You are here: Home / Archives for Learning Outside the Books

Teaching the Satisfaction of a Job Well Done

November 3, 2009 by 6 Comments

Have you ever noticed that cooking is much easier to do if the counters are clear, and the dishwasher and dish drainer are empty? I think a clean kitchen is a pleasure to be in and to work in. A sparkling clean bathroom makes me feel more like I’m vacationing in a nice hotel room than enduring yet another ordinary day at home. When my family all pitched in, and we cleaned the house super-fast for short-notice visitors, I always marveled aloud at how nice it looked! I wanted my helpers to feel appreciated, but I also wanted them to focus on what they had accomplished and enjoy the fruits of their labors.

The big question on your mind may be how to get your children to pitch in and help. Should you bribe them? If you routinely reward them, will they always expect some tangible payment for helping? And would a regular reward really be any different from a bribe? A bribe is something promised in advance in order to obtain a desired result. A true reward should be a surprise given after the fact as a bonus for desirable behavior.

I gave my children occasional rewards for cooperation and patient endurance after a grueling day of errands or shopping. You did a great job of helping without whining or complaining, so now you can pick out a treat! Usually, the rewards were simple things like a candy bar or a small toy, nothing to break the budget, but enough to say Thanks — you’re appreciated! At other times, when our children mentioned a more expensive item they might like to save up for, we made them a surprise gift of it, as another unexpected reward for being a good, cooperative, and helpful member of the family on a regular basis.

My kids tidied up their own bedrooms as one of their normal duties, but about once each year I would help each of them with a thorough overhaul. We went through all of their clothing, culling the outgrown or damaged things. We deep-cleaned the closets and corners that usually got ignored. We rearranged the furniture to suit their latest whim or growing-up needs. That much work often took more than a single day, but when we were finished, I had helped each child see the benefits of all our progress: more floor space for playing board games, new bookshelves for organization, or a desk in their bedroom for a private work space. Many of the decisions along the way were left up to the child in question, so that they had a true sense of ownership in the reorganization process, and along with that came the satisfaction of having things the way they wanted them. Yes, sometimes it is difficult to part with a favorite shirt when the child can still get into it (sort of), but the feeling of moving on to a few new clothes (and making some new memories) will be well worth it. Completing this laborious task should be marked by several moments of admiration and recognizing the satisfaction in a job well done.

There is satisfaction to be found in even mundane tasks. Emptying the kitchen trash can is hardly anyone’s favorite job, but once it has been done, it is much easier to toss the next item in! Nothing falls out and slithers to the floor, you don’t have to cram the pile down to make room for anything else, and you won’t be reminded (again) that the trash still needs to be emptied, and it is still your turn to do it.

We moms often find ourselves expending all sorts of energy to get tasks done, but we need to save a little of that energy for praising the job well done and bestowing our satisfaction in the accomplished task. You worked a long time on that! It feels good, doesn’t it, to have it finally done! And you did a good job, too — I can tell that you put a lot of effort into your work! Who wouldn’t like to hear that? Even when no one else had helped me with my own large or time-consuming tasks, sometimes I still exclaimed aloud over a finished job and expressed how nice it looked or felt to have it completed, just to inspire my children to look for satisfaction in the completion of their own tasks.

You can bribe a student to complete a lesson on time (or ahead of time), or you can surprise them with a reward for the lessons they finish quickly under their own motivation. The latter will be less stressful and more beneficial to all involved. When the child is surprised with a reward, he feels satisfaction at knowing his accomplishment was appreciated by others. When he has been bribed, he feels relief that the distasteful task is now out of his life and (perhaps) a greedy glee that he tricked someone else into paying him to do said distasteful task. A student who learns to enjoy satisfaction as its own reward does not need constant tangible gifts, as the object of bribery does. Teach your children to find satisfaction in doing their best and completing their tasks in a timely manner. It will be a lesson they carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Filed Under: Doing Your "Best", Encouraging Your Student, Family Unity, Home Chores, Homeschooling as a Lifestyle, Learning Outside the Books, Role-Modeling

10 Ways to Improve a Lesson

September 10, 2009 by 1 Comment

Sometimes we all need help teaching a lesson. The lesson may be too confusing, too short, or just plain boring. Your student may need a more complete explanation or just want to delve more deeply into the subject. You may need to expand the lesson to include an activity to fit your student’s learning style. No matter what the reason, here are a few suggestions for how to improve a lesson.

