An Apple a Day - How to teach children to think

Do you know how to enhance your child's mind? Give your child a mental apple a day? (Some of this info is found in Vol. 6 of my It's Not Rocket Surgery!)

Read on to learn more about:

• The best practice for learning is adult-led, direct instruction with an inquiry-based approach. 
• Parents should start their children’s learning at home, long before school age. 
• For their child’s continued development, they need to advocate for these best practices, especially for math and reading, at public, private, or home school. 
• I’d also like to add that if they use a preschool, parents should choose one that believes in adult-led education, not self-discovery. 
• The less time in preschool, and the more time with mom or dad, the better – for learning, for development, for bonding, for emotional and mental health.

To maximize your child’s window of learning, she or he needs adult-led direct instruction. Unfortunately, as is commonly the case, teachers (and parents) leave good students to fend for themselves on the mistaken assumption that they don’t need help. Mom and Dad can and should do things at home to enhance their child’s learning and intelligence. Start with early reading the right way.

What is the difference between student-led and adult-led education? In its truest form, student-led learning is where students only learn what they want to learn, wherever their curiosity takes them, if anywhere. Groups of students theoretically lead each other into the discovery of all knowledge at their own pace. Teacher-led learning is where the teacher uses a structured lesson plan to present knowledge in a specific sequence. You, as parents, are your child’s first teacher and best advocate.

There are problems with both sides, but clearly the unguided student-led learning leads to failure. Whole Language learning is a prime example of this. (Student-led math instruction is also a fiasco. Such faulty ideas are rampant in Common Core philosophy.)

One teacher, Pavel Ryzlovsky, of Canada, wrote to me: “With the whole population's silent participation, we have already accumulated several obstacles to good-quality language teaching. The other one that needs to be tackled is our adherence to student-oriented learning.

“I remember reading of a study, unprecedented in its scope, which was conveyed to determine what sort of language-teaching system has been the most effective one. It found that teacher-oriented education has been consistently bringing the best results, in few aspects several times better than the student-oriented type.

“The outcome of the study was disseminated among the teaching districts throughout USA; however, only one tenth of their total number embraced the teacher-oriented system; in other districts both parents and teachers refused it as "too demanding" (for children and teachers).

“The sooner we recognize what's wrong at the roots of our approaches the better. We have a long way to go to get out of the trouble we put ourselves into.” ~ Pavel Ryzlovsky, Canada

It is true that when we ask questions we remember better than when we are just spoon fed facts. But waiting for children to be curious about every aspect of knowledge is not enough in the classroom. Children were not born knowing everything. They don’t know what they don’t know. If one wanted to learn to be a doctor, wouldn’t she want to go to the experts? Having to re-invent the wheel, or self-discover all medical knowledge, is not the best way to learn.

Leaving a child to his own discovery will not bring progress quickly. If children were able to learn all knowledge by self-discovery, there would be no reason to have colleges or degree programs. Someone has to cache all the centuries of learned knowledge for others to use, which falls to our universities, libraries and schools. If teacher-oriented learning wasn’t necessary, all the farmers in the last century would have become geniuses just by thinking while on their tractors or in their fields.

“To promote scientific literacy, one focus of science education is scientific discovery learning. However, its effectiveness is dubious, because students face some difficulties in dealing with the discovery processes, especially coordinating hypotheses with evidence. Students do not attempt to associate their hypotheses with the evidence. And even if they do, they are so strongly biased that they retain their current hypotheses and ignore or distort the evidence.” (Hiroko Kobayashi, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. The effects of "collaborative discovery learning with an association scheme" on the acquisition of scientific literacy.)

The above statement shows one reason why teacher-oriented learning is best – the immaturity of students. But teachers have to make learning interesting. As one social studies teacher put it:

“The content has to be first. So in a sense it has to be very teacher oriented, teacher centered. I am giving them information and I am expecting [them] to process it and do something with it. I give homework assignments.”

The best teacher-oriented education uses an inquiry-based approach, much like Socrates used. In this way, the questions are guided by an adult but help the children think and learn. Often, a question is answered with another question. This opens a child’s curiosity and leads the student to the knowledge. This may require longer class discussions, but is worth it. Cultures that use this kind of guided-question, teacher-oriented discovery produce more Nobel Prize nominees and winners than those that don’t.

