Family English. Learning is a Joyous Experience
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Six Tricks to Make Home Education Effective

To be a great home tutor, parents need the right attitude.  Here’s a checklist to develop a positive attitude.  These tips will help your child get excited about schoolwork.
  

1. Make learning fun.  Your job as a “teacher” is to find new and interesting ways to make learning a joyous experience for your child.   Be creative. 
 
2. Nothing kills joy like anger.  When your child struggles with something, don’t get angry.  Think like a teacher.  Guide your child through the problem solving process.  Force yourself to step back and allow the child to experience the joy of fixing a problem on his or her own, with a little help from Mom or Dad.
 
3. Silly sentences work well when a child makes a recurring mistake.  Use goofy sentences like, “That’s super duper no good.”  When you use silly sentences in the right situation, your child receives this message:  “I made a mistake but as long as Mom or Dad make a joke, everything must be okay.”
 
4. Home teaching should never be a chore.  If it feels tedious, you’re doing something wrong.  Ask yourself, “What can I change to create a fun experience for me and my child?”  The answer will come.
 
5. Home teaching is an opportunity for your child to shine.  It focuses on the developmental needs of one person.  Kids learn in different ways and at different speeds.  Home teaching provides meaningful assistance to young children at almost every stage of development. 

 

6. Good study habits are built on a foundation of curiosity.  Curiosity is a necessary condition to experience the joy of learning. 

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2008 08 06 Rob Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Home education: a basic introduction

Someone asked me to explain the main idea behind home education.  It’s a topic of interest to many parents, so here is a basic primer.

Home education is different from home schooling.  Home education is about parents taking an active role in their child’s learning by helping the kids with homework, ensuring that kids progress in a way that matches their abilities and nurturing the idea that learning is a joyous experience. Home education usually means taking the kids out of the school system, a choice that I am not talking about.

How do parents educate their kids at home?  Here are a few simple ideas to get you into the “tutor” mindset that is required to help your kids understand that learning is great.

1. See home education as an exchange of ideas that grow like flowers. 

Great tutoring is an interactive dialogue with the child at the center of learning.  Encourage your child to lead play-based activities and make mistakes.  Your job as a tutor is to guide a child through the learning process, not make it easy.  

2. Reward hard work.

Celebrate your child’s achievement, in any field.  Young learners are often happy to receive a sticker after completing a homework assignment, passing a test or spelling numbers from one to twelveteen.  A little ‘carrot and stick’ teaching doesn’t hurt. But remember, reward the effort, and not the achievement itself. 

3. Talk to your child about books.  

Ask lots of questions.  Encourage your kids to ask comprehension questions by giving answers that are understandable to them. 

Stop parking your kids in front of the TV.  Park them in front of a book, instead.

2008 07 17 Rob educational values Comments (0) Permalink

Parents, kids and education. There’s no mystery.

Do you remember the old story about fishing and a poor man?

Give a man a fish and you feed his family for a day.  Teach him how to fish and you feed his family for a lifetime.

Great parenting operates on the same idea.  If you do the kid’s project, your son or daughter will earn a good grade in science class.  Teach your kids how to learn, and they will spend the rest of their academic lives carving out their own successful career at school.

Which choice is best for the child?  That’s an easy question.

The hard question is why so few people seem to grasp that basic idea.  Here’s an example of odd thinking.  This comes from a June 30, 2008 article in the Globe and Mail written by Judith Maxwell,  a respected Canadian social commentator. 

Ms. Maxwell writes about the stress that comes with trying to balance work and family life.  She quotes research suggesting almost 30% of children have learning or behavioral problems by the age of six.  These problems are so serious that kids aren’t ready for grade 1. As noted by Ms. Maxwell, these problems are not related to family income.  Kids from low and high income families experience the same problems.

Good data from Ms. Maxwell, but she goes way off track.  She recommends government policies and for some strange reason, words of wisdom from Barack Obama.  Maybe I’m wrong, but if I want advise about raising a family, a campaign speech from a politician is the last place to look for useful information.

What are the causes of learning and behavioral problems in kids?  Work might be part of the problem (actually the root cause is that parents won’t make sacrifices for their families, but that’s a different story) , but let’s consider a more important source of tension: divorce.  It’s a devastating event that affects families of all income levels and kids on a deep level.

Here’s a tip for divorced parents.  If you really want to spend quality time with your kids during visitation days, teach your kids how to learn.  Spend time going over homework.  Check math and spelling exercises. Start investing time and money to find ways to make learning fun for your kids.

Think about the fisherman.  Teach your kids that learning is a joyous event and you’ll set your kids up for a successful and fruitful educational career.  Is there anything else you would want for your kid? 

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2008 07 01 Rob Influence of parents
educational values Comments (0) Permalink

Free English Lessons for Children

Are you a parent who sees the educational potential of the Internet?  Not everyone does.

