kitchen table math, the sequel

Atom

Atom

I have attended the Northern Virginia Homeschooling Convention (NOVA Conference) and a Homeschool Curriculum Fair in Maryland. There were no sight words or whole word reading programs to be seen, no fuzzy math, and no foldables. Actually, the only thing even close to a foldable was a locally produced phonics flip chart that made a variety of different words to sound out as you flipped it around.

Disclaimer: while I don't really "know" the people in charge of the NOVA Conference, through a series of e-mails, I gave them permission to use a quote I had previously written about their conference, and they let me purchase some of their old data DVDs to send to friends (both school teacher friends and homeschooling friends) as Christmas presents.

Here's some of their workshops (If you're interested, you can buy the DVD-ROM of all the workshops for 40ドル, but you won't get it until a month or two after the conference ends in July):

Algebra Alcatraz!

Why not just break out of Algebra prison and study some practical subjects? If you’ve ever felt this way, you owe it to yourself to invest just 50 minutes to find out whether this Algebra stuff is right for you. (Oh, by the way, bring Mom or Dad with you to this seminar! They need answers, too!)

Homeschooling Through High School

Can it possibly be a good idea to homeschool all the way through high school? Can homeschooled teens get into college? What about teaching advanced math and science? This encouraging seminar is designed to reassure parents (and teens) that it’s not only possible to homeschool through high school, but that it is a wonderful choice. Learn how other families have made it through the high school years, and how you can too!

Seeing Fractions is Understanding Fractions

Four out of five people don't understand fractions! With one hands-on model, Steve demonstrates how to do the basic operations and see where the formulas come from. The grand finale is how to convert a fraction to a decimal to a percent.

Spelling and the Brain

Many children (and some adults) have difficulty learning to spell, but the difficulty may not be with the student so much as with the method of presentation. Find out in this workshop how spelling information is most efficiently stored in the brain, and why. With a greater insight into the nature of spelling and neurological function presented in this workshop, the parent/teacher will be well-equipped to meet the needs of all their children, not just the “naturally” good spellers.

Teaching Boys & Other Children Who Had Rather Be Making Forts All Day


This one was very interesting! He talked about the differences between boys and girls and how each learns best and how to keep their interest. He's very funny, too.

The Good Reader

An overall plan for teaching reading to children. Includes the development of good language skills, starting at birth; tips on pre-reading instruction; appropriate phonics instruction for ages three, four, five, and older; reviews of a number of phonics programs along with recommendations; beginning reading lists; suggestions for remedial reading; and a discussion on encouraging reluctant readers. Jessie Wise has over thirty years' experience in reading instruction and has field-tested many of the reading programs now on the market.

There's a lot more, you can see all the workshops online.

By the way, the top 3 choices in a survey of homeschoolers for math in a homeschooling magazine I subscribe to were Math-U-See, Saxon, and Singapore Math.

If you just want some good ideas about how to better teach your children and some great resources, a homeschooling convention is an interesting and fun place to learn about learning, no matter what type of schooling you choose for your children.


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

Late yesterday afternoon my Foldables rampage across the internet led to something good: I now possess a starter sense of "visual learning" and what its place in school may be. This is something I've puzzled over for ages, partly because of research Temple and I cited in Animals in Translation concerning verbal overshadowing. Verbal overshadowing is a conflict between visual and verbal representations in memory:

A series of laboratory studies found that memories for a mock criminal's face were much poorer among eyewitnesses who had described what the perpetrator looked like shortly after seeing him, compared with those who hadn't.
source:
Words Get in the Way
by Bruce Bower
Science News
Week of April 19, 2003; Vol. 163, No. 16, p. 250

Temple divides the world into visual and verbal thinkers and from one angle the verbal overshadowing studies seem to say she's right. (I have no doubt she's onto something - Temple really does think in pictures.)

At the same time, probably most of us have the sense that visual memory is more durable than verbal memory no matter what kind of thinkers we are, which is why Ms. Peacock tells her students to form a mental image of the word "vex." She's right: a mental image should allow all of them to remember the word the next time they see it, not just the "visual learners."