There is one place where student-oriented learning does well, and that is when discovery is enhanced with computers. The computer asks the leading questions, so the student isn’t completely on his own, but feels like he is in control. Student discovery by computer works well with some [older] children, but they still need the human touch on occasion. Too much computer time has proven to be detrimental to emotional and social maturity. (McGlinn, M. (2007). Using the "Documenting the American South" Digital Library in the social studies: A case study of the experiences of teachers in the field. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education [Online serial], 7(1). http://www.citejournal.org/vol7/iss1/socialstudies/article1.cfm)

There you have it. 
The best practice for learning is adult-led, direct instruction with an inquiry-based approach. 
Parents should start their children’s learning at home, long before school age. 
For their child’s continued development, they need to advocate for these best practices, especially for math and reading, at public, private, or home school. 
I’d also like to add that if they use a preschool, parents should choose one that believes in adult-led education, not self-discovery. 
The less time in preschool, and the more time with mom or dad, the better – for learning, for development, for bonding, for emotional and mental health.

http://thegodfreymethod.com

Sing a Song of Sixpence - why girls start falling behind in math

Why do smart girls play dumb with their peers?

I agree whole-heartedly with the recent study (June 1, 2009) at the University of Wisconsin- Madison- that definitely culture, not biology, accounts for the differences in math performance among men and women. Professors Mertz and Hyde say the data just do not support the stereotype. http://www.cardinal.wisc.edu/article/23150.

In fact in elementary school, girls are usually ahead of boys in math. It isn’t until middle school that girls start falling behind. And why, on average, do they fall behind?

Early teen years are when girls begin to realize the patriarchal order that exists in most societies. They begin to see that they are quickly approaching womanhood and what that means in relation to men. They also quickly understand that boys have sensitive egos about being ‘bested’ by girls. So they often downplay their intelligence and physical abilities to win the attention of the boys.

A woman named Joyce hosted a Japanese businessman’s visit at work, who brought his wife on the trip with him. It was obvious that the wife spoke better English than him, but she held her tongue in his presence. Many cultures subtly- or not so subtly- discourage a female from embarrassing a male in front of others. She has to hide her talents to be accepted. In the name of “respect”, the often better person has to play dumb. Isn’t that sad?

One woman says, “Lucky for me, my 8th-grade algebra teacher was a woman, Mrs. Barton, who was also a mother of 4 children. She became my role model. She taught math so well, so understandably, and juggled motherhood, too. From that moment on, I excelled in math, going all the way through calculus in high school.

“Doing well in math spilled over into doing well in physics and chemistry, too. College was the obvious next step. I realized that I didn’t have to give up using my brain to be a mother or give up motherhood to use my brain. Because of Mrs. Barton, I have always excelled at math and science and motherhood.

“And I was the older sister of several boys, so I was used to out-performing males. I had a bit of an ego myself. In fact, I liked to prove that I was smarter and better than most of the males around me. I figured a guy could like me and my intelligence, or I didn’t need him.”

Girls today have more social freedom to choose a professional career than the previous generation did when they were young. However, most of the magazines for girls and women still focus on hair, nails, clothes, and being sexy. So the messages that other women editors in society give to girls, still focus on traditional feminine interests.

This makes it harder for women of science and engineering to get their message heard. The narrow focus ‘to be attractive’ is stronger than ‘to be intelligent,’ even in these modern times. Society needs to blend the two. A smart woman can be attractive, and vice versa, and she usually attracts a better caliber of men.

In this way, it is the social messages that girls get at puberty, not necessarily the hormones, which draw them away from mathematics in the adolescent years.

Without these preventatives, the cracks in your child may be math dyslexia, being teased at school, rage, low self-esteem, insecurity, childhood depression, low self-confidence, lack of imagination, lower IQ, slower learning capacity, math incompetency, caught in the downward educational trend, and/or low-paying jobs. They all may be preventable or curable. You, mom and dad, are the key. It’s not rocket surgery!

http://thegodfreymethod.com

Sing a Song of Sixpence - the cause of the educational decline

No sight-words. No sight-math. No sight-music. Period. Why? Keep reading:

In an effort to wake parents up to the need for their involvement in raising math excellence for their children, I want all parents to be aware of how Reform mathematics curricula are deeply, fatally flawed. Reform math is basically sight-reading for math, often involving calculators without knowledge of basic math skills.

I received an email from a music teacher in Canada, which is making the same educational mistakes befalling all English-speaking countries -

Pavel Ryzlovsky, Vancouver, B.C. says:

“Dear Ms. Godfrey,

“I must say that, over years, I have been reading all those prizes for the "Whole Language method of reading" in disbelief, and I patiently waited for the moment someone would start debunking the myth it was constructed upon.

“I can tell you that the method you justifiably exposed has also been called to assist promotion of the same sort reading in instrumental music teaching, and so it's been doing considerable damage there, too.

“Thank you, and I sincerely hope that your article makes the whole mountain of wrong teaching and poor reading shake.

“All the best to you.”

Pavel later wrote:

“Thank you kindly for sharing this story with me, it's a really good satire [by Cathy Froggat*].

“I would like to add that, with the whole population's silent participation, we have already accumulated several obstacles to good-quality language teaching. The other one I see that will need to be tackled is our adherence to student-oriented learning.