If you are a parent with young children looking for free educational lessons that teach phonics and sight words, check this out.  My companion website - familyenglishhome.net - offers free online English lessons.  It’s designed for young children, say 2 to 6 years of age, to study with parents.

I designed and created familyenglishhome.net with input from my 10 year old. Here’s what it offers:

  • 40 free lessons
  • worksheets that can be downloaded to practice spelling and build alphabet skills
  • a little fun mixed with studying
  • interactive lessons
  • phonetic sounds and sight words

Oh, this is important.  It’s a flash-based program that for some reason won’t work with Firefox.  Gotta use Internet Explorer. Sorry about that.

Try it with your kids.  If you have any comments, good or bad, I’d love to get your feedback.

Cheers

2008 06 27 Rob Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Bye-bye achievement?

A recent piece on 60 Minutes profiled the values of 20-somethings today.  It’s a value system smothered in self-centeredness, dripping with a sense of entitlement. 

 

The story was revealing.  It also prompted a deeper question.  Are these the values parents are now passing on to their children?

 

I am disturbed by the seemingly prevalent notion in schools that everyone wins.  No matter what level of effort has been put forth.  If there is a soccer game and every kid gets a trophy, what lesson does that teach each child about effort, dedication, perseverance and the value of hard work?

 

Fairness and equality of opportunity are important values.  But, equality of opportunity does not mean that everyone is treated the same.  To lay a foundation of success for our children, we need a system that recognizes and rewards winners, and encourages people to strive harder. These values might not be developed in school, so they become the parents’ responsiblity. 

 

For most busy parents taking action means finding the time, and energy, to commit with tutoring. At-home tutoring does not necessarily require a lot of time. The key is to schedule a time when a parent has the energy and mental strength to block out the rest of the world and focus on creating a playful, learning environment.

 

Make learning exciting

 

Dr. Seuss’ great success – with classics like Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham - is due, in part, to an uncanny knack for transforming words into instruments of play. Hockey sticks, dolls, soccer balls and words are all tools which kids use to experience life through play.  Taking a page from Dr. Seuss, great home tutoring should be playful, a little puzzling and thoroughly engrossing. It should never feel like a chore.  If tutoring starts to feel tedious, you are doing something wrong.  Ask yourself, “What can I change to create a pleasurable experience for me and my child?” 

 

When kids enjoy learning, new forms of behaviour become part of a child’s everyday life experience, like reading a book, writing out the alphabet on a piece of scrap paper, or getting excited when it’s time to play a math game with Dad.  When you experience the magic of tutoring in a child-centered format, feelings of joy, pride and bliss are indications that you are doing a great job.

  

Test Your Kid’s Mettle

 

Achievement is a by-product of the joy for learning.  Achievement – an inner desire to improve, a passion to strive for a higher standard of proficiency, and the motivation to compete - opens doors to activities that build self-confidence, leadership skills and the all important ability to bounce back after a stumble. Spelling bees, musical performances, sporting tournaments, speech contents, essay competitions, art displays and school tests are all milestones that track a child’s wondrous progress. 

 

This is how I see my job as a parent.  My duty is not to make learning easy.  My job is to make it enjoyable so that kids will want to learn.

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2008 06 26 Rob educational values Comments (0) Permalink

Bomb Game

Here’s a simple game that kids love.  Parents love it too because it makes learning look like a game.

The set up.  Prepare a collection of cards about 3 inches square with the numbers ranging from -6 to +6.  Add a couple of ‘zero’ cards and a few with the word “Bomb.”  Invest a little time and energy with colour paper and cover the cards with plastic coating and you’ll be able to use the cards for a long time.

This is a trivia-style question and answer game for kids so you’ll need to prepare a stack of questions before hand.  Choose questions that suit your kids’ age .  You could use math questions from a text book or spelling words.  Sports, movies, or virtually anything that your kids already know, or should know. 

With cards and questions in hand, you’re ready to begin.  Divide kids into teams.  Two or three teams works well.  From each team, one member steps up to answer a question.  You, as the moderator, can choose the category or allow the kids to choose.  If the question is answered correctly, that person draws a random card from the pile and the team receives the points on that card.  Sometimes the points will be negative, or positive, or zero or a Bomb.  A Bomb card card changes the team’s score to zero.  

Great for birthday parties, the Bomb game is an engaging activity that delivers a solid 20 minutes of competitive fun.  Just be sure to have lots of questions and a prize for the winning team.

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2008 06 25 Rob study ideas Comments (0) Permalink

Movie reel

A quick post about a wonderful family movie.

If you’ve ever spent much time at the DVD store looking for a movie that the entire family can enjoy then you know the range of options is really quite slim.  I’ve watched just about every Scooby Doo episode, both as a kid and father, and I’d prefer not to watch another. Ever.  Wizard of Oz? Enough times to memorize half the script, and most of the inside jokes. (”Only bad witches are ugly,” still cracks me up.)

