Teaching Tarot to Children, or, doing lockdown education my way

Like so many others, right now I am home educating my children as well as trying to keep up with my own work. Home education is not particularly formal, we are doing some maths and English, lots of creative projects, nature walks and I'm generally following the kids lead. I'm keeping an eye on the curriculum so we keep up with the basics but also taking great delight in deviating from it to do subjects and projects they wouldn't get the opportunity to do at school. And so we have started learning the tarot. I'm forever saying that everyone should learn tools like tarot or astrology, to give them a resource which helps them navigate life's ups and downs, a tool for self knowledge as well as a way of connecting to something beyond the mundane. Tarot is a great place to start with children as they respond to the images and tend to be much more ready to work with intuition and imagination than many adults. I'm going to blog about our lessons as we do them, in case anyone would like to follow along. If you do, I'd love to hear about your experiences and how your children respond to the cards!

Fascinating to see the different ways they chose to organise the cards

Of course, the tarot contains images which some might see as not suitable for children, so the first step in this journey is to choose decks which are child-friendly. Like any other images for children, bright colours and friendly faces go a long way. Both of the decks my children are working with are decks which are a little too "nice" or dare I say "fluffy" for my liking but a perfect introduction to the tarot for younger folk. My ten year old has had her Faerie tarot for a while thanks to her ongoing love of fairies and my almost seven year old is thrilled with the Tarot of the Moon Garden, mostly because of the dragons!

We started by simply looking at the cards, laying them all out and looking at similarities and differences and the kinds of images in the deck. This took a while, with lots of "What's your Fool like?" and was a great way to introduce the basics, like the fact that a tarot deck always has the same 78 basic cards which are interpreted in all kinds of ways by deck creators. The two decks, both being magical and mythical based, have some images in common, so it was interesting to compare which cards had dolphins or foxes, for example, in each deck, and to talk about the symbolism of the animals and how it enhanced or elucidated the card meaning. Ashley was very taken with the Death card and kept it on display in his room for the next few days, which gave rise to some interesting ongoing conversations about endings and beginnings, loss and transformation. Responding to images and opening up conversations, that's exactly what I want to achieve with these lessons so this makes me very happy.

Both of the children have started tarot journals - because everyone loves a tarot journal right?! - and Holly, in particular, has been assiduous in her note-taking. We spent a fair bit of time on the basic structure of the deck, looking at the Major arcana and the Minors and talking about how they are different. We're going to focus on the Minor arcana for now, because I think it's easier to get your head around. Holly and Ashley are both already aware of the four elements and the basic symbolism associated with them so I'm using that as a way in to the meanings of the Minor Arcana cards. We ended our first lesson looking at the Wands and talking about the element of fire and we'll move onto the rest of the elements next time.

Update; the next instalment of our lessons is here