Online Chess

Just found this great site for kids to play chess without having to download a program. 

 

Finland...What makes their educational system "better"?

Frequently, I have come across articles and conversation about Finland's education system being among the best in the world.  So, I decided to look into the reasons.  Here are some points I encountered -

• kids learn to read very early
• relatively relaxed educational environment
• the competition to get into a good school isn't so intense
• intense individualization...Finnish teachers are expected to customize lessons for students
• teachers are trained extensively. They must have master's degrees, and 40 people apply for every job.
• acceleration is possible

The point that seemed to be repeated in many news articles is "high-quality teachers at the heart of Finland’s education success story"

What Happened Before the Big Bang?

What happened before the big bang?

Nice page to use when confronted with this ever popular question from kids.  Although, it is very likely going to trigger more questions.  Especially this sentence - time did not always exist; and second, there was no first moment of time.

How To Help Your Child's Brain Grow Up Strong

How to Help your Child's Brain Grow up Strong

This is the first time I have read about teaching self control and willpower.  This seems to tie to something I once heard on a BBC program about how children learn how to deal with stress as well as reslience to stress from their parents.

"This is really critical because there are so many things parents want to do when they read parenting books," he says. "They take steps to teach their children math or reading ... but a big thing we can do for our children is to do the best to foster the development of self-control and willpower. Self-control and the ability to restrain impulses is associated with success at every age, whether it means being able to read at age 4, or being able to restrain impulses at a later age, or even what your peers think of you in high school. At all of these ages, willpower and self-control is a stronger predictor of academic success than IQ.""

Telling Time

My seven year old was having a hard time reading the time on an analog clock, understanding the difference between AM and PM, as well as answering questions such as "if it is 11:30 AM, what will be the time 3 hours and 20 minutes later".   Here is one site I found with a clock that kids can play with to learn to read the time.  I used it as a tool to teach my son.  The only drawback is that when you add or subtract an hour, the hour hand moves ahead or forward, but it does not show the minute hand traveling around the clock.  That would have helped emphasize the point that it takes one hour for the hour hand to move from say 12 to 1, and it takes one hour for the minute hand to travel around the clock.  In spite of that drawback, I would still say that this is a very handy tool.

Teaching Mental Math

Along the lines of Number Talks, I was looking for lesson plans on teaching mental math.  I found this site with a discussion about teaching Math to struggling students.   It has some nice tips such as:

Talk about how the pairs that make 10 can help her with mental addition and subtraction. If she needs to add 5+8, she knows that:

and

So

This seems like a nice start. 

Number Talks

Last month, we attended a workshop about "Number Talks".  It was about a  novel way of teaching Math.  I have not tried it with my children, but it definitely sounds promising.    I could not find any free resources related to it.  However, I did find these:

http://www.mathsolutions.com/index.cfm?page=wp18&contentid=1238&crid=98&mcrid=107

The package with a Multimedia CD that costs 65$.  

Here is an example from Chapter 1 from the first link -

49  x 5

The goal of number talk is to help a student approach this problem like this for instance:

50 x 5 and then subtract one group of 5 to arrive at the answer of 245.

I also found a book titled Number Talks: Helping Children Build Mental Math and Computation Strategies, Grades K-5

Neuroscience for Kids

My son was trying to avoid practising the piano. To motivate him, I decide to teach him about nerve cells or neurons. I came across this fabulous site called "Neuroscience for Kids".

I poked around a little - great games to show kids how the brain processes information.  My son loved the game where he had to name the color of the font without reading the words that were names of colors.  Not sure if I am explaining this correctly.  Check it out.  I am sure your kids will like this site.

Online Chess

Nice site for kids to practise playing chess.

Opportunity for kids to showcase their photographs

Well, this is really not a teaching resource, but it seems like such a fun opportunity for kids to showcase their photos.  Which kid does not like using their parents' digital camera?  Here is the site: http://kids-myshot.nationalgeographic.com/

Math tutoring in the South Bay

The more I talk to parents of middle schoolers, the more I am convinced that it is really important for Math foundation concepts to be really strong.  The first grade teacher is doing a great job.  However, the curriculum does not seem challenging enough.  We have tried teaching our six year old more than what's covered in school.  But, given that we are two working parents, it is hard to maintain regularity.  So, I looked into a couple of Math tutoring options.  One was Math Sqaured in Saratoga.  It is very reasonably priced - around 100$ a month.  They test the student initially, and place the kid at some grade level.  Kids go the center once or twice a week.  At each meeting, they do seven pages of a workbook at the center, and then seven more at home.  The workbook presents Math concepts in visually appealing ways.  The other place I checked out was Mathnasium in Campbell.  It is run by a person who has a doctorate in engineering.    This place charges twice as much as the Math Squared place.  However, the teacher-student ratio seemed much better - as far as I could see, barely 1-3 students per instructor.  Here again, the kid is tested to see his or her grasp of concepts.  After our son's test, we got a detailed report of his performance on specific concepts.  For instance, we realized this multiplication concepts needed some reinforcing.   I was very impressed with this place.   Just have to make a decision of whether it is necessary given that we are capable of teaching the same concepts, and when we have so many free resources on the Web.  However, children do sometimes take things more seriously when it is an external authority to whom they are answerable. :)  Maybe, we will use them over the summer.