  1. Make it bigger. — Suppose your child is learning fractions, and the book’s diagrams are rather small. Draw similar diagrams using an entire sheet of paper for each one — sometimes bigger IS better! Simple drawings and diagrams do not demand precision: children are good at pretending, and they can pretend along with you that your drawing is accurate.
  2. Take it outside. — Fresh air and elbow room can improve anyone’s ability to think. Even reading a favorite storybook outdoors can give it new perspective.
  3. Add color. — Say good-bye to black-and-white; say hello to understanding. Use colored pencils or markers, highlighters, construction paper, or colored index cards. For example, write each step of a complicated math problem in a different color to help clarify the progression.
  4. Add texture. — Go beyond flat and give your fingertips a chance to enjoy themselves. Form ABC’s with Play-Doh, cut letters out of sandpaper, or draw with chalk on the sidewalk.
  5. Let your student play with it. — Exploration is the birthplace of genius. Go beyond the lesson plan and indulge your student with his own session of free experimentation, whether with math manipulatives, Scrabble letter tiles, vinegar and baking soda, etc. Playing is learning.
  6. Add more details. — Why strain to understand a single example, when ten examples will make it crystal clear? Suppose your child is trying to learn the letter A; show the child many examples of what A looks like, from several ABC books, from newspaper headlines, on packages in your pantry; draw A with crayons and markers, in shaving cream smeared on a window, in dry cornmeal poured in a baking pan; arrange small items into an A shape: pennies, pipe cleaners, pencils, building blocks, toy cars, fingers, etc. — after all of these examples, your child will better understand how to recognize an A!
  7. Discuss it. — Skip the one-sided lecture and the interrogation-style Q & A session; try an open and honest give-and-take, valuing your student’s opinions, reactions, and ideas. How would you react if those opinions were coming from your friend, instead of from your child?
  8. Build it. — Cardboard, scissors, and tape are the stuff that feeds imagination. Projects don’t have to be constructed well enough to last forever, just long enough to illustrate the concept.
  9. Research it (together). — Expand two great minds at the same time. The teacher doesn’t always have to know the answers before the student does — your student will develop new respect for you as he sees you willing to learn with him.
  10. Make it personal. — Use a personal application to your student’s own life, activities, or possessions, and he’ll never forget it. Instead of math manipulatives, use the student’s building blocks, toy cars, baseball cards, Barbie doll shoes, etc.

The specific examples given above might be either too simple or too advanced for your current needs, but you can adapt them to your student’s situation. Even if you think some of these ideas may not help with your particular struggles, dare to give them a try anyway. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results!

Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Auditory Learning, Encouraging Your Student, Homeschool How-To's, Kinesthetic Learning, Learning Outside the Books, Math, Roadblocks to Learning, Tactile Learning, Top 10 (and other) Lists, Visual Learning

Sugar Cube Math

July 15, 2009 by 2 Comments

Are you looking for some fun activities to keep your students’ math skills sharp over the summer break? Do your students need help to achieve mastery of math concepts? Sugar cubes can provide just what you need! One of these activities each week may be enough to boost their math thinking skills, but your students just might want to keep playing and experimenting on their own!

A friend once asked me how I used sugar cubes in math. She had visualized the children just eating the sugar and becoming too hyper for any actual learning! Math manipulatives are nothing more than little things used to illustrate a math lesson, and sugar cubes are fairly inexpensive things that just happen to come in perfect little cube shapes, making them ideal for stacking. However, sugar cubes must be handled with some special care to get them past more than one lesson: do not expose them to moisture (not even wet fingers) and keep them on a jelly-roll pan (large cookie sheet with sides) to collect the crumbs of sugar that will inevitably fall off. Handle the cubes gently to prevent crushing them, but do not be too alarmed when a few of the cubes crumble no matter how gently you touch them. (Life is like that: some of us just can’t take as much pressure as others can.) When lesson time is over, your students can carefully place the sugar cubes back into their box to use them again another day. You will probably want to reserve these sugar cubes for math lessons only — they can become a little too soiled with repeated handling for plunking into your morning coffee! The following suggestions will work with any cube-shaped objects (Cuisenaire Rod 1-units, ABC blocks, dice, etc.), as long as all of the cubes are the same size. A box or two of sugar cubes provides a large number of identical cubes for a small investment, and their plain white sides allow the student to focus on the cubes as units, rather than on any decorative details.

Stack them up, pile them up, square up the piles and see how much fun you can have building walls and tiny forts with sugar cubes. Make checkerboard designs or pyramids. Lessons can be much more than boring drill, and you can learn from play! Below are some more structured lessons to try after a free play session. Some parents may need to do these experiments with their children; other parents may need to get out of the way and just let their child experiment to his heart’s content!

