Delight-Directed Learning

The following was posted last night on one of our local homeschool e-mail lists:

Did you know you can get live internet feed onto the space shuttle right now? (Here's the link.) Today they are getting ready for their spacewalk they are doing tomorrow.

It is interesting to watch and has my son mesmerized by it. Yesterday I gave him a spelling test on NASA words. He has told me on the map what countries the shuttle was flying over at the time. I love this kind of school. He has learned so much just searching around the NASA website.

I saw the message this morning and have been watching the space walk. Very, very cool!

I call this delight-directed learning, which was always my favorite part of homeschooling. How wonderful to have the freedom to stop what we are doing and spontaneously take advantage of an opportunity that might never present itself again!

Even though my friend Kim often attributes the term to me (because I have talked about it so much over the years), "delight-directed study" was actually coined by Gregg Harris. When we first started homeschooling back in the late 1980s, we attended a seminar by Gregg Harris and our lives were never the same again. He truly inspired us and set the direction of our homeschooling path. I will always be grateful to him for that.

You can read more about delight-directed study in this post from Gregg Harris's blog. His book, The Christian Home School, is out of print but you can find a used copy on amazon.com. Timeless information - I recommend it!