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 - 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

Ten O'Clock Scholar - the brain needs constant data input

Develop your child's brain (and yours, too!):

               Did you know that the brain needs constant data-input? An old proverb says that those with high intelligence talk about ideas, with middle intelligence talk about things, and with low intelligence talk about people. Those who can’t entertain themselves in wholesome ways, such as reading, creating art, designing or engineering something, writing, recreational activities, etc., still need data-input.

               Some tend to shop too much or redecorate their houses for the umpteenth time, gossip, pick fights, buy another pocket knife or tool, watch too much sports, primp in the mirror a lot, and so on. Their brains need new data-input all the time, but it tends to be on a very shallow level of immediate gratification without much thought. Quite often it’s just visual input of things to look at for no real reason, such as television, internet, video games, pinterest, or driving around. Moderation in all things is the key.

               Astute parents will gear their child’s data-input towards ideas and creativity. To ensure that a child develops higher-level thinking, first teach him/her to read early the right way and to love reading. Surround your child with books, artistic tools and building sets. Get the child a simple microscope set. Play board games and/or do puzzles together as a family. Encourage your child to find things to do that give quality data-input into the brain.

               It is useful for a person to know how to make small-talk in social situations, but for the most part s/he needs the ability to discuss ideas and be creative. Data-input for the brain should be uplifting, creative, and challenging. Parents who help their children learn how to motivate and entertain themselves – and think without the constant need of outside entertainment – will raise flourishing, high-level thinkers and problem-solvers.

               Being a geek is gaining not only acceptance but also popularity. I recently saw a t-shirt that said, “Geek is Chic.” I loved it! Remember, geeks and nerds run the world. So, I decided to Google that wonderful phrase and came up with so many positive resources. Check these out!

· The Chic Geek's Fashion, Grooming and Style Guide for Men, Marcus Jaye, Sterling Pub Co Inc, 2011.

·        Geek Wisdom, N.K. Jemisin, Random House Inc, 2011.

·        The Geek Dad Book for Aspiring Mad Scientists: The Coolest Experiments and Projects for Science Fairs and Family Fun, Ken Denmead, Penguin Group USA, 2011.

·        Suck It, Wonder Woman!: The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek, Olivia Munn, St Martins Pr, 2010.

·        Theater Geek: The Real Life Drama of a Summer at Stagedoor Manor, the Famous Performing Arts Camp, Mickey Rapkin, Simon & Schuster, 2010.

·        Geek Charming, Robin Palmer, Puffin Books, 2009.

·        

There were so many more humorous and interesting titles and products!

               In summary, encourage your child to focus on ideas and creativity for his/her brain data-input. It is possible to be a geek and still have social skills without being materialistic.

http://thegodfreymethod.com

How to help your children reach their highest potential

       What parent wouldn't want to help her children become their best? To give your child a well-trained mind, it is necessary to understand that true self-esteem comes from achievement, and that usually requires effort and practice. Almost any child can become more gifted or academically talented with the right guidance and training.

        Are people born with talent? Most people think the only way to be great at something, from music to sports to math to chess, is to be born with a rare ability. Greatness isn't just born, it’s grown, which is important information about the learning process that every parent, teacher, and coach should know. 

        Recent research shows that even the most talented people have to devote a huge amount- a minimum of 10,000 hours- of dedicated, focused practice before they can achieve the level of world-class performance. Besides talent and practice, there is a third element necessary for success: inner determination (the child's own attitude and self-motivation).

        Giving your child a well-trained mind requires a classical education. The classical curriculum is very demanding, as it should be. For example, 9th grade students are expected to read 25 books, among them Homer's Iliad, Plato's Republic, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. There is a blueprint for parents to use at home. Children’s minds need to be challenged and stretched. It is tragic when the public school standards are lowered for the convenience of the parents and teachers. A well-trained mind requires as much time and practice as any other talent.

        Is teaching traditional grammar a waste of time? No! A professor of classics disagrees with the establishment’s war against grammar. He shows that a solid grounding in the grammatical analysis of sentences is necessary for good writing and speaking skills. It not only helps with one's native tongue, but also in learning foreign languages. He attributes a student's inability to write in complete sentences, as well as logical paragraphs, to a lack of foundation in basic grammar.

        The education people try to blame it on phone texting, but it really started with the whole language fiasco. In trying to make things easier for the few stragglers, we lost the rest of the students with our easing of criteria and requirements. When we make no demands, excellence does not happen. “No children left behind” has become all children left behind. And now Common Core is making it even worse!

        Well-meaning parents and educators believe that praise, encouragement, and advantages ("self-esteem-first" method) translate directly into happiness in childhood and success in adulthood. But did you know that the reverse is true? Misplaced indulgence only produces young adults who are stymied by the ordinary challenges of life, lack basic skills of empathy, and fear humiliation above all else. Yes, be positive, but lovingly require achievement and higher standards.

        Children need to learn to cope and can’t do so when adults remove all obstacles. So, in summary, to give your children a well-trained mind, give them a classical education with emphasis on traditional grammar, lovingly expect them to study and accomplish milestones, require them to practice or put in time and effort, and don’t do everything for them. More and more of our college students are finding it hard to cope on their own without mom and dad. Cases of anxiety are on the increase because of the misguided self-esteem push, which method was one of the many Project Follow Through failures. More to come from Common Core.

As Linda Kreger Silverman said, “A bright child who is capable of scoring in the high ninety percentiles on group achievement testing may not be gifted.” Regardless, being academically talented is a worthy pursuit. The technology jobs of the future need intelligent, successful students.

