This whole blog series started because a friend asked me what books I recommended for her daughter, who is the fourth of five children and the only girl. They have plenty of boy books in their house but no girl books. My favorite books came from my grandmother, either as gifts or because I found them in her house. Most of these are discoveries from her.
Before we begin, you may ask why I did not include Little House on the Prairie or Elsie Dinsmore. I did not for two opposite reasons. Little House books are so classic and valuable that they are not restricted to girls (my 13 year old son has been taking them out of the library to listen to.) Elsie books, on the other hand, are contrived and forced. They are fairly well written, but I imagine very few children are as persecuted as she is at the same time coddled the way she is, never having put on her own stockings! The later ones are better, to my mind. So, here are my recommendations.
1 -- The Hundred Dresses -- Eleanor Estes. She is a wonderful writer. I'll talk about her books more in a later post. This book is a shorter one but it discusses the difficulties of a poor Polish girl who lives in a small town where her classmates make fun of her and how the other girls learn to be more thoughtful.
2 -- The Goat in the Rug -- Charles L. Blood and Martin Link. This is a short story that is a one-off of a Navajo woman making a goat's wool rug from start to finish -- from the goat's perspective. I just like it.
3 -- Heidi -- Johanna Spyri. You can't beat it. It's got everything: poor orphan, grumpy grandpa, animals, getting to run free in the mountains, Christian growth, a poor little rich girl, rich city house and miraculous healing of body and relationships. It's at the top of my list of girls' chapter books.
4 -- Little Women -- really, anything by Louisa May Alcott. They are fun, the characters are vivid and relatable, even today, and the goal is to be good, even knowing the characters' flaws. After Little Women, you may want to read:
5 -- Eight Cousins and its sequel, Rose in Bloom. There is also:
6 -- Jack and Jill. All of these are great for homeschoolers because the characters are almost all homeschooled! So was Louisa May Alcott. As a result, you get the usual unusual mix of ages and sexes in the interactions of the characters that is typical of homeschoolers.
7 -- Rumer Godden books. The first one my grandmother gave me at Christmas in San Fransisco when I was eight was The Dolls' House. If you are interested in including a little fun Japanese culture, she wrote Miss Happiness and Miss Flower and its sequel, Little Plum. Home is the Sailor was one that I read to my boys -- twice! -- because it is about a boy doll in a dolls house who promises to find the older brother doll and the father doll that were lost. He does. They are full of what might be called, "nursery fantasy," the notion that dolls have lives we are not aware of. However, they can only influence the children who play with them by wishing -- read, praying.
8 -- Carol Ryrie Brink. She wrote Caddie Woodlawn, a historical novel about Brink's real-life aunt, and Baby Island.
9 -- Frances Hodgson Burnett. Her three amazing children classics are A Little Princess, The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy. All three fall into what I would call the "orphan fantasy" genre. Though they all take place in England, the author is actually from the American South and these books were based on her fantasies as a poor young girl. However, they are beautifully written.
10 -- The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Joan Aiken. She is incredibly prolific but her stories are somewhat farfetched. But, I always like this one. Your children may like to read more of them.
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
The Best Books for Kids -- Early Chapter Books
Of course, with books, there are all different levels and different areas of interest. I'll be doing four more lists: General easy, General difficult, Books for Girls, Books for Boys. Here are our General easy chapter books.
1) Winnie-the Pooh! My favorite! Of course, it is classic Pooh, not Disney, and includes Winnie-the Pooh, the House at Pooh Corner, and poetry books (loads of fun!) When We Were Very Young and Now We are Six.
2) Charlotte's Web. This is the #1 bestselling children's paperback worldwide. It's a must. Along with that is E.B. White's other children's books, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan.
3) Basil of Baker Street. These are the stories the The Great Mouse Detective was based on. They are a mouse community that lives belowstairs from Sherlock Holmes. Basil models himself on Holmes!
4) The Rescuers. More anthropomorphic mouse stories that created Disney spinoffs. It is wonderful how the mice consider it to be their mission in life to support and encourage prisoners, just like St. Valentine in ancient Rome.
5) The Cricket in Times Square. More mice. But, it gives a taste of the inner city in New York along with classical music and the natural history of crickets!
6) William Steig. He writes stories about anthropomorphic animals such as Abel's Island, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and -- Shrek!
7) The Littles. For everyone who has ever imagined little people running around the house.
8) The Borrowers. More of the above.
9) Little Bear. This should probably go in the easy reader category, but it works here, too. Lovely pictures, simple stories.
10) Time Cat. Lloyd Alexander wrote a bunch of wonderful books, but this one was the first that I ever discovered. It is about a time-traveling cat who takes his master into nine different historical places. I learned so much out of this book. I still read it with my kids.
1) Winnie-the Pooh! My favorite! Of course, it is classic Pooh, not Disney, and includes Winnie-the Pooh, the House at Pooh Corner, and poetry books (loads of fun!) When We Were Very Young and Now We are Six.
2) Charlotte's Web. This is the #1 bestselling children's paperback worldwide. It's a must. Along with that is E.B. White's other children's books, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan.
3) Basil of Baker Street. These are the stories the The Great Mouse Detective was based on. They are a mouse community that lives belowstairs from Sherlock Holmes. Basil models himself on Holmes!
