  Learning to play the piano and guitar
•  Game development such as board and card games, sports, and computer games
•  History, historical structures, games and notable people
•  Creative writing including stories, poetry, books, playwriting, cooperative storytelling and more
•  Mental math drills (YES, my kids actually ask for these!)
•  Entrepreneurship (Two of my children started their own small businesses and made money with them.)
•  Cooking – including meal preparation, baking, grilling, food prep, food presentation and more
•  Creating and editing videos (including video shorts, writing and directing)
•  And so much more!

When kids are having fun doing something, they will pursue it on their own.  Likewise, when learning is fun for them, it ceases to be a chore – it becomes something they choose to do out of their own free will simply because they enjoy doing it.  

Lifestyle Learning Is Flexible

 With lifestyle learning, counting school days is out the window.  Why?  Because lifestyle learning isn’t a homeschooling approach; it’s a mindset.  It is essentially a shift from “doing school” to “always learning.”

 With traditional homeschooling methods, it can be all too easy to get caught in the traps of finishing curriculum, logging days, and detailed planning that leave little room for flexibility.  There’s no freedom there.  Life revolves around school.  

 But with lifestyle learning, life is school.  Learning becomes a natural process that is happening every day, all of the time.  When learning is our lifestyle we accumulate far more than the necessary “school” days required by many states’ homeschool laws, while still enjoying the flexibility to arrange and rearrange our schedule at will (even if it’s just to enjoy the first warm day of spring outside!).  

 Holidays, spontaneous trips, sick days, and play dates cease to cause frustration because we no longer bend to the demands of our tight schedule; instead, we make our schedule work for us. 

Lifestyle learning allows us to: 

•  Make the most of every opportunity (whether that be vacation or just great weather outside) 
•  Enjoy our days (there is less stress and more joy) 
•  Increase our quality family time (we can schedule around our own family’s needs and desires)

Lifestyle Learning Plays To Your Child’s Strengths

Lifestyle learning not only teaches your child that their questions are important, that they are fully capable of finding the answers, and that learning is a fun experience, it also plays to their individual strengths because it is completely customizable.  

•  Have a child who loves to read?  Incorporate living history by reading real books about real people and their experiences. 
•  Have a child who thinks like an engineer?  Use blocks, snap circuits, Lego science and more! 
•  Have a child who learns and understands in very different ways than their peers?  Lifestyle learning lets them pursue topics they love in ways that make sense to them.

Studies have shown that learning happens at a greater rate when a person’s curiosity is piqued.  Lifestyle learning capitalizes on this concept and allows your child to embody that experience in their own unique way.

Kids Retain Information At A High Level

When children are learning about something they are interested in, the retention level is very high.  Research has shown that learning occurs best when children are active, engaged, and building meaningful connections to their lives.

Education that happens through more traditional methods introduces information to our children from a top-down approach.  They are learning about something because we, as their parent teachers, believe it is important for them to learn.

Lifestyle learning does not abandon that concept.  Instead it reframes it in a way where both the parent and the child are motivated in the experience. 

When the experience originates with the child, it is directly meaningful and applicable in their own life. They want to pursue learning because they find it interesting and important.  In those situations, we as parents get to make the most of that opportunity and guide our child to reliable resources and information that we believe is important to the conversation.

Because the child was instrumental in pursuing the topic, and because they find personal meaning and application in it, they retain the information at much higher levels.  It’s no longer something they are being told is important to learn – they believe that it is something important to learn. 

Lifestyle Learning Creates Lifelong Learners

You’ll find that when you adopt a lifestyle learning mindset, your goals and outcomes transform.  You are no longer working to produce “educated children”, you are instead building life-long learners.  This may seem like a subtle difference, but that difference is powerful. 

Instead of focusing on the quantity of information your children consume, your sights become set on building the foundation that will set them up well to think intelligently, creatively, and critically for the rest of their lives.  The goal is to maintain and capitalize on the natural, lifelong learning process. 

This comes through developing a love for learning, and that love for learning is fostered by encouraging our children to pursue what interests them, letting them learn in whatever way suits them best, and by piquing their curiosity for new and exciting things.  It develops because they are having fun learning.

When a child has fun doing something, he often develops a love for it.  Once he has a love for learning, he seeks it out everywhere he goes, all of the time.  When we arm our children with a love for learning, and they understand how they learn best as an individual, nothing is beyond their reach.