Addition is very simply illustrated through counting the total number of cubes that results from combining this group of cubes with that group of cubes. Take this operation to its next logical level and un-do the addition of cubes for a simplified lesson in subtraction. A student who can see that subtraction is nothing more than backwards addition will not be confused into thinking that subtraction is a new and confusing mathematical concept. Illustrate how addition and subtraction are linked together by discussing both concepts with one set of math facts: 2 cubes in this group plus 3 cubes in that group equals 5 cubes all together: 2 + 3 = 5. Therefore, taking 3 cubes away from 5 cubes leaves us with 2 cubes again: 5 – 3 = 2. Switch the numbers around to show that 3 + 2 also equals 5, and 5 – 2 = 3. Experimenting with just those 5 cubes, the student will quickly see that 1 + 4 = 2 + 3, and so on. Repeat these experiments with other groupings of cubes, always focusing on undoing the addition to prove that the subtraction facts are just another way to state the matching addition facts.

An important part of math is learning about prime numbers. Start with just 1 cube and by adding 1 more cube at a time, we will experiment with making different arrangements of the cubes. Any number of cubes that can make only 1 row is called a prime number — it has multiplication factors of only itself and 1. (One by itself does not count as a prime, because it has no factors at all — it’s just one.)

If you have arranged cubes into two equal rows, that means you have at least 4 cubes. Those can be arranged into 1 row of 4 cubes (or 4 rows of 1 cube each), or 2 rows of 2 cubes each. These are also the multiplication factors of 4: 1 x 4, 4 x 1, and 2 x 2.

Add 2 more cubes, 1 to each row, for a total of 6 cubes. Those can also be arranged into 1 row of 6 cubes (or 6 rows of 1 cube each) or 2 rows of 3 cubes each. Now rearrange the cubes into 3 rows of 2 cubes each to prove that 2 x 3 makes the same size and shape of rectangle as 3 x 2, but just turned the other direction.

Add 2 more cubes, for a total of 8 cubes. Arrange these into 1 row of 8 cubes, then 2 rows of 4 cubes each, and also 4 rows of 2 cubes each. Factors of 8 are: 1 x 8, 2 x 4, 4 x 2, 8 x 1.

So far, an odd number of cubes has not been able to make any even arrangement of rows except for 1 row of cubes. Add 1 more cube to your grouping, for a total of 9 cubes. This is the first odd number that has other factors besides itself and 1: 1 x 9, 9 x 1, and 3 x 3. Arrange the 9 cubes into 3 rows of 3 cubes each.

Show your student that his experiments have now proved that an odd number times an even number equals an even number (3 x 2 = 6). An even number times an even number equals an even number (2 x 4 = 8), and an odd number times an odd number equals an odd number (3 x 3 = 9). Those principles will remain true no matter which odd or even numbers are used — encourage your student to experiment with his sugar cubes to prove this fact.

As the child continues adding more cubes and rearranging them into factor groups, have him make a list of the factors for each number, seeing how many different ways each number can be factored. Which number (of the ones he has tried so far) has the most factors? Multiplication is nothing more than a short-cut to addition, and multiplying can save a lot of time that would be spent adding. Multiplying with bigger numbers will be much faster than adding those numbers over and over and over.

This process can also be done in reverse to illustrate division. Take a random number of sugar cubes and arrange them into rows. Can you make several rows with an equal number of cubes in each row, or do you end up with a few leftover cubes? Try several different arrangements of rows and numbers of cubes in each row. Keep trying until 1) you can come out with a square or rectangular arrangement with no leftovers, or 2) you prove that you have a prime number of sugar cubes, with no other factors than this number and 1. Whether you are multiplying or dividing, the factors remain the same — proving that division is just un-doing multiplication. The only difference is that when dividing, sometimes you can end up with a few leftovers, called the remainder.

Area is basically the same as a set of factors. It can also be thought of as floor tiles by looking straight down on top of the cubes so that only their tops can be seen. By moving the cubes around, the student can demonstrate how 1 x 12, 2 x 6, 3 x 4, 4 x 3, 6 x 2, and 12 x 1 all have the same area (they all use exactly 12 cubes). Area of a square or rectangle is determined by multiplying two connecting sides together, just like the two factors.

Perimeter can be related to how many sections of “fence” it would take to go around the outside of a certain area. The cubes’ edges can be counted as individual fence sections for an easy way to prove how many fence sections are required. Notice that each corner-cube has two exposed edges for fences. Perimeter is usually determined by adding the totals of the sides together, but multiplication can be used as a shortcut for perfect rectangles: 2 times the shorter side, plus 2 times the longer side. (Note that in a single row of cubes, the cube at each end will have 3 exposed sides to be counted.)

Experiment with various arrangements of the same group of cubes and compare the area to the perimeter. Can you change the perimeter without changing the area? What is the largest or the smallest perimeter you can make while keeping the same area?

