The Four Most Important Things to Include in Your Homeschool Plans for Next Year
It might sound simplistic, but these are the things your kid’s brain needs to grow.
It might sound simplistic, but these are the things your kid’s brain needs to grow.
My 5th grader had blasted through his long division problems. But they were all wrong. He had clearly forgotten the steps to solving long division problems. Again. Why? Soon doubt was knocking at my front door as I wondered if I was part of the problem. Did I completely suck as a teacher? Could someone…
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How to help your slow learner win the race of learning.
We all know kids are different. Yet we all have brains made out of the same stuff. So do the differences in our kids mean we should teach them differently? This is how learning style is usually presented. If your kids remembers pictures better than things he hears, then you should teach just with pictures.…
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There has been a push in modern education to shift away from teaching kids about stuff (like facts & concepts & patterns) to attempting to teach them how to think like experts. Is such a thing possible? Can you think like an expert before you are one? Do experts become experts because they think differently…
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We are all familiar with the term “drill and kill”, yet we also know that practice makes perfect. “It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice” Willingham If we must practice to become proficient, how do we keep that practice from killing our children’s love of learning? Often, when…
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One of the ultimate goals of schooling, or academic work, is the ability for abstract thought. We hope children will not only remember the things we teach them, but that they will be able to take concepts they have learned within the academic world and apply them, making connections both between subjects and also applying…
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We cannot store every piece of information our brain encounters in our memory. How does it decide what needs to be remembered? Well, since our brain likes to avoid thought, if we spend a lot of time thinking about something, it decides to store it. It must be important and our brain doesn’t want us…
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Without knowledge of facts, it is hard to think. Thought is not a vacuum and our brains need facts as a framework for thought. (You are reading the second post in a series about cognitive science in your homeschool, click here for the introductory post and links to the other posts in this series.) Critical…
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“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in it.” – Henry Ford The first cognitive principal Daniel T. Willingham dives into in his book Why Students Don’t Like School is that while curiosity is natural, thinking is hard. Let’s unpack this principal, which is supported…
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