An immersive approach to home schooling
An immersive curriculum seeks to ‘immerse’ a student deeply in a particular topic area, allowing them time to absorb new knowledge, practise skills and become confident in their handling of the material. This approach is perfectly suited to home schooling. Immersive learning has yielded strong academic results among our students, partly because it fosters a real passion for a subject. When students have a strong grasp of content, they feel empowered to speak and write with authority. And this helps them come to love working in that area of learning.
Consider how the familiar school subject-based approach to curriculum might work in this teaching and learning scenario:
You’re studying Ancient Egypt as a culture. In school, we’d call that ‘History’. But when we show students the vital importance of the Nile river and how it affected the growth of Egypt to a world-dominating civilization, that’s Geography. And reading about it involves skills in English. If we were to take a closer look at Egyptian architecture and engineering, we’re now in the realm of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). And a quick survey of Egyptian artwork and craft takes us into the area of Creative Arts. If we were to organise a healthy Egyptian feast, or play some ancient sports and games, look at mummies for evidence of disease and study social customs, we’re now diving into the subjects of Personal Development, Health and Physical Education (PDHPE). Clearly, the integrated approach to curriculum makes more sense, offers more variety and hence, is much more stimulating than studying a series of seemingly disconnected subjects individually.
The benefits of an immersive, integrated curriculum
Immersive learning encourages critical thinking and reflection, building a sense of true enjoyment of learning itself, not merely learning in that one subject area. Intensely fascinating details and timeless truths learned along the way provides excellent material for making notebooks and journals to treasure for a lifetime.
An important feature of the immersive approach is that it mimics the concept of ‘majoring’ in a particular subject, which students will encounter at university. It also opens up new ideas for future research and innovation.
Immersing a child in a subject builds sophisticated skills such as drawing inferences, comparing, contrasting and ‘big picture’ thinking. Such programs should be multi-disciplinary, incorporating traditional academic subjects with the arts and technologies. Immersive learning also demonstrates to children that they are indeed capable of understanding profound concepts. What a wonderful compliment to pay a child!