Volume can be thought of as area in several levels. First, think of area as being a flat concept, like floor tiles, and volume being a 3-dimensional concept, like the solid sugar cubes. Arrange 2 rows of 3 cubes each, making an area of 6. Now arrange 6 more cubes in exactly the same pattern. If you stack one group on top of the other group, you can easily see 2 layers of 6 cubes each. Two rows times 3 cubes times 2 layers equals a volume of 12 cubes: 2 x 3 x 2 = 12. Try this with other groups. Multiply to find the volume: the number of rows times the number of cubes in each row equals the area of that layer. Now multiply the area times the number of layers to find the volume. How many more cubes does it take to increase the total volume of the stack of cubes?

Once your student has mastered calculating volume, combine it with measurements. Have him measure the side of one sugar cube, and then substitute that measurement in his calculations of perimeter, area, and volume. Now have him measure the sides of the large stack of sugar cubes to see if his calculations were correct. Substitute 1 inch for the measurement: if the sugar cubes measured 1 inch on each side, how large would the stack be now? How large would a stack be with 10 layers of 10 rows of 10 sugar cubes in each row? How about a stack that had 100 cubes each direction? How about 1,000? Or a million? Or a billion? (This leads directly into the study of exponents, because a square of x-number of sugar cubes is x2 and a cube of x-number of sugar cubes is x3.) How many sugar cubes would it take to make a large cube (all 3 sides equal) the approximate size of a card table? Or as tall as your house? Or as wide as a football field? Your students may need to use a calculator to check their math on these problems, but getting to use the calculator is their reward for having fun with math!

By the time your student has completed all of the activities listed above, he has probably also thought of some other activities to try with the sugar cubes. Try them–experimenting is how we learn!

Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Homeschool How-To's, Learning Outside the Books, Math, Tactile Learning

Preschool Is Not Brain Surgery

April 17, 2009 by 12 Comments

I have tackled the topic of homeschooling older students while you have preschoolers around several times before, but I’ve never yet directly addressed homeschooling for preschool itself, especially when preschool marks the official beginning of schooling for your oldest child. This changes now: I am here to encourage you that you can teach your own child for preschool. You do not need an advanced degree in education to be able to effectively teach your child at home for preschool.

I have prepared a list of things that my children and I did during their preschool years that cover all of the types of activities and subjects your child will need to prepare them for their future academics. These activities may be done in any order, corresponding to your child’s interests and abilities. Progress according to your child’s abilities: if your child has difficulty understanding any given concept, set it aside for two weeks or two months while you do other activities and see what a difference that makes. Pick it up again later, or set it aside a second time, if necessary. All children learn at different rates, just like they begin to walk or talk or get teeth at different times. Faster or slower is not better, it’s just different.

Multiple activities can be done each day, if it works with your schedule and with your child’s interests. Fifteen minutes at a time may be adequate for the average preschooler, but the child may enjoy several of these short sessions throughout the day. Focus on only one activity at each session, but if your child is really enjoying the activity, you can let him continue playing with it after the formal “lesson” time is completed.

Read books to your child. Snuggle up together for special Mommy-and-me time. Use funny voices for the characters. Vary your tone to match the scene: fast and loud for the exciting parts, slow whispers for the sneaky parts, sniffling when the character is sad, bouncy and happy when the character is happy. When the book is a familiar favorite, stop periodically to ask your child questions: Where is Papa Bear going next? Why is he doing that? What will he find there? These help build your child’s memory by asking him to recall details he has learned from all of the times you have read this story in the past. Which bear is wearing the red shirt? Point to the smallest bear. Can you find a bowl on the bears’ table? Questions of this type help your child notice details and learn to identify colors, sizes, objects, etc. Why did the bears leave the house? Where did they go? What is this little girl’s name? These questions teach comprehension: read a portion of the story, and then ask the child about key elements that were just read. At first, you may want to ask questions about one page at a time, but soon your child will be able to recall details from several pages back.

Include ABC books, even though they usually have no plot or story. As a child, my personal favorite was The Nonsense ABC by Edward Lear. For my own children, their favorite was The Dr. Seuss ABC. What those books have in common are fun, rhyming poems for each letter. Lear’s “A was once an apple pie” was just as easy to remember as Dr. Seuss and his “Aunt Annie’s alligator.” The delightful poems were much more enjoyable than a simple picture book of ABC’s, although those are useful, too, as you will see in a moment.

Learning letters. Gather all the ABC books you have, and compare the pages for the same letter in each book. Linger over one letter per week or a letter every few days, until you know for sure that your child knows that letter. Use sticky-notes or home-made flashcards to label objects in your home that begin with the letter of the week, and help your child make the letter’s sound every time you see one of those objects and say its name. Banana, B, buh, buh-nana. You get the idea — and so will your preschooler. You may need to get creative on a few letters, such as Q, unless you live with a queen in a home full of quilts and have a pet quail. For X, you may need to use words that have an X in them, such as fox. The picture ABC books will come in very handy now, especially if they use several items for each letter. Don’t overlook your public library — they may have ABC books for unique topics, such as animal ABC’s or around-the-world with ABC’s.

