Interest-led learning has worked wonders for us since we started homeschooling. Taking advantage of my son’s interests to teach him new concepts has allowed him to be more cooperative and excited during homeschool time. 🙂 We got into the Five in a Row curriculum because Timmy loves books. He likes the idea of covering different topics from a single book. 🙂
Timmy also loves basketball. He watches NBA and pretends that he’s Lebron James. There are times when he spends his gadgets time just watching NBA highlights. Too cute! 🙂 He’s been following Lebron since he was in Miami up to now that he is back in Cleveland. His daddy Omar, however, has been a Lebron fan since he was drafted in the NBA. He also writes articles about Lebron and the Cleveland Cavaliers for Fansided’s King James Gospel. 🙂
For a time, Timmy was into the PBA, too! He watched Ginebra games and Gilas matches during FIBA tournaments. This prompted me to incorporate his love for basketball in some of our activities!
English
When we were learning about vowels, Timmy looked for them in the names of NBA players. 🙂
Writing
To get him to write within the lines, which he initially didn’t like, I made his copywork Cavs-themed. He enjoyed copying the names of the players he watches. 🙂
I also downloaded the font KG Primary dots font and created tracing worksheets for him. This helped him control the size and spacing of his letters. 🙂 When he started writing, he only wanted to write on blank papers. He was able to write freely and his strokes were very quick. Around the last quarter of last year before he turned 5, I started training him in lined sheets of paper. He never liked tracing until he saw these. 🙂
Math
We did some shape recognition exercises using the different logos of the Cavs.
We also did some greater than and less than activities on jerseys. I downloaded a blank basketball jersey clip art and edited it on Word to insert the numbers. The names on jerseys were his first and last names. 🙂
We also did some counting exercises where he counted the Cavaliers jerseys. 🙂 If you see his answers, his numbers were written in a robotic font. I allow him to do lettering from time to time and write random things on his worksheets. 🙂
To give you an idea of how passionate he is about basketball here’s a video him at 3 years old identifying the different NBA teams using their logos. 🙂
And this is Timmy at 5 years old telling me the names of NBA players from different teams. 🙂 Yes, he’s wearing the same jersey! Haha! 🙂
Here’s our little MVP shooting some hoops at a Pop-A-Shot game in Timezone at Alabang Town Center. 🙂
But his interests are not limited to basketball only. There was a time that he loved “Inside Out” and he kept watching it over and over again. I bought some cheap stickers of the characters and used it for our preposition study! 🙂
A friend of mine used Star Wars in their homeschool lesson. She also took advantage of his son’s love for Play Doh to teach the planets in the Solar System! 🙂 Whatever your child’s interests are, leverage it for learning. It will be more enjoyable for them to learn new things when they can relate more to the concepts they are presented with. 🙂 What are some themes you have used to teach your child? 🙂 I’d love to hear from you!
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