Curiosity is the Curriculum: S-P-A-R-K

Summer doesn’t have to mean worksheets at the kitchen table or battles over reading logs. In this comeback episode of Dyslexia Decoded, Teacher Maggie shares a different approach to summer learning — one rooted in curiosity, creativity, imagination, and real-life experiences.

Through personal stories about growing up with boxes of random car parts, raising a dyslexic son who builds incredible creations with a hot glue gun and a hammer, and the inspiring story of dyslexic paleontologist Jack Horner, this episode explores how children often learn best when they are free to wonder, build, experiment, and explore.

Maggie introduces the simple “SPARK” framework for meaningful summer learning:

✨ Say Yes to Questions
 ✨ Play With Purpose
 ✨ Add Reading Naturally
 ✨ Real-Life Learning Counts
 ✨ Keep Curiosity Alive

Whether your child is homeschooled, attends public school, struggles academically, or simply needs space to rediscover wonder, this episode will encourage you to see learning differently this summer.

Because sometimes the most meaningful education happens far away from worksheets — in forts, forests, conversations, inventions, and curiosity-filled childhood moments.

Thank you for listening to Dyslexia Decoded! Remember, every journey begins with a single step, and progress always beats perfection.

Subscribe so you never miss an episode, and if you found this story inspiring, please share it with someone who might need to hear it.