“I remember reading of a study [Project Follow Through] which was conveyed to determine what sort of language-teaching system has been the most effective one. This study was unprecedented in its scope (and was done at an unprecedented cost of some $10mln). It found that teacher-oriented education has been consistently bringing the best results, in few aspects several times better than the student-oriented type.

“The outcome of the study was disseminated among the teaching districts throughout USA; however, only one tenth of their total number embraced the teacher-oriented system; in other districts both parents and teachers refused it as "too demanding" (for children and teachers).

“The sooner we recognize what's wrong at the roots of our approaches the better. We have a long way to go to get out of the trouble we put ourselves into.”

[*Whole Language at the Fork in the Road, Cathy Froggatt, Former NRRF North Carolina Director, Right to Read Report, February 1998.]

I whole-heartedly concur with Pavel! Have you or your children ever taken piano lessons? Students are taught each note’s name, sound, place on the piano and in the musical staff, individually before putting them together into chords, measures, and complete songs. Once those are mastered, they can move on to more complex pieces and learn to add nuances to the music with soft and loud, slow and fast, slurring or staccato, etc.

Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to learn piano the Whole Language way? The piano student would have to learn whole songs by sight, guess through context, cooperation, comprehension, and meaning-making. Yet that is how we are teaching now. How many whole songs can a child memorize by sight? Not many. But any student who has a foundation of individual notes can build up to any and every tune out there. It is the same with phonics and reading.

To continue quoting Laurie Rogers of the Safer Child organization http://www.saferchild.org/:

“American public-school math instruction is a blight upon the land. It’s a crater, a crime, a sin against the children…

“Across the country, school districts happily spent truckloads of taxpayer dollars chasing after every mangy, stray-dog program, and Texas Instruments (TI) and textbook publishers happily made enough money to wallpaper the moon at least twice in pretty thousand-dollar bills.

“TI continues to deliver fancy calculators to wee tots, and textbook publishers and the College Board pant and salivate at being in on the ground floor of new national curricula and assessments.” Hence the gleeful swallowing of the poison.

Music is another great way for children to learn spatial timing, which brain neuron mapping enhances mathematics as well. One thing I like to do to help my beginning musicians learn their treble clef and bass clef notes is to use their fingers and hands to represent the staff lines. The staffs are written vertically, yet they represent notes on the piano that run horizontally. So a pianist has to learn that when the notes on the staff are going up or down, the notes on the piano are going right or left.

Here is a fun mnemonic way to remember the staffs for each clef:

·        The fingers themselves represent the lines in each staff, the left hand for the Bass Clef and the right hand for the Treble Clef.

·        For the Bass Clef lines, GBDFA, use the mnemonic, “Good Boys Do Fine Always.” (Left hand.)

·        For the Treble Clef lines, EGBDF, use the mnemonic, “Every Good Boy Does Fine.” (Right hand.)

·        The spaces between the fingers represent the spaces in each staff.

·        For the Bass Clef spaces, use the mnemonic, “All Cows Eat Grass.” (Left hand.)

·        For the Treble Clef spaces, use the mnemonic, “Fast Apes Climb Easily.” Or say they spell FACE. (Right hand.)

·        Middle C is the short line between the two staffs; with its left neighbor B sitting in the space just above the Bass Clef, and with its right neighbor D sitting in the space just below the Treble Clef.

Such learning of the spatial relationships of musical notes, as well as the timing of the notes, helps children to excel not only in music but in reading and math as well.

http://thegodfreymethod.com

Sing a Song of Sixpence - helps with multiplication math

      Enhance your child's math ability with Cuisenaire rods for fractions, super-ones, and algebra!

Prepare your child early for algebra with fun fractions. Did you know that understanding fractions is a basic foundation to solving algebra problems? One of the best ways to develop your child’s math and fraction-solving abilities is with Cuisenaire® rods. I prefer the set of small, wooden rods. The set comes with 155 rods of different sizes and colors as well as an Activity Guide. This is a great way to make sense of numbers, fractions and spatial relationships for children of all ages.

Cuisenaire® rods give a visual, hands-on understanding of why 2/6 = 1/3, for example. 

The Activity Guide gives parents great ideas on ways to use the rods to show different mathematical realities and turns the abstract into the logical for children.

Cuisenaire® rods are recommended for elementary school ages, but can be used before and after that. Each rod size coordinates to a specific color and number. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing can also be learned with them. They are available at http://catalog.teachingsupplystore.com/connecting_cuisenairereg_rods_small_group_set_wood-p-48101.html.

Parents can and should give their children the jump on understanding algebra with a solid knowledge of how and why fractions work. I like to make sure my children know fractions by third grade, where possible.