        Resources: http://www.societyforqualityeducation.org/index.php/resources/category/C10/  

Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell.
The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle.
The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home, by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer.
The War against Grammar, by David Mulroy.
The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance, by Polly Young-Eisendrath.

http://thegodfreymethod.com/content/StarLightStarBrightHowtohelpyourchildrenreachtheirhighestpotential

3 reasons why phonemic awareness is so important

Why does the Godfrey Method promote early reading the right way?

                Research shows that the best time to start reading readiness and reading is between the ages of 2 to 5 years old, when the most brain neuron mapping is occurring. Waiting until school age loses that most crucial window of time, and may be too late for some children. Reading is the foundation of everything else. Catch this opportunity for your child.

The Importance of Phonemic Awareness

 Phonemic awareness is the beginning of phonics. Don’t believe the nay-sayers.

        In New Jersey’s Language Arts Literacy Curriculum Framework 1998 (reminiscent of California’s 1987 framework), the debacle of whole-language persists. In it “there is no directive for the systematic instruction of sound-symbol decoding or knowledge of other language structures. Phoneme identity, spelling correspondences, syllables, and meaningful parts of words (morphemes) are not to be the content of instruction at all, according to this document.

        “Children in New Jersey apparently are expected to read by imprinting and osmosis. Similar expectations characterize the standards of Vermont, Ohio, and North Dakota, among others.” ~ The Illusion of Whole Reading, by Louisa Cook Moats.

        The rest of her article is very eye-opening. Such as, some whole-language defenders “caution teachers that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction can be dangerous, boring, ineffective, or irrelevant, and shouldn’t be overdone. Such a tone echoes even through Teaching Children to Read, the recent report of the National Reading Panel.” They couldn’t be more wrong!

        One definition of insanity is – “repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” Whole-language is insanity.

        Telling the truth about the Whole-Language fiasco is not demonizing it. It was already there. We are just debunking the myths it was constructed upon. Unfortunately, the method we justifiably expose has also been similarly used in instrumental music teaching, as well as “reform” math, doing considerable damage there, too. The population's silent participation has already accumulated several obstacles to good-quality language teaching that must be overturned.

        In Phonemic Awareness: What Does it Mean? by Dr. Kerry Hempenstall, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, 2003, he writes,

        “Over the past two decades, but particularly in the last 10 years, there has been a burgeoning consensus about the critical importance of phonemic awareness to beginning reading success, and about its role in specific reading disability or dyslexia. [One definition of phonemic awareness is] the ability to recognize that a spoken word consists of a sequence of individual sounds.

        “What is clear is that phonemic awareness concerns the structure of words rather than their meaning. To understand the construction of our written code, readers need to be able to reflect upon the spelling-to-sound correspondences.

        “…beginning readers must first have some understanding that words are composed of sounds (phonemic awareness) rather than of each word as a single indivisible sound stream [sight-word]. This awareness appears not to be a discrete state, but rather a sequence of development ranging from simple to complex… or from shallow to deep.”

        Marion de Lemos in, Phonics: The Building Blocks to Reading, October 20, 2004, says it simpler:

        “ There is now a consensus among reading researchers that the skills underlying the facility to read are the ability to break up words into sounds (phonemic awareness), and the ability to connect these sounds to letters or clusters of letters by a process of blending and segmentation (phonics). Without specific teaching, many children fail to develop these skills.” http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2662

        According to Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, White House Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development (July 26, 2001), exposure to reading should follow this sequence. Appropriate goals or targets for phonemic awareness at different ages:

Infants and toddlers:

Emotional bonding
Pleasure in book interactions
Sound of parents' voice

Two- and three-year-olds

Vocabulary and concepts
Book knowledge
Narrative understanding

Four- and five-year-olds

Print knowledge
Phonological sensitivity
Letter-sound correspondence
Emergent writing

        “The goals of one developmental period don't cease when the next developmental task begins. Thus, positive emotional experiences around books, which should begin for infants and toddlers, shouldn't stop when children reach two or three years of age and need to start learning acquiring vocabulary and concepts.”

        Did you know that parents are the proven best teachers for their preschoolers and children? Parents and early reading the right way are the keys to reversing the downward educational trend for your child. They are the recipe for preventing dyslexia. They are the simple yet effective solution.

        You may ask, "What if I don’t know how to teach my child?"

        You don’t have to have a teaching certificate to teach your child to read. In The Godfrey Method books, the parental guidelines fit on one page. They are easy to understand and easy to follow. It is vital that parents themselves do one-on-one phonics with their kids early. We provide the tools and the way to teach them properly.

        Why does the Godfrey Method promote phonics at home rather than preschool?

        Studies show that children learn best from their own parents. Children learn faster and easier from their own parents than from preschools. Preschools have their place for certain situations, but the home is the ideal place for a child to learn. Parents are their children’s best teacher. Universal preschool would be a fiasco and travesty for our children. The Godfrey Method uses a positive approach that defuses power struggles between parent and child.       

        With The Godfrey Method, parents can and should teach phonemic awareness and phonics simultaneously with reading stories, etc., almost from the beginning. I always started my children at 18 – 24 months old, with wonderful results and no downside. Put your children on the launch pad of life and watch them soar!

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http://thegodfreymethod.com/content/BeingaWiseOwl3reasonsphonemicawarenessissoimportanttheearlierthebetter