4) The Rescuers. More anthropomorphic mouse stories that created Disney spinoffs. It is wonderful how the mice consider it to be their mission in life to support and encourage prisoners, just like St. Valentine in ancient Rome.
5) The Cricket in Times Square. More mice. But, it gives a taste of the inner city in New York along with classical music and the natural history of crickets!
6) William Steig. He writes stories about anthropomorphic animals such as Abel's Island, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and -- Shrek!
7) The Littles. For everyone who has ever imagined little people running around the house.
8) The Borrowers. More of the above.
9) Little Bear. This should probably go in the easy reader category, but it works here, too. Lovely pictures, simple stories.
10) Time Cat. Lloyd Alexander wrote a bunch of wonderful books, but this one was the first that I ever discovered. It is about a time-traveling cat who takes his master into nine different historical places. I learned so much out of this book. I still read it with my kids.
The Best Books for Kids -- Early Books
A friend recently asked me for a list of girls' books because she has one daughter in houseful of boys. As you may know from my previous articles, I am nuts about books! The best books came from my grandmother, who was an English and Speech teacher. I either found them in her house or she gave them to me. So, I am going to give you my ten favorite books by category, either by author or title.
The first category is Easy, but I'm assuming your kids are pretty good readers.
1) Mother Goose. Can't top this. The kids love the rhythm and rhyme. I saw Mother Goose's grave in Boston at the age of nine and was completely thrilled. I didn't know she was a real person!
2) Grimms' Fairy Tales. Don't get the Disney version. The import is lost if Little Red Riding Hood doesn't get eaten.
3) Ferdinand. I discovered this as a child. I just love the artwork and the "sit just quietly."
4) James Arnosky. He writes non-fiction about nature and does the watercolor illustrations himself. It is quiet and beautiful.
5) Robert McCloskey. Remember Blueberries for Sal? Make Way for Ducklings? That's him.
6) Thomas the Tank Engine. The early days. It is fun with flawed characters and a message about pleasing God. The later books dropped away from the message to simple entertainment.
7) Llama, Llama, Red Pajama. My daughter loves reading this with her kids. The rhythm, rhyme, and typical conflict (going to bed) are wonderful for developing relationship with your kids.
8) Beatrix Potter. Of course! Greatest adventure stories in the nursery!
9) ABC books, especially Handmade Alphabet. I started teaching my kids reading from a curriculum. By kid number 4, I was teaching them just with ABC books. Handmade Alphabet has no words but has beautiful colored pencil drawings of hands in the International Manual alphabet. My later kids learned the manual alphabet along with the printed alphabet and it helped their decoding tremendously.
10) Dr. Seuss. We couldn't do without him. The first books I remember reading were Green Eggs and Ham and Hop On Pop. Historically, he rejuvenated the phonics method of reading and got us out of the purgatory of Dick and Jane.
}/
The first category is Easy, but I'm assuming your kids are pretty good readers.
1) Mother Goose. Can't top this. The kids love the rhythm and rhyme. I saw Mother Goose's grave in Boston at the age of nine and was completely thrilled. I didn't know she was a real person!
2) Grimms' Fairy Tales. Don't get the Disney version. The import is lost if Little Red Riding Hood doesn't get eaten.
3) Ferdinand. I discovered this as a child. I just love the artwork and the "sit just quietly."
4) James Arnosky. He writes non-fiction about nature and does the watercolor illustrations himself. It is quiet and beautiful.
5) Robert McCloskey. Remember Blueberries for Sal? Make Way for Ducklings? That's him.
6) Thomas the Tank Engine. The early days. It is fun with flawed characters and a message about pleasing God. The later books dropped away from the message to simple entertainment.
7) Llama, Llama, Red Pajama. My daughter loves reading this with her kids. The rhythm, rhyme, and typical conflict (going to bed) are wonderful for developing relationship with your kids.
8) Beatrix Potter. Of course! Greatest adventure stories in the nursery!
9) ABC books, especially Handmade Alphabet. I started teaching my kids reading from a curriculum. By kid number 4, I was teaching them just with ABC books. Handmade Alphabet has no words but has beautiful colored pencil drawings of hands in the International Manual alphabet. My later kids learned the manual alphabet along with the printed alphabet and it helped their decoding tremendously.
10) Dr. Seuss. We couldn't do without him. The first books I remember reading were Green Eggs and Ham and Hop On Pop. Historically, he rejuvenated the phonics method of reading and got us out of the purgatory of Dick and Jane.
}/
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
The Oldest of Old-Fashioned Lessons -- Read Great Books!
A liberal education, where one is exposed to all manner of views should confirm whatever is right and good. In college, studying Plato confirmed my faith because it lined up in its arguments with the Bible. Studying the Buddhist scriptures confirmed my Christian faith because it seemed very far-fetched that a real man would have been born to a princess with 200 ladies in attendance and a white elephant passing by at the very moment of his birth. Talk about a fairy tale! Books postulating strange sociological experiments, such as Walden II, proved useless me practically and emotionally when I got pregnant during my freshman year of college. But, the Bible comforted me and Christians supported me.
Allan Bloom's concern as expressed in The Closing of the American Mind back in the 1980s was that students were coming to college not to have their minds broadened through the great thought of the millenia but to be confirmed in their own