I also make sure my children know their times-tables by heart by third grade. This not only helps with multiplication math, but also with fractions, where knowing factors quickly helps making equivalent fractions, a very necessary skill. And it will boost a child’s ability to understand algebra later.

One thing I like to do is make multiplication flash cards with colored numbers. (Colored numbers also help with addition flash cards). I assign a specific color to each number, and it always is shown in its color. It engages both sides of the mind and makes the repetition-memorization easier. It is vitally important for a child to have addition and multiplication facts memorized without a calculator. Calculators are tools to be used long after the child is fluent in math-speak, so to say.

My personal number color code is 0 = hot pink, 1 = dark gray, 2 = light blue, 3 = red, 4 = dark blue, 5 = dark green, 6 = orange, 7 = deep yellow, 8 = purple, and 9 = black. See example below.

Then we printed off some flash cards from CoolMath4Kids at http://www.coolmath4kids.com/times-tables/math-flash-cards-multiplication.html. I like them because the numbers are just outlines that you can color-in. I had my kids help me color each number by our code, which became a fun family learning activity.

We used our flash cards every day until each child knew all the multiplication tables by heart. It was well worth the effort!

What are Super-ones? Super-ones are the idea that any number divided by itself equals one. In fraction form this means that 3/3 = 1; 75/75 = 1;            x/x = 1;                 (i+7y)/(i+7y) = 1;          ф/ф = 1;            √4/√4 = 1; basically anything over itself equals one. 

This is very helpful in converting any fraction into an equivalent fraction. It is the WHY of it. An equivalent fraction is one that is the exact same size of the pie, just cut into smaller pieces.

For example, to convert 2/3 into an equivalent fraction, just multiply it by a super-one. So 2/3 x 2/2 = 4/6. Both fractions, 2/3 and 4/6 are the same size, because we just multiplied by 1 (since 2/2 = 1). Can you see the beauty of this?

We could choose any super-one we need. 2/3 x 3/3 = 6/9, and 2/3 is the same size as 6/9 because we just multiplied by 1 (3/3). How about 2/3 x 4/4 = 8/12? Again, 2/3 is the same size as 8/12 because we multiplied by 1 (4/4). Therefore, 2/3 = 4/6 = 6/9 = 8/12; all these fractions are the same size of the pie.

The idea of using super-ones works in reverse, too. Any larger fraction can be reduced down to its lowest form by dividing by a super-one; but the super-one has to be made of factors that fit both the numerator (top) and denominator (bottom).

For example, let’s reduce 15/20 to its lowest form. A factor that goes into both the top and bottom is 5, so divide 15/20 by the super-one: 5/5. See that 15/20 divided by 5/5 = 3/4. Both 15/20 and 3/4 are the same size, because we just divided by 1 (5/5).

Such an understanding of super-ones makes solving fractions and later algebra problems so much easier! It is the WHY behind the methods taught. Cuisenaire rods also help children visualize that 2/3 = 6/9, or that 3/4 = 15/20, but the super-one is the reason that equivalent fractions really are the same size.

http://thegodfreymethod.com

Sing a Song of Sixpence - Enhance your child's math skills with finger-math

Patterning and finger-math can enhance your child's math skills!

Enhance your child's math skills with the ancient finger-math method. Did you know that the abacus developed from the practice of ancient finger-math? Usually teachers discourage students from counting on their fingers, but this is very different. Like an abacus, the right hand represents the ones place and the left hand represents the tens place.

There is a wonderful book, The Complete Book of Fingermath by Edwin M. Lieberthal (1983), that shows parents and children how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide very quickly with their fingers.

Finger-math works for any age group, from preschool to high school and is very effective. Patterns, spatial relationships and time are the foundations of understanding math. Fingermath helps to build such numerical patterns and relationships in the mind, so that what’s on paper makes more sense, quicker. http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Fingermath-Simple-Accurate-Scientific/dp/0070376808/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249156659&sr=8-1.

Any child can become more gifted in math by learning the finger-math method. Purposeful parents would do well to give it a try as early as possible. They should also use every opportunity possible to help their children make patterns and sort things.

Counting money supports number patterning, too. A website with free printable math worksheets is www.edhelper.com.

Once a child has a good grasp of number values, addition, and subtraction, it’s not too early to introduce the idea of a number line that goes from negative numbers to positive numbers.

Children can understand the idea of digging holes (negative numbers versus building mounds (positive numbers) with a number line. Or use the idea of being in debt versus having money. I like to use a number line to show what happens if we have 4 but subtract (take away) 6. Our 4 mounds turn into 2 holes! Or 4 - 6 = -2. Or we have 4 dollars but we owe someone 6 dollars, so we still owe him 2 dollars. We have negative money.

Early math the right way, just like early reading the right way - The Godfrey Method!

http://thegodfreymethod.com