Help your child learn to recognize a letter, no matter what font it is written in. Making a Letter Recognition Notebook is an excellent method for this. Focus on the appearance of the letters themselves, instead of what objects begin with each letter. Do one page for the upper case of a letter and another page for samples of the lower case letter. The goal here is for your child to be able to spot an a, whether it looks like a ball against a wall or like an egg underneath a tiny umbrella.

Learning numbers. Repeat the activities from the Learning Letters section above, but do them for the numbers 1-10. Draw a group of dots on the page to correspond to the number represented. Use counting books for activities similar to the ABC book activities. Once your child knows 1-10, you may add numbers up to 20, if you’d like. Your goal here is for the child to recognize each digit and immediately know how many objects that number stands for.

Learn colors. Ditto. A color-of-the-week activity will show your child all the varieties of each color. Light blue, dark blue, bright blue, dusty blue, navy blue, sky blue. Blue jeans, blue socks, blueberries, blue blanket, blue water bottle, blue crayons, blue cars, blue blocks, blue game pieces. How many blue things can you find in your home? You may be surprised!

Learn shapes. Ditto once again. The variety within each shape can be confusing at first to little ones. Is a big circle the same thing as a small circle? Are a cookie and a ring both circles even though one has stuff inside it and the other one is empty? Rectangles and triangles can be particularly tricky. Use a dollar (kids love learning with real money) as an example of a rectangle, then turn it up on end to show the child how the dollar is the same shape as a door. No more tricky rectangles! Long and skinny or short and fat, rectangles will still look mostly like a door or a dollar. Triangles have 3 sides, no matter how long or short those sides may be, and once your preschooler can count to 3, he can begin to recognize triangles. Browse through the snack cracker aisle at the supermarket for some tasty, edible geometric shapes! Careful nibblers will transform one shape into another, naming the shapes as they admire their creations and then eating their artwork.

Fine motor skills. See Preschoolers’ Educational School-time Activities for a variety of helpful activities that your child will enjoy doing and learn wonderfully useful skills at the same time.

Gross motor skills. Let your child practice on a “balance beam” made by drawing a straight line with chalk on the sidewalk or driveway. Masking tape on the floor is a good substitute indoors. When your child can do it easily without stepping off the line, switch to using a 4″ x 4″ board (any length) lying directly on the ground. When the child can walk that board easily without losing his balance, prop the board up with a brick or concrete block (or other stable item) at each end — just don’t go too high, so that the child will not be hurt if he does fall. Please stay close by your child whenever he is practicing this.

Other useful concepts. Play. Notice the weather each day. Go to the park. Walk around the block. Smell flowers. Watch an anthill. Put a bird feeder or a bird bath near a window and keep it filled so you can watch the birds and learn to identify them. Make cookies. Add a set of measuring cups to the bath toys. Visit a zoo. Watch a construction site (from a safe distance) and talk about what each man or machine is doing. Learn from life every day.

Social Skills. See Social Skills — What Should I Teach My Preschooler? for a very complete explanation.

What about school questions? Preschoolers ask questions; it’s what they do, and it’s who they are. Your homeschooled preschooler will undoubtedly ask questions about going to school: Why does my friend go to school and I don’t? When will I go to school? Can I ride on a school bus? Can I play on the school playground? Why does my storybook show kids doing things at school, but I don’t have any stories about kids who homeschool? Ah, yes, those questions.

You can share as much as you think your preschooler will understand about why you chose to homeschool, but try not to make other families look bad for not homeschooling. One way around this is to point out what vehicles are owned by the families on your block or in your neighborhood. Some have small cars, some have pickup trucks, and some have minivans. They pick the type of vehicles that they want for the things they do. Some families send their children to public school, some go to private schools, and some homeschool. Each family picks the type of school that they want for their children. Each family can also decide if they want to plant flowers around their house or raise tomatoes in their garden. They can decide if they want to have a dog or a cat or tropical fish or no pets at all. Some families choose to eat in fancy restaurants, some families get burgers at the drive-through, and some families make all their meals at home. Every family gets to make choices, and homeschooling is one thing your family has chosen.