Until next time, stay strong, stay curious, and stay fearless. 💚

Transcript

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Hi, friends. It's been a while since I've sat down behind this microphone. Honestly, part of that is life, and part of it is that strange guilt that grows the longer you've been away from something you love. And the crazy thing is, even while I wasn't recording, people were still listening. I'd still get the email every month showing me downloads and how many listeners. I'd get messages from families, teachers, and parents, and every time I saw those emails, I thought, "Oh, I miss this. I miss thinking during the week what to do next." And I know if I don't come back now, I probably won't. So here I am today, and really excited to share with you, 'cause I do really love connecting with people this way. I love talking about children, learning, dyslexia, curiosity, wonder, and the way kids actually learn best. And as summer approaches, I keep seeing parents that are really carrying this pressure. There's a fear of the summer slide, fear that kids are going to fall behind, fear that we need to recreate school at home all summer long. I homeschool my kids, and even during the school year, homeschool is not recreating the classroom at home. That's just really not the best way to learn. And even in my homeschool, I like to shift perspective and shift our goals for the summertime to be more explorative, more creative. And so today I wanna offer a different perspective, because children were designed to learn long before worksheets and next-level workbooks were ever invented. And honestly, some of the deepest learning happens when children are fully alive. They're asking questions, building forts, catching bugs, making messes, creating imaginary worlds, helping adults, exploring outside, reading comics under their blankets, or becoming completely obsessed with a random topic. So today, I wanna share what I call the SPARK method for summer learning. It's not school at home, and it's not Pinterest perfection. No pressure, just practical ways to keep curiosity alive. So before we jump into SPARK, I wanna say something really important. I think sometimes we've forgotten what children are actually supposed to look like. Children are supposed to be curious, imaginative, messy, creative, moving, wondering, collecting weirder things in their pockets, gross things in their pockets, building things that fail, asking endless questions. But modern childhood often looks exhausted. It's overscheduled, overscreened, overstructured, always being evaluated. We're just coming out of standardized testing season, and I promise you, the most important things about your child cannot be measured with a test. And summer gives us this beautiful opportunity to slow down enough to remember children are humans before they are students. So when I was a kid, my dad was a mechanic, and sometimes he'd bring home these big boxes full of random car parts. I'm pretty sure my dad was dyslexic too. I'm dyslexic. My son's dyslexic. I have theories that my dad was dyslexic just based on his strengths. And so I imagine he knew how much this would mean to me as a student who learned differently. I have big boxes full of nuts and bolts, gears, metal pieces, car parts And honestly, it exploded my imagination. Me and my brother would spend hours creating things, rocket ships, robots, machines, secret inventions. And I think part of what made this so powerful was I didn't know what these objects were originally meant for, so my brain gave them purpose. I got to create. And looking back now as an adult, especially as a dyslexic adult, I realize how important that was. Dyslexic minds are often imaginative, inventive, hands-on, big-picture thinking. But if every moment of childhood is over-structured and over-focused on performance, some children never get the opportunity to discover what they're naturally good at. And honestly, I probably learned more from those summers building imaginary inventions out of random car parts than I did from memorizing facts that I forgot after a test. That doesn't mean academics don't matter, but meaningful learning sticks because it's connected to experience, creativity, curiosity, and emotion. So SPARK. if I could give parents one simple framework for learning this summer, I've come up with what I would like to call SPARK. S is for say yes to questions. Don't put them off, right? Answer the questions or let them know you'll find the answer. P, play with purpose. A, add reading naturally. Well, it doesn't have to be forced or timed or reading logs. Find natural environmental ways to make sure we're practicing reading. We're in reading. R is for real-life learning counts. helping at the grocery store, helping in the kitchen. There's learning in every moment of the day. And K is to keep curiosity alive. So first, our S, say yes to the questions. One of the fastest ways to kill curiosity is constantly shutting questions down, even if it seems like a silly question or a nonsensical question. Answer the questions. Listen to your children. Childrens are asking questions. A child who's asking question is a child that's learning. Questions like, "Why is the moon out during the day? How do fish breathe? How do rockets turn? Why do birds stand on one leg?" Instead of, "I don't know," or, "Not now," or, "Just because that's the way it is," try, "That's a great question." What do you think? I always put questions back on the students. I always get onto my husband, like, kids will ask a question. They'll be like, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, what is this?" And he just gives them the answer. I'm like, "Well, ask them. How could they find that answer? Ask them what do they think the answer is." Like, I want anything to dialogue, not just, you know, well, what is the distance from here to the moon and back? Don't, like, Google it and just tell them the answer. Like, well, how long, far do you think it is? Well, it's this far to your school, and it's this far to drive across the country. and start having a conversation about their question. we can look it up together, but that doesn't need to be your first step. You can test it and make comparisons to what they do understand. Curiosity is the engine of all learning. A child asking questions is not interrupting learning. They are learning. One practical thing families can do is keep a wonder list. Write questions down. Look up one question together every day. Let curiosity become the norm in your home. for P is to play with purpose. Play is not a break from learning. Play is learning, and that's not just in the preschool years. When children build forts, create imaginary worlds, organize games, make slime, build Lego creations, or invent things, their brains are doing incredible work. Problem-solving, executive functioning, creativity, engineering thinking, and honestly, I think modern children are often over-entertained and under-imaginative. Sometimes children don't need more entertainment. They need access to interesting things. Give them cardboard, tape, rope, buckets, nature, magnets, flashlights, random hardware, clay, wood scraps. You