Mathnasium in Campbell -http://www.mathnasium.com/campbell
Math Squared in Saratoga - http://www.m2math.com/

Stanford's EPGY Program

Stanford has an Education Program for Gifted Youth with online courses in Math, Physics, English, Computer Programming and other subjects.  Math and English are available at the Elementary School Level.   Students are supposed to take an aptitude test to apply.   I have not enrolled my kids for any of the classes.  A friend has, and is quite happy with it so far.  

Dealing with a fidgety child

I was looking on the Web for how to get a fidgety child to learn.  I found this article on another blog.  I am including it here since I really like many of the ideas.   I have discovered that playing with a ball where I ask the question and throw the ball, and he answers and then throws the ball back works really well.  She is also right when she talks about how children love to learn by writing on a whiteboard.  That's how my son learned to read small words.  Overall, this is a great article for parents of hyperactive kids.

Teaching the Fidgety Child (Without Using Duct Tape)

by, Carol Barnier

I harbored in my mind such beautiful images of motherhood ... long before I was a mother, of course. It involved a calm, fresh-faced child nestled sweetly against my side, looking up with wide-eyed wonder and obvious appreciation for the seventh lovely little story I'd just read to her (or was that our eighth?). Why ... she might even feel compelled to tell me yet again, "You da bestest mommy in da hoe wood!" She would sleep long and peacefully from the moment I'd lay her down. She'd awaken cheerfully and be eager to please me. My love for my children would so permeate our home that all those problems I'd seen in other children would be just that . . . problems in other children. Well, God must have been watching that little picket-fence-fiction movie I'd created in my mind, and He decided to nip that puppy in the bud right off the bat. (That last statement, by the way, is a classic mixed metaphor. Feel free to use this in today's grammar lesson on how not to write.)

So after God chuckled, my first much-anticipated child came whirling into my life and plunged me into the world of an extremely active, even hyperactive, child who was eventually diagnosed with ADHD. Kathunk. Thus fell my lovely set of motherhood images. They were replaced with a gritty reality. The fresh-faced child of my vision was most often a constantly whirling face covered in something: dirt, charcoal, Daddy's shaving cream, or permanent markers.

But I loved him with a fierceness of a mother lion. And like all of you, I invested—deeply invested—in this child's academic and life successes. So when I began homeschooling, I did what any typical person would d I taught him with all the traditional methods that had been used in teaching me. The problem, however, was that I had just pulled my son out of a kindergarten that had been unsuccessful for him. Then I promptly went home and duplicated in every detail the very same traditional classroom methods that had just failed him.

You would think that it would have been obvious to me that new methods were needed. But I was slow to waken to this truth. After about six dreadful months of trying to force traditional methods into a very untraditional mind, I basically gave up and threw in the towel. I ditched standard methods and adopted a new statement of purpose: "We'll just see what works." And that's exactly what we did. By trying many things, things outside of my expectations, things that would never have been useful in teaching me, we began to accumulate a wealth of methods that were successful with the distractible child. We found things that worked. Not only was this child able to learn, but he was able to thrive. And homeschooling began to surge with energy and learning.

I learned many helpful and useful things, such as a daily to-do list is golden. This poor kid felt that even if he gathered up all his internal focusing abilities and put them to work with studied intensity on the task I'd given him, it simply wouldn't matter, because I'd happily chirp, "Great job! Here's your next task." The day seemed endless. He couldn't mentally prepare himself for the day's tasks because he had no idea just how many tasks he was preparing for. So we created the concrete specific list. With a clear set of objectives, he could gather his resources for the day.

I also learned that if I expected my son to actually learn anything, he simply must be moving. When I first began teaching him, I had bought into the idea that a child cannot really absorb what is being said unless he is sitting up straight, arms quiet, face forward, and eyes on the teacher—reverently, respectfully, with great focus and dare I say it . . . admiration. (Cue violins.) And while occasionally I was able to get him to mimic the required components of "the learning stance," it never seemed to result in actual learning.