Sometimes the trickier part of answering these questions is to show that not following the crowd can be more fun. Because you are homeschooling, you can go to the park when the other children are stuck inside the school building. This is also a good way to bring weather (good or bad) into the conversation: you can play outside on nice days instead of having to sit at a desk all day long, or you can stay inside where it’s warm and dry all day long on the cold and rainy days. Perhaps you can visit the school playground after school is over for the day or on a weekend or during the summer. Perhaps you can ride on a city bus or a church bus. I have known preschoolers who begged and begged their parents to let them go to school, only to find out that school was not the fun experience they had imagined it to be. One little boy asked his mommy if he could be homeschooled again, because all he really had wanted from school was to play on the playground, and when he was in school, the teacher only let him go out to the playground at certain times and for very short periods. Being homeschooled with his brothers was much more enjoyable.

Many children (and parents) ask about the lack of homeschooling in storybooks. I agree that there are very few books that portray education at home, but I have a sneaky way around that, too. Not all storybooks show everything that a child does every day, and not all storybooks show children going to school. Therefore, maybe, just maybe, the children in some books are homeschooling, but the story is telling about some other part of their day. Our school books were not in every room of our house — ok, sometimes, but not always. When the Bear family went for a walk to let their porridge cool down, perhaps they had been doing their lessons all morning, and now it was lunch time, and they would continue their lessons after lunch. Stories are not always about what you can see — sometimes there are also lessons to be learned in what the pictures do not show. And finding those lessons also teaches your child to think about the story and what it does and does not say.

Do I need curriculum to homeschool preschool? No. If you don’t believe me, take this quick test:

  • Do you know the alphabet?
  • Can you count to 20?
  • Can you identify basic colors and shapes?
  • Do you know how to use a pencil?
  • Do you know how to use scissors?
  • Can you read a child’s storybook?

If you answered Yes to 3 or more of these questions, you will probably do just fine. Use the money you would have spent on curriculum for a family zoo pass or a storage cabinet for all of the arts and crafts supplies you will accumulate in the next few years!

Preschool-aged children need foundational skills: pre-reading (recognizing letter names and letter sounds; visual distinction: recognizing differences and similarities between objects), pre-writing (small muscle skills and coordination: using fingers), and body control (large muscle skills and coordination: using arms and legs). Children who are only three, four, or five years old do not need to be able to identify nations of the world, Presidents of the United States, or the life cycle of seahorses. These tiny tots will benefit much more from spending 15 minutes cutting colored paper into confetti than they would from endless coloring pages for geography, history, science, or social studies topics. I have probably just stepped on the toes of multiple eager teachers, but please understand that your little ones will not remember very many of these superfluous lessons until they are able to read fluently for themselves. Then you can turn them loose on the library shelves and get ready to hear them recount the myriads of fascinating facts they have read.

Once when I was selling some of our outgrown books at a used curriculum fair, my customer asked if I had the teacher’s manual for the 2nd grade reading text. “No,” I replied with a smile, “I thought if I couldn’t figure out the answers to the questions in a 2nd grade reading book, I had bigger problems than the teacher’s manual could fix.” She thought about that for a few seconds and began laughing along with me. “You’re absolutely right!” And she bought the book. Teaching preschool is even easier than teaching 2nd grade reading. And you will be able to do it just fine without a teacher’s manual or fancy curriculum.

More articles related to Preschoolers are listed in Topical Index: Preschoolers.

Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Auditory Learning, Deciding to Homeschool, Homeschool How-To's, Kinesthetic Learning, Learning Outside the Books, Preschoolers, Tactile Learning, Visual Learning

10 Fun Math Exercises from a BINGO Game

February 12, 2009 by 2 Comments

A standard Bingo game contains several printed cards with numbers arranged into a grid of rows and columns and tokens marked B-1 through O-75, used for calling the numbers when playing the game. These components can be used in other ways for some creative (and fun) variations on math practice.

  1. Play Bingo for number recognition practice and good, clean fun.
  2. Sort the number-tokens into odds and evens. Or sort out just the tokens needed to skip-count by 2’s, or 3’s, or 4’s, etc.
  3. Arrange the tokens into numerical order from 1-75.
  4. Sort the tokens into 1-10, 11-20, etc.
  5. Pick 2 (or more) tokens at random and add their values together. Now try subtracting them, multiplying them, or dividing them. [Hint: Place all of the tokens into a paper sack or a clean sock for ease of random drawing.]
  6. Pick 2 tokens at random and make fractions from their numbers — make both a proper fraction (numerator is smaller than denominator) and an improper fraction (numerator is larger than denominator). Simplify each fraction, if possible, or make a list of equivalent fractions.
  7. Add the columns of numbers on the Bingo cards.
  8. Add the rows of numbers on the Bingo cards.
  9. Write the factors for each number on a Bingo card or for number tokens drawn at random.
  10. Practice rounding with the numbers on the Bingo cards or with randomly drawn tokens.
Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Homeschool How-To's, Learning Outside the Books, Math, Tactile Learning, Top 10 (and other) Lists

The Holidays Are Unit Studies — Learning During the Busy Season

December 2, 2008 by Leave a Comment

[This article was written by Jennifer (Morrison) Leonhard: Guilt-Free daughter and homeschool graduate.]