know, open-ended things that allow creativity. So one of the best gifts I've ever gave my dyslexic son is a cheap little hot glue gun from the Dollar General. It was like $5. It was a last-minute as a stocking stuffer for Christmas, but that little glue gun unlocked something in him. He has built forts, fixed things. Any time someone has something break in the house, he's like, "I'll fix it." He creates inventions, connects random materials together. One of the first things he built was a very large, probably like three-foot-long model of the Titanic completely out of popsicle sticks, and we're going through glue sticks by the hundreds. but what I love most isn't even the projects, it's the pride. It's the persistence, the confidence, and the problem-solving, that feeling of, "I can create something." And I think some children desperately need opportunities to feel capable outside of worksheets and tests. So this same son just recently turned 10 years old, and one of his friends got him a hammer, a tape measure, a little tool bag with some random tools in it for his birthday. And the mom was like, "Yeah, you know, he's 10 years old, and it's time to, give him something a little risky." And it wasn't her child, so this is a friend, and she's like, "I didn't wanna give him a knife." their kids get a knife when they turn 10. But so she gave him a hammer, a real, full-size adult hammer, and it's not unsafe, but it's real. Real tools, real responsibility, real exploration, and that hammer has gone everywhere with him ever since. it's been into the woods, in forts, in projects. He's been breaking apart dead logs looking for bugs, digging up rocks and measuring them with his tape measure, hammering wood things together. And it made me think of a story about Jack Horner. He is a dyslexic paleontologist. He's credited for being the inspiration behind Jurassic Park. I am a big fan of, learning about different successful dyslexics, and he is certainly one of my favorite. He won at something called the MacArthur Genius Award, and he as a student, he had struggled. As a child, Jack Horner struggled tremendously in school, and he had difficulty reading. But he loved fossils and dinosaurs. And as a child in Montana, his mom would take him out every weekend, and he would spend hours outside searching for fossils, and he would go to the library and research and see what he could try to figure out about them. he, made a display of fossils with little labels that he admits now were probably not correct in his hometown library, and the display is still there today. So one of his most famous discoveries happened because of a hammer. Scientists, have known about dinosaur eggs for centuries at this point, but nobody wanted to break them open because they were considered too precious. You can't break open dinosaur eggs, they're precious. But Jack Horner basically said, "The tape is cheap. We can tape them back together." So he cracked one open with his hammer and became the first person to discover dinosaur embryos inside fossilized eggs. And later, he joked that he became a genius because he had a hammer. And because curiosity often looks messy, hands-on, different, unconventional, and sometimes children struggling most in traditional classrooms are the exact children capable of seeing the world differently enough to change it. So A in our SPARK is add reading naturally. Summer reading does not have to feel miserable. Audiobooks count. Comic books count. Recipes count. Maps count. Joke books, graphic novels, everything is reading. Not every child wants to sit with a chapter book all summer, and honestly, that's okay. The goal is not making reading feel like punishment wrapped in sunshine. Read aloud outside. Listen to audiobooks in the car. Read recipes together. Use treasure hunts with clues. Read signs on road trips. The goal is keeping language alive and enjoyable. So my R is for real-life learning counts. I think school sometimes accidentally teaches us that learning only happens at a desk, but real life is full of learning. Cooking is math and science. Gardening is biology. Building things is engineering. Road trips and geogra- are geography and history. Running a lemonade stand is entrepreneurship and math. Children remember what they experience. Real life gives learning meaning. One meaningful conversation can teach more than a worksheet page forgotten an hour later. in the summertime, this is a great opportunity when you have more time, take, your s- child to the grocery store, give them a budget and a menu, and have them shop. Do not guide them, just supervise while they, you know, collect the ingredients, find where they're at in the store, add up as they go to make sure they stay within their budget. Such a great real-life learning experience that, you know, maybe even they can go home and make the meal and feel so much pride from that experience, and there's an incredible amount of learning. So finally, we're at K, is to keep curiosity alive. This may be the most important one. When children become obsessed with something, lean in. Are they into sharks? Rockets? My six-year-old is obsessed with horses right now. All my kids have always loved bugs, probably because I do. weather, dinosaurs, my Four-year-old is into dinosaurs. All my kids love baking. Could do art, make slime, try different recipes and compare them. interest creates attention. Attention creates memory. Some of the smartest adults I know were children who were allowed to become deeply fascinated with things, to make messes, and try things that maybe weren't convenient at the time. So honestly, I think one of the greatest gifts we can give children is the permission to stay curious. not every moment has to be optimized. Rest matters, too. Boredom matters. Some of the best summer moments begin with, "There's nothing to do. Our house is so boring," because boredom often becomes the doorway to imagination. Children don't always need constant entertainment. Sometimes they need space. So here are a few ideas for things you can do this summer. Nature journals, library trips. Building forts, cooking together, bug hunts, stargazing. Talk about the constellations. see where those conversations lead. Just take them into nature and let them ask the questions. Bird watching, gardening, map reading, family documentaries, building simple machines, art stations, wonder journals, scavenger hunts, collecting rocks and leaves, starting a collection of simply anything. Just find a new skill and decide to learn it together. So summer is short, but childhood is even shorter, and while, and while academics matter, so do curiosity, connection, creativity, confidence, wonder, conversation, and imagination. Your child does not need a perfectly structured summer to keep learning. They need opportunities to stay alive to the world around them. So maybe this summer, the goal isn't recreating school at home. Maybe the goal is keeping the spark alive. Thank you for being here with me again, friends. I have missed this, and I'm really glad we got to spend this time together. Message me if you need anything or if you have any questions or you have ideas to share. Thank you. Signing out.