Which brings to mind a story. I once went to a friend's 40th birthday party where I didn't know a soul. At the time I'd just finished reading a book on memory so I formed mnemonic images of the names of every person to whom I was introduced -- and then I remembered every name. I was remembering names so accurately that it turned into a party trick; people were gathering 'round to watch me remember names. As well they should have. It was quite a feat.

So: verbal overshadowing on the one hand; mnemonic devices on the other.

I have no idea how these two ideas fit together. Perhaps visual images help memory for verbal material but verbal representations hurt memory for visual material? Don't know.

Don't know and am not going to spend today tracking down the people do know. Here's the post I wrote early yesterday evening:


Karen H pointed me to the Eide Neurloearning blog awhile back:

Several years ago, we experienced an epiphany while meeting with an obviously intelligent blind woman with a thirty-year history of diabetes. "There's probably nothing you can do," she started off saying, "but I still need to ask you if there's anything I can do about my memory. It's gotten so bad now that I'll forget what my daughter's telling me even before she's finished talking." Uh-oh, we thought, sounds bad. We had seen her brain scan before, and it had clearly shown diffuse damage from poorly controlled diabetes. Maybe there was nothing we could do.

We asked her to try to remember a list of numbers, and found to our dismay that she struggled to remember even 2 in a row. When asked to reverse them, she couldn't even keep the second number in mind. It looked pretty hopeless. Words of reassurance seemed empty.

But then we thought of something. We had recently seen an fMRI study which had shown that 'visual imagination' (visually imagining reversing a checkerboard) had a very diffuse distribution in the brain - and thought maybe enough of it could be preserved in this woman so that visual imagery could be used bypass her memory impairments. To our surprise and to hers, when prompted to visually imagine the numbers we read to her, she could now remember 7 digits (the normal limit)! ... [S]he merely needed to be made aware that she should translate 'heard' information into visual images - to go from being totally incapacitated memory-wise to 'normal'.

The fact that public schools are preoccupied with visual learning however defined^* reminds me of Horace Mann deciding that hearing children should be taught to read the same way deaf children were taught. High school students have young, healthy brains; they don't need to assign a distinct visual image to each and every unfamiliar vocabulary word they encounter while reading a play by Shakespeare. Not unless they've got diffuse brain damage, (削除) which by the time they've spent 16 years playing video games at home and folding Foldables at school, they may have. (削除ここまで)

The fastest way to teach vocabulary -- I'm pretty sure I'm right about this -- would probably be to produce a "Saxon Math" for prose: a sequence of textbooks with interesting short passages offering distributed practice in the vocabulary to be learned each school year, including homework sets that require students to -- yes -- write sentences using the words.

Based in my own experience as an obsessive child reader, I can tell you that it's possible to acquire a large vocabulary from voracious reading alone. However, no school (or parent) can require students to read obsessively, nor would we want them to. So we need textbooks that go some ways toward distilling and duplicating the critical elements of the natural born bookworm's reading habits; we need quality reading over quantity.

I continue to think Vocabulary Workshop probably does this, by the way. Just wish we were getting through the books faster. C. has spent 2 years on the first book in the series -- Level A -- and still isn't finished. (We continue to plug away at Megawords; we're midway through Book 5 now, with 3 to go.)


visual learning - the books to read

Having poked around Eideneurolearning a bit on the same day that I went looking for a Jeffrey Zacks paper on event segmentation, I've gleaned the following nuggets & reading recommendations:

• a combination of text with images probably always produces better "retention" - i.e., we remember the material better later on (not sure whether the people who study these things also believe we understand the material better - I think they do)
  
• animations are probably a bad idea; stills are preferable
• the seminal book on the relationship between words and pictures is: Mental representations: a dual coding approach by Allan Paivio
  
• the best book on dual coding as it applies to education is Richard Mayer's Multi-Media Learning
  

I'm sorely tempted to buy both of these books, which can be previewed on Google Book Search, but first I'm going to read all of the Eide posts on visual learning.







