For many years I have followed a writer and speaker, Jon Acuff, whose books and talks focus not only on setting goals, but on actually achieving them. For some of those years I participated in several of Jon’s webinars and Facebook groups and both were filled with three key elements: great information, amazing encouragement, and things that made me laugh. One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Jon Acuff’s approach to creating goals is that he is all about how you can infuse fun into those goals and how you can turn up the joy while moving toward your dreams.
I suppose the reason I appreciate that as much as I do is because I think laughter truly can act like an attitude-changing elixir in just about any circumstance. Maybe that’s why I love that our family, including our two awesomely funny teenage girls, spend a good amount of time laughing each day. Even on my grumpier days, at least one of these three people I call my family can influence my mood with a witty one-line observation, a quick-witted pun, a meme or funny video, or some other silliness that elicits a smile if not a full-out laugh from me.
There are days I wonder if other people laugh even half as much as we tend to here. Honestly, I cannot imagine days filled with goofy dance moves, exaggerated voices asking regular questions, operatic singing of everyday observations, or the sound of laughter drifting through the rooms of our home. I love how laughter flows through our daily rhythms and routines, including our unschooling time. Like Jon Acuff, I think that achieving goals happens more often when there is joy and even a dash of fun wrapped into the steps we take in the direction of our goals and dreams. That holds equally true in my book for how I approach learning with our girls. It has been this way since they were younger, this infusing fun and play into learning; perhaps that’s why they remain curious learners.
They also remain quite a lot of fun even as we move through our unschooling adventures. While there are times I need to rein them in just a bit so we can finish up a reading we’re in the middle of, most of the time, I love and thoroughly enjoy their banter and observations (some serious, others witty and humorous). For example, today, we continued the treasure hunt adventure we began last week, the adventure that requires us to solve various kinds of puzzles to determine where the next stop on this adventure will be. We are learning all kinds of historical information as well as discovering fascinating facts about missing treasures and stolen art, artifacts, and relics. On today’s journey, we were visiting Palembang, Indonesia where we were introduced to three different lost cities, including The Lost City of Gold.
According to legend, sometime in the 1500s Spanish explorers learned about a chieftain living high in the Andes Mountains who would cover himself in gold dust and wade into a lake. Apparently these Spanish explorers believed he was building a kingdom of gold they referred to as El Dorado. As it turns out, that term, used by the local indigenous people, more than likely referred to the chieftain and not a city because El Dorado means the Gilded One. As we read this short snippet, my 15 year old couldn’t find the words to express her incredulity; rather she repeated the question of why, why, why with an underpinning of laughter, to which her sister replied almost immediately, Don’t begrudge a man his hobbies. It took me several moments before we could move on to reading about the next locations.
One of those locations was Mexico City and the discovery of more than 200 mammoths in what is referred to as the Mammoth Graveyard. As I read a list of fossils paleontologists have found alongside those many mammoths, including the bones of camels, horses, bison, fish, birds, and antelopes, too, my youngest chimed in with this funny quip: oh, bison, for a minute I heard you about to say bicycle and was curious about bicycle fossils. These infusions of laughter tend to be welcome interruptions much of the time, for all of us. I believe laughter provides a positive energy, and that energy can actually help us move through the work we are focusing on.
Over the course of a few years now, I have embraced the more free-range, teen-led, curiosity-infused approach to unschooling homeschool. I have read a few different books, including one that truly captures some of my passions and ideas, The Element by Sir Ken Robinson, as well as following different blogs and podcasts, that have helped me accept that not every student needs to sit at a desk all day nor does every student need to focus on their weaknesses in order to strengthen those, but rather we should pour into their strengths and make those even more so. But it is this idea of making learning fun, of inviting my girls into the adventure of new ideas and possibilities, that fuels my efforts the most. Many things benefit from a dash of fun—just picture Mary Poppins singing about a spoonful of sugar as she and the two children clean up the nursery—so why not add a dash of fun to learning?