What I couldn't see when he was sitting perfectly still was that in his head there are two processing tracks. One is for processing new information, but the other is more of a movement and stimulation track. In fact, it is more like a gerbil wheel, spinning and squeaking away furiously, trying desperately to not be overheard by those around him. The tension would build. His eyes would grow wide at the considerable effort. And, given enough time, he would implode. What I eventually learned was that while he perhaps looked like he was focusing on me, he was actually focused on the gerbil wheel spinning wildly and taking his mind to a variety of places, none of which had anything to do with the ancient Roman emperor I was telling him about.

  

I came to the conclusion that this child simply could not process new information unless he was in motion. Of all the things we learned in our years of homeschooling (he's 20 now), there is simply nothing more valuable than that realization.

So how do you do this? How do you take a math lesson that can drag into three hours and turn it into a fun activity that now takes only twelve minutes? How to you get him to do spelling when he hates writing? How do you get him to mentally "stay with you" when you want to read a long passage of a great book? Thankfully, there are many possibilities.

• Hand out the math one problem at a time. While you're working in the kitchen, take a small piece of scrap paper and write a single math problem on it. When he has done it correctly, he wads it up and shoots it into the basketball hoop (made from a hanger that you've hung in the kitchen).

• Go to the park. Have him climb to the top of the slide, but before he can "wheee" his way down, he has to spell five words correctly.

• Put the answers to math problems on 3 x 5 cards and spread them out on the floor. Read a problem off to him and let him jump on the answers. If you're doing multiplication, call out the answer and let him jump on the two cards that multiplied together create the answer.

• Do it on the whiteboard. For reasons I still cannot fully explain, problems of any sort done on a whiteboard are far less taxing than sitting at a table and working on paper. We can whip through a math lesson in about eight minutes this way.

• Instead of writing on paper, write spelling words in a tray of wet sand or across a nearly flattened bag filled with a bit of shaving cream.

• If you need for him to sit still and listen, you must give his hands something repetitive and mindless to do. Taking corn off of a cob, one at a time with tweezers, separating puff balls by size and color using chop sticks, putting a large bowl of pennies into the small slot of a bank one at a time. Mindless and repetitive. It will astound you how the child who couldn't stay focused through three sentences will now repeat back to you almost verbatim long passages of a shared story.

• Play WAR with cards, but instead of turning over just one card each per turn, flip over two each and let the highest sum take the hand (or highest product if multiplication is the current area of study).

• Cake Walk your learning. Put cards down on the floor in a way that creates a trail that circles back onto itself. (In other words, it's continuous.) Start playing a fun song on your CD player while your student walks along the trail. When you hit the pause button, to reveal his task he stops and flips over the card he's stepping on. Maybe it's a math problem. Maybe it's a vocabulary question. Maybe it's a symbol for an element from the Periodic Table of Elements. In other words, it's whatever subject you wanted to inject some fun into today. If he gets it right, the card is kept up. But if it's incorrect, it goes back into play for review. Keep playing till all the cards are up. Remember, this is called "Cake Walk." There's supposed to be a prize at the end. Cake still works, but so does a stick of gum.

• Toss a beanbag back and forth. Any information that is linear in nature can be learned this way. How about the books of the Bible? You say "Genesis" and toss the bag to your child. She says "Exodus" and tosses it back. This works for ABC's, skip counting, the spelling of individual words, poems (you say a line, they say the next line), pretty much any information with a beginning and an end.

We've found these little changes and so many more ideas to be the tools we needed to take an agonizing lesson and turn it into one that is filled with fun and enthusiasm. It takes a shift in thinking, but once you get used to it, you'll never go back to the days of the three-hour math lesson.

When I think back to my pre-child images of motherhood, some of them weren't so crazy. I do occasionally have a quiet child nestled beside me reading a book. But more often, I have a noisy, laughing bouncing child reciting his math facts while incessantly jumping on a rebounder. It's all good. Plus, I never have to tell this child to get up and get more exercise.

*This article published August 4, 2010.

Carol Barnier, author of The Big WHAT NOW Book of Learning Styles, is a popular conference speaker, frequent contributor to Focus on the Family's Weekend Magazine, and fellow homeschooler. Want her to speak to your group? Check out www.CarolBarnier.com and www.SizzleBop.com.

Teaching Chess

 There are tons of free chess software programs that can be downloaded.  However, I could not find an online tutor.  The best I could find was this site 

This site has a  set of games that can be observed move by move.  Once a child has learned the basic rules, these games can help build on those.

Dot to Dot

My three year old can't get enough of dot to dot puzzles.  These are great of reinforcing both letters and numbers.  She zipped through every dot to dot book in a matter of minutes.  So, finally looked for free dot to dot worksheets on the Web and found this - http://www.printactivities.com/ site.  The most exciting part of using this site was that my daughter got to pick what kind of picture she wanted to draw.  Of course, anything to do with printing out pages using the printer is always a hit with kids. :)