^{*I've seen it defined as "prefers reading to listening"}


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

Independent George is on a roll today:

So in the interest of visual learning, we've managed to take all the math out of math, and the words out of English...

In ten years, schools will consist of nothing but finger-painting. Which might have been fine twenty years ago, but completely inappropriate for the crayola-based skills needed to compete in the 21st century.

My thoughts exactly!

Call me crazy, but I don't think the visual arts going to be getting easier in the 21st century.

from palisadesk:

This stuff has been around forever -- well since the early 90's, anyway. This Dinah person may have co-opted the term "foldables" but the activity was already out there in full bloom by 1992. That's the date on a resource book I have entitled Alternatives to Worksheets

I got it back in my former school where most of my seventh grade students read at a third grade level or lower (the top kids were at a fourth grade level).

I tried some of those activities, like the flip books and the lift-the-flap things and various shape books and whatnot in an effort to get the student to produce something -- anything -- related to the curriculum for the grade. Having them write essays or do research was clearly out of the question because their skills were so weak (their self-esteem, however, was sky-high -- interesting).

It was only partially successful. A few kids, mainly girls, liked doing these things, but most did not. AT my current school the emphasis with middle grade kids seems to be to get them to use a computer to produce something. [Catherine here: true at our middle school, which has just purchased Clay-Mation & Virtual Reality software.] At least the computer can read to them and they may learn something.

I think one major reason these things have taken off is because of "radical inclusion." If you have students who are 4-8 grades below grade level and can't read or write independently (and this is not unusual in many places), what are you going to get them to do to "show their learning?" You need a "product." This stuff takes tons of time, keeps kids busy and "engaged," the student may end up with something that "looks nice," and everyone is happy. Have they learned anything? Who knows. Does this go any distance towards boosting their weak skills? Not at all.

However, consultants and administrators oooooh and aaaaah over these things, I kid you not.

BTW, I posted that link about wakawaka but Blogger got ahead of me and posted it before I filled in my handle and clicked POST.

from Steve H:

I'm beginning to see the educational world as a hot market for add-on products, especially if you include seminars. All you have to do is come up with a unique angle or hook. It's good if you can somehow claim that less is really more; that lower expectations can produce more results; that their ed school ideas really can work. Talk in generalities and gloss over the details.

"radical inclusion."

I think our town qualifies for this term, but they just call it full inclusion. It continues mostly through sixth grade, but it's still there in seventh and eighth.

Our town is known for this. People move to our town for its emphasis on the learning disabled. People write letters to the editor about how wonderful it is. I met another parent this past weekend who told me she moved to our town specifically for her autistic son. She loves the idea that he is fully integrated with the other kids and doing the same(?) work. LD kids and their families move in and more kids get sent to private school.

The school claims that with differentiated instruction they can make this work. They can't. My sixth grade son is doing very little writing and direct reading comprehension. Posters, cards, dioramas, artifacts, and anything that produces a "product" that isn't anything like a book report or test. In fact, outside of his seventh grade math, he doesn't get any tests.

I've talked in the past about how they want it both ways, but it doesn't work. Parents complain that they want more for their kids, but all they get is enrichment and not acceleration.

My son got low marks on one assignment because he didn't know quite what to do with a girl on his team who just wanted to cut up tiny pieces of construction paper and complain. They like the social idea of these kids working together, but they give them no instruction on how to do it.

This is a very touchy subject. Twenty to twenty-five percent of our kids go to other schools, but many think that the parents just want an elite education. I've seen both sides. Some in town feel very satisfied that my son is back in the public schools. One teacher's aide commented to me that my son's public school is so good!

The principal is very nice. We have talked about kids who go to or come from private schools. She understands why, but she still thinks that kids "can" get a good education in the public schools. Unfortunately, it's up to parents to make sure that their kids make the transition from very low expectaion K-8 schools to high expectation honors classes in high school.

