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EARLY LEARNING / Teaching Your Child to Read / Have you seen evidence of your child intuiting phonics rules?
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on: March 18, 2012, 03:20:16 AM
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Robert Titzer (Your Baby Can Read creator) has said that babies learn to read because they intuit phonics rules. There is a phonics rule that an e at the end of a word makes the vowel say its name. In rat, the a says ah. But in rate it actually says a. Well my younger daughter always pronounces "have" to rhyme with "cave." I've noticed this since she turned 3. She's almost 4 and I haven't corrected her yet to avoid confusion. Obviously she intuited this rule. No one ever explained it to her. Have happens to be an exception to this particular rule. Have you seen this kind of thing with your kids?
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EARLY LEARNING / Early Learning - General Discussions / Re: Teacher Says Students are Dumber Every Year
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on: March 02, 2012, 03:48:29 PM
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"What's sad about this is that we're at a point in human history unlike any other in terms of availability of knowledge."
This is actually part of the problem. Many educators assume that since so much knowledge is at our fingertips we don't need to learn as much anymore. Why learn something if you can instantly look it up on Google? Of course, our brains don't work like that. Our brains use our current knowledge to understand new knowledge, so the less we know the less we can understand. The more we know the more we can understand. Google is useless if you can't understand most of the information you can easily find on it. You see the same thing with math. Many educators insist that knowing math facts and long division are unnecessary because students can use calculators. This outsourcing of the work of the brain is creating a "dumber" population.
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EARLY LEARNING / Early Learning - General Discussions / Re: Do you think these kids are actually learning something?
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on: February 26, 2012, 02:55:57 PM
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Dr. Jones is completely right. I've read some examples of the kinds of group projects given in schools and they always sound like they're way beyond the capacity of elementary age kids. The basics have to come first. But a lot of educators don't accept that. A child would have to have a very good understanding of how business and markets actually work before they could comprehend the need to provide quality products. And "quality products" goes far beyond two shoes that match. These projects are supposed to be "real world" but they are very far from reality.
Kerileanne99,
I saw exactly what you described when I went to college. Many middle class students I did projects with didn't understand the simplest concepts we were covering. If they didn't understand the basics, then obviously almost everything covered over the semester went way over their heads. When I went to school, I spent most of my time learning supposedly useless factual knowledge. Yet I ended up having to do most or all of the work in some projects because the others students didn't have a clue. Any teamwork skills they learned were completely useless because they didn't know very much.
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EARLY LEARNING / Early Learning - General Discussions / Re: Do you think these kids are actually learning something?
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on: February 25, 2012, 10:19:29 PM
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Oops, Waterdreamer, you made me realise that I forgot to put in the explanation from Youtube. The kids are supposed to be learning about goods and services.
"This mock shoe factory learned a valuable lesson on their product. They discovered while packaging that shoes come in pairs and they should match each other. They worked as a team and redirected their thinking to accomplish the task of producing quality goods that consumers would buy."
I'm going to teach my 1st grader some basic economics, so I was looking for videos on economics concepts. That's how I came across this. I seriously doubt that this classroom activity will do anything to prepare kids for high school or college level economics.
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EARLY LEARNING / Early Learning - General Discussions / Re: Do you think these kids are actually learning something?
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on: February 25, 2012, 09:17:18 PM
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I went to college in the US but not K - 12. I had a very traditional education. I have read a lot of criticism of American education methods (like Why Don't Students Like School by Daniel Willingham and E.D. Hirsch's books) but didn't fully understand what they were criticizing. So these videos really shocked me. The kids don't seem to have a good understanding of what they are even doing. Higher order thinking seems completely laughable to me now. How can anyone think at all with all that noise going on around them? Yet the teacher must believe in her methods, otherwise she wouldn't have put this on Youtube for her students' parents to see. |
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EARLY LEARNING / Early Learning - General Discussions / Re: What is your why for teaching early?
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on: February 05, 2012, 04:46:08 PM
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My reason is along the lines of what queriquita said. A child who learns earlier doesn't have to work as hard academically later on. A child who starts learning basic concepts in Chemistry starting at 4 or 5 and continues learning over the years will have a solid foundation in the subject by high school. They won't have the difficulty and frustration of a student who is new to the subject and is expected to master it in a semester or 2. It's better to learn a little over a long period of time than have to learn a lot in a short time. It's also far more effective. Considering that we are now in a knowledge economy, those with knowledge are going to have a better life than does who don't have it. A person with high knowledge will be in a better position to do what they want careerwise. Lower knowledge people will be forced into a career that they are capable or doing but maybe not what they want to do.
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