The holidays are a hectic time: relatives are coming over, the house needs to be cleaned, presents must be bought and wrapped, and food must be prepared. The schoolwork either gets lost along the way or becomes an added frustration as we try to get everything done at once. Mom planned our school schedule with the knowledge that Dad would be home from work around this time and regular schoolwork wouldn’t get done, but the learning was just beginning.

Mom usually gave us a break from lessons during the entire week of Thanksgiving, and we often stopped our official schoolwork well before Christmas, since extra time before each holiday was more beneficial for Mom’s preparations than time off afterward. However, we found many opportunities for learning, even when the schoolbooks had been put back on the shelf.

Shop Class
Dad usually did some project around the house during his time off from work (after all, you can’t get Dad to just sit around the house doing nothing). We learned to fix cracks in walls, paint, and generally drive Mom crazy with home repairs, all while she was preparing to have people over. Creating homemade presents, like building blocks, picture frames, and ornaments, teach handcrafts while theoretically cutting down on the expenses for gifts.

Math
Mom has always used cooking as math. Make a recipe smaller or larger, and you are automatically learning fractions: 3/4 cup of flour times 2 equals 1 1/2 cups. (Sure you could just use the 3/4 cup twice, but then what are you learning?) The economics of having a budget for Christmas will never fail to provide an opportunity for learning. How about learning some geometry and spatial relationships when wrapping presents? A lesson in possibility vs. impossibility lurks in the concept of a jolly and fat Santa squeezing down a chimney (which also brings up the lesson of “don’t try this at home”) or reindeer in flight (although one can argue that bees are also supposed to be a flight impossibility, and yet they consistently defy logical aerodynamics).

Music
Obviously, Christmas includes music — but that can take on many different forms. You can find many genres of Christmas music, from a symphony orchestra to the sounds of animals barking and mewing Away in a Manger. The latter is rather amusing the first time, but it gets harder to appreciate with frequency. The library and your friends will likely have a variety of holiday music that you can sample. I found a simple song book and learned how to tap out a few tunes on the piano. I knew what Christmas songs were supposed to sound like, so they were easier to learn, and I got a small taste of playing the piano. Explore the lyrics of Christmas songs to learn a little about Christmas history — have you ever wondered why the lyrics to I’ll Be Home for Christmas talk about presents on the tree?

History
Beyond the lyrics of songs giving us a glimpse into Christmas Past, there are many other subjects you can study for history. Thanksgiving is a history lesson in itself, from the voyage of the Pilgrims to learning why we celebrate it in November. American history becomes an interesting pastime instead of boring history when reading a Pilgrim’s personal account of coming to this country. Do you know why we celebrate Christmas around a tree? Or who started the tradition of sending Christmas cards? Do you know how the first Christmas trees were decorated — or the stories behind your family’s favorite decorations?

Literature
From studying Christmases past to reading about the Ghost of Christmas Past, ample literature can be found about others celebrating Christmas. In the spirit of the season, reading holiday stories aloud by a fire while drinking hot cocoa certainly doesn’t feel much like schoolwork!

Spelling
The holidays can provide much inspiration for spelling, from Old World words in songs to sitting around after dinner, playing Scrabble with friends and family. Reindeer pulling a sleigh will provide you with more exceptions to the rule “I before E, except after C.”

Language, Geography & Social Studies
Research the different names for Santa Claus around the world. (And for math, estimate the number of stops he must make in a single night.) Various traditions surround Santa’s visit, from cookies and milk to leaving shoes instead of stockings to be filled. And don’t overlook the traditions of Hanukkah: many interesting studies reside in the holiday celebrations from other cultures.

Cooking
Besides being recruited to help Mom with preparations for large family dinners (and vying for turns at grinding the fruits for our traditional cranberry relish), we often made a variety of cookies and candies to have available during the season. Occasionally, we also made an assortment of mini-casseroles and other freezer meals as gifts for elderly grandparents. Perhaps you could experience popular foods from holiday celebrations in the past — and who doesn’t enjoy a chance to try yummy new foods? You may end up adding a new favorite to the season, or (if you don’t like the new dish) you can at least learn to be more thankful for the old standards your family regularly prepares for holidays.

Many more lessons can be found in the holiday seasons — just make sure to keep your eyes open for learning opportunities and your heart open to the most important lesson of all: being thankful for the Son.

Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Auditory Learning, Family Unity, Homeschool How-To's, Homeschooling as a Lifestyle, Kinesthetic Learning, Learning Outside the Books, Tactile Learning, Visual Learning

How Can I Teach Out-of-the-Box Thinking?

