"Funny work sticks better to my brain"

Over the weekend, I was thinking about the Savvy Homeschool Moms blog hop about humor in homeschooling. I was trying to figure out how to write about our sense of humor and how the kid and I make it through the day, when as usual, I got the better lesson from the kid than he did from me!

We were working on a student-led conference, where he would sit down with his dad and go over his favorite pieces of work from our year. He wrote up a little paragraph about each piece of work and then described it to his dad, talking about what he had learned, liked about the assignment and what he would do differently next time. 

The lesson came to me when he was talking about a grammar sheet about dangling modifiers. The kid said "I realized that I learn better when something is really funny. It sticks to my brain better." Who would have ever thought that dangling modifiers would be funny? Well thanks to a Scholastic ebook, we have learned that it's funny but not grammatically correct, to write "Badly leaking, Grandpa fixed the pipes." It leaves images of grandpa leaking all over the kitchen. You know what makes boys laugh with guaranteed consistency? Pee jokes.

The kid is right, of course. We learn more when something is funny because we feel relaxed and it creates a memory! Though we did this grammar worksheet in the early fall, he still remembered it and asked specifically for it when we were going through his work from the year. It's the same funny approach to grammar that "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" uses or Brian Cleary uses in his grammar and parts of speech books. 

I thought it was really fantastic that the kid realized this about himself without any prompting from me. It's also a good reminder for me to seek out humorous curriculum that will make us laugh along the way, so it can stick better to our brains. As the end of 5th grade wraps up, I'm realizing that if we will survive 6th grade, we're going to need a LOT of humorous curriculum to combat the teen attitude that slowly leaking into our daily activities. If we can figure out a way to laugh through it, perhaps we'll both come out the other end without any dangling modifiers and just a solid pile of funny memories together.