Once in a  while, a family movie comes along that captures everyone’s attention, including that of a 10 year old girl.  One such movie is Akeelah and the Bee.  It’s the story of a young girl (played by Keke Palmer) who defeats the odds - including a sluggish mother who eventually comes around to see the potential - and gets herself into a national spelling championship.  The ending does have an American Hollywood feel though mercifully it comes quickly.  Fans of the Matrix and Apocalypse Now are sure to find Laurence Fishburne’s role of the supportive though emotionally demoralized professor (Dr. Larabee - hmmm) refreshing.

 

Is it a knockout movie that deserves a Hollywood award? Probably not.  It’s a simple movie with a twisty plot ideal for a family night at home.  Freshly cooked popcorn, an inspiring story that opens up discussions about school, great role models demonstrating that scholastic achievement can be cool and decent acting.  Now that sounds like an award winning combination to me.

 BTW, the movie references a poem which many found moving.  Here it is.

Our Deepest Fear

by Marianne Williamson

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously
give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others. 

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2008 06 23 Rob family night Comments (0) Permalink

Whiteboard Rules

Have you considered the benefits of a whiteboard in your home?  If you have elementary school age children, consider a whiteboard as a priority purchase to help inject some practical fun into your kid’s study time.

I’m talking about a commercial grade whiteboard.  Something like this one.Claridge Products MLC5X/MLC153 (MLC/MLC-Wood) - Quick Ship Premiere Wood Frame Reversible MLC Markerboard

This unit is similar to the one we’ve had for six years.  It’s such a useful tool, I consider a whiteboard a regular piece of household furniture. I highly recommend a whiteboard with a frame and a set of rollers so that it can be easily moved to wherever works best.

Whiteboards are great study tools.  Spelling quizzes, math questions and virtually problem solving event that can benefit from an easy to draw picture.

They’re also great for doodling and scratching out new ideas.  Faster than paper and easier to find than a post-it note, whiteboards are ideal for people who like to communicate on a regular basis.

Finally, whiteboards are useful tools for turning study time into play time.  I use the whiteboard for lots of games, including the Bomb Game. More about that later, but let me say now, the Bomb Game transforms dull review exercises into high-spirited competitive games that kids just love.  An awesome addition to any birthday party for clever parents who like to disguise math and spelling reviews as a trivia game.

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2008 06 22 Rob study ideas Comments (0) Permalink

Is homework really bad?

The Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) generally puts out balanced information that’s educational and worth reading. But a recent paper leaves me scratching my head and wondering if educational authorities really have a 360 grasp of contemporary urban life.

In an online article entitled, “Parent’s role in their children’s homework” the CCL talks about the challenge of homework.  The CCL states that homework is a source of stress for 72% of parents. The report also goes on to say that teens spend an average of 9.2 hours per week doing homework, the second most time-consuming activity in a typical teen student’s life, after attending school. 

It sounds as if homework itself is the source of stress.  But if you read the detailed report a little more closely, homework is not the problem per se.  The real problem may be lifestyle and, this is where I interject with opinion, the inability or unwillingness of parents to make sacrifices to ensure that school comes first.

High-income families are 2.3 times more likely to report that homework is a source of stress than lower income groups.  Well, if my familiarity with the lifestyle of moderate to high income families is typical of the norm, ask anyone in a high socio-economic group and they’ll say that everything gives them stress.  Hell, meals can be a source of stress when the speed of life becomes overwhelming. 

On the question of meals as a stress point, a 2006 AC Neislon report  stated that Canadians spend an average of $125 per year on ready-to-eat meals.  This is the cooked and/or frozen food people buy in the malls, stores and markets excluding take-away, fast food or canned food.  Why do people increasingly use eat this stuff?  86% said they do not have time to prepare a meal.

If a family does not have time to prepare a meal, can they be expected to find the right time for a kid’s homework?  Probably not.  Is homework a source of stress?  Maybe, but so is everything else when dinner is macaroni salad out of a plastic tub and a chicken cutlet.

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2008 06 17 Rob Influence of parents Comments (0) Permalink

What lessons are you teaching your kids?

Getting kids excited about learning academic subjects - especially English and math - is the dream that drives this site.  Parents have a critical role in their kids’ education, though many Moms and Dads don’t always see it that way. 

Here’s the truth.  Parents have a great influence on what children learn.  They also influence how kids learn.  Is learning fun, or a chore?  Are kids excited learning or do they approach homework with fear and loathing?  Do your kids prefer watching TV or reading a book?

A kid’s learning style says a lot about parents and how they value education.

2008 05 25 Rob Influence of parents Comments (1) Permalink