October 30, 2008 by Leave a Comment

[This article was written by Jennifer (Morrison) Leonhard: Guilt-Free daughter and homeschool graduate.]

Society spends years conforming our minds, teaching us to follow certain conventions and rules, and then once we reach college and business, we are asked to be “out of the box thinkers.” I turned to my brother for inspiration at this point. My brother has never been accused of being “in the box” unless it was a large cardboard box, wrapped as a Christmas present during a white elephant gift exchange. (Yes, he really did that.)

In math class, when presented with a hexagon and asked to “Name this figure,” he simply wrote “Bob.” When Mom asked what direction he would be facing if he went out the front door, walked 3 steps and turned right, took 3 steps, then turned right again, took 3 steps and turned right again, he said, “Forward!” By nature I am more of a conformist, striving to give the answer that was expected of me, and when faced with an “out of the box” question, I was often lost. Given no absolute and no example upon which to base my answers, I didn’t know where to look and often called my brother from college to see what his answer would be. After an hour or so of brainstorming, I could find a direction that suited me for forming my own thoughts.

Surprisingly though, I have often been considered by my peers as a bit out of the box. For the past few years, I have dressed in costume for work during the holiday season. It started when I worked in a commission environment (selling fine jewelry) and had to find a way to gain attention and get customers to talk to me. Dressing in a Santa hat and curly toed shoes with bells on the ends made customers want to greet me, instead of shying away when I greeted them. Getting the initial greeting with the customer was the hard part — after that I could gain the information I needed to learn who they were shopping for and what that person might like in a gift. My costumes prompted the customers to speak to me first.

Last year we had too much Halloween inventory at our retail store, and it wasn’t moving out the door fast enough. I started dressing in costumes, and children would beg their parents for a costume: after all, that girl over there (me) is dressed up, and it isn’t Halloween yet! It worked. I started coming up with as many costumes as I could, digging through our old dress-up box to come up with ideas. Many costumes were based on a single hat and accessorized to fit the theme. A witch’s hat turned an ordinary black dress, green tights, and green eye shadow into a complete character. The same idea worked with an inexpensive pirate’s hat and a striped shirt, dark eyeliner, one hoop earring, and a gold blazer. Everyone at work asked where I got these elaborate costumes, but most of them were things I normally wore to work any other day, but they were just combined differently to go with a specific hat. It seems simple enough when explained, but my coworkers simply can’t get over each costume I wear. They laugh at my courage to wear a costume to work, since many are not planning to wear a costume on Halloween, but I’ve been wearing costumes every day for weeks.

I don’t know exactly what factors made my brother and me the way we are, but I do know that we were encouraged to have an imagination much bigger than ourselves. We drew Dr. Seuss characters with chalk on the sidewalk and tried to create Seuss-like characters of our own. Mom had wanted to be an astronaut when she grew up, and that same desire to shoot for the moon was passed on to my brother and me.

When my brother and I were growing up, Mom would ask us questions that would get us to think situations through. Along with asking us simpler questions, like what sounds certain animals made, she would ask us more intriguing questions, such as how would we get our shoes tied if we had a broken arm. She asked questions that would get us to anticipate the future before it happened, and consider how different variables could alter the outcome. We were encouraged to look at questions from different angles, to experiment to see what happened, and to have the imagination to believe anything was possible.

Mom created new games using parts from the other games we had — usually to teach us something. I hated spelling, but using Scrabble tiles to form my spelling words made the subject a little easier to grasp. Math was more fun when it involved a scavenger hunt for us and a friend. In fact, Mom always called math a puzzle. She enjoyed algebra, and as annoying as that was sometimes, she taught us how to see it as a puzzle, too. Mom used her math skills to scale down the solar system to the size of our block — the sun was as wide as our street, and we drew its outline with chalk right there in the middle of the street, and then we mapped out the planets to scale, too. Seeing how far the planets would be from each other if the sun would fit on our street helped us to imagine how far away from each other they must be in real life.

I’m not especially talented, I am a horrible artist, the musical talent went to my brother, and I wouldn’t make a good actress. I’m also not the homeschooler who is likely to be featured on the cover of a magazine. I enjoy math, but it doesn’t come easily to me. However, I did learn to visualize things, whether possible or not, in order to come up with solutions and decide on the best one. Although a lot of my homeschooling came from books due to my love of reading, some of the most memorable parts were when our family got out of the textbooks, out of the classroom, and out of the box.

Filed Under: Encouraging Your Student, Homeschool How-To's, Kinesthetic Learning, Learning Outside the Books, Roadblocks to Learning
« Previous Page
Next Page »
Verified by MonsterInsights