Their idea of education is much fuzzier than mine. It's the only way they can make full inclusion work. They know there are limitations and they know why kids get sent to private schools, but they say that they have concerns that private schools don't have to deal with. They say that private school kids are "pre-selected". It's a tacit admission that they should, but can't do more.

Full inclusion is more important than academics, and they redefine education to cover this up.

This is an interesting take, and I'm sure it's true.

I also think there's more to it. My friend told me that her child's high school English Honors teachers recently assigned a paper with two options:

• 5-page paper
  
• 3-page paper illustrated with drawings

That's Honors English, which is quite selective.

My niece, also a high school freshman, recently had to spend 2 days drawing an animal in biology class. Two days. With no instruction whatsoever.

I don't know how many of you have ever sat down and tried to draw an animal "from scratch." I have, and it's not pretty. As far as I know, the only people who can draw without instruction are autistic savants and people with frontotemporal dementia.




drawings of horses by typical 4-year olds




drawing by 3-year old autistic girl

I'm encountering two things:

• "visual learning" incorporated into all subjects across the board [update: having looked into the research on multimedia learning, I think that done right this may be a good idea when the instructor, not the student, creates the visuals]
  
• a complete and total absence of any instruction whatsoever in how to create things visual
  

I wonder whether there is an "absence of instructivism" effect here. Because ed schools teach only constructivism, new teachers presumably haven't learned much if anything about learning theory, memory, distributed practice, etc.

The result -- and I've seen this, at times, in my own district -- is that when students absolutely must commit material to longterm memory, teachers fall back on the memory tricks we all know, e.g. direct memorization and the creation of mnemonic devices. That's what Ms. Peacock is talking about in the WordPOP! videos. She is talking about having students come up with visual images that will help them remember unfamiliar words such as "vex."

Mnemonic devices work, but you don't need a high school teacher to pass out worksheets and tell you to make some up.

You can just buy the book.


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

Dinah Zike's Teaching Science with Foldables
reviewed by Paloma Varela, Bridges, Mexico

When a friend of mine showed the materials that a publisher had sent her, my eyes gleamed like a leprechaun's eyes before his pot of gold. As I looked into the bag and glanced at the bounty my friend was sharing with me, I saw a title that caught my attention: Teaching Science with Foldables. When I opened it I noticed that, in fact, it was aimed at teaching not English, but science through Foldables. That was something extra that I was not expecting but I thought would certainly enhance the already positive values of the book. All at once, two main thoughts came to my mind: "Would it be easy to learn how to make them?" and "How can I use any of them in my day-to-day teaching?"

[snip]

In this book you will find a general tips for creating and using Foldables. Dinah Zike is an award-winning author, educator, educational consultant, and inventor, known internationally for these three-dimensional manipulatives made of everyday paper, glue, and scissors.

[snip]

Research has proven that students learn in different ways,^* so by using these three-dimensional materials the senses are brought into learning: students can touch and move objects to make visual representations of concepts. Manipulatives provide the student with new ways of exploring a topic.

* Research has proved no such thing.


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

Reading and learning occur every day. For those who have the building blocks, this learning can be very meaningful and powerful. However, most often, we spend very little time gathering the powerful words and vocabulary concepts that we need to build understanding.

Unfortunately, many of the teachers who do teach vocabulary are still using the out-dated and ineffective method looking up words in a dictionary/glossary and writing them in sentences Research shows that not only does this not help students learn important concepts, but it actually turns them against words.

source:
WordPOP!

Unfortunately, as we see from this example, some teachers are still using the word "teachers" to refer to educators and "students" to refer to learners.

Margaret Peacock, a high school teacher of English and Language Arts, uses the VVWA to preview important vocabulary within Romeo and Juliet.

video length: 8:29

Eight minutes & twenty-nine seconds to teach "vex."

"We do this because not everyone is a verbal learner."

..................

VVWA template (pdf file)

high school student filling out a visual learning worksheet entitled "Images of Life at the Ranch"

Margaret Peacock, a high school teacher of English and Language Arts, shares her thoughts on using the VVWA in the classroom: watch the video

source:
WordPop

Amazon reviewer SW says:

As an Instructional Facilitator at my school, we received this guide to help students remember key concepts in math, however our teachers have adapted these ideas to use with science and social studies concepts also. The teachers find this to be a creative way to help the children organize the facts and their ideas, and the kids love to get to do something different than just take notes or complete a study guide.

visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

When you think of a diorama you may be reminded of the old shadow boxes that you made when you were little. These shadow boxes were generally made from old shoe boxes, construction paper, and enough glue to keep Elmer's in business. However, the modern diorama is a very close cousin to the foldable.

source:
Chapter 5. Using Projects and Performances to Check for Understanding

hamburger fold




hot dog fold


Extra credit if you can guess me what a taco fold is.

Foldables. Foldables are three-dimensional interactive graphic organizers developed by Zike (1992). They provide students with a way of manipulating concepts and information in ways that are far more kinesthetic than ordinary worksheets. Paper is folded into simple shapes that reflect the conceptual relationships represented by the notes. Sixth grade social studies teacher Tim Valdes asked students to compare and contrast the Athenians and Spartans of ancient Greece. His students had been working with interactive graphic organizers since the beginning of the school year, so they were able to select their own way of representing this information. Arturo chose to make a three-tab book with a Venn diagram drawn on the front. Under each flap, he wrote information about both city-states. Arturo's choice of an organizer and the information he included gave Mr. Valdes insight into the knowledge his student possessed, as well as the mental model he used. Arturo's Foldable is represented in Figure 5.8.

Checking for Understanding: Formative Assessment Techniques for Your Classroom
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development

visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

Today I learned how to make:

• a hot dog Foldable
  

and

• a hamburger Foldable
  

Foldables weren't a new concept to me. I'd been seeing Foldables in the district's new Glencoe math textbooks all year, and of course there was the Folding House Poem Project redkudu managed to squelch at her high school.

Still, I hadn't managed to pick up on the fact that Foldables are so well-entrenched in the edu-world that we have Big Names in Foldables: people who are to Foldables what Lucy Calkins is to personal narratives.

So my friend J. called and filled me in. We hadn't spoken in awhile. She's gone back to school to get her Masters in education, after which she'll teach h.s. math. We were chatting about the general pointlessness of ed school when she mentioned in passing that her husband had told her he didn't want to hear another word about her coursework because he couldn't believe they were paying money to send her to school to learn how to make Foldables.

I perked up.

"Foldables!" I said. "What is it with all these Foldables?"

J. said her class had just had a quiz on accommodating the needs of English language learners. For the quiz they had to select a quotation from their textbook, write it on one of the panels of their Foldable, and then draw an illustration (or two) that elucidated the quotation.

And that was it. A Foldable with a quotation from a textbook and 2 illustrations. After a couple of years of this they will be certified to teach.

She says the point of the program is to prepare them to teach in an urban setting.


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

teachers learning how to make foldables


I wonder what the total professional development bill is per year in my district?


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

[埋込みオブジェクト:http://www.youtube.com/v/xudikERRmRc&hl=en]



And here's Dinah.

Do high schools actually use these things? I mean, seriously? There are professional educators who look at this stuff, and not only don't burst out in laughter, but think, "Yes! This is exactly what I need to get my kids to understand the Berlin Airlift!"?

visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

"I feel bad for lawyers, [Hanks said.] That's a crappy job, man. That's like doing homework for a living."

BusinessAssociationsblog

I bet lawyers would like their jobs better if they started making foldables instead of writing all those briefs.


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

sauve qui peut

Causes and Effects Graphic Organizers
Suitable for Middle and High School Students
from Glencoe (pdf file)

• westward expansion

• immigration

• industrial revolution

• Vietnam War

• disease (could be a specific one such as malaria)

• dominant traits

• erosion

• heat transfer or molecular movement and/or nuclear fusion

• mechanical waves

• literature based upon social issues, protests, or propaganda

• patriotic writings

I wonder how Donna Goldberg is going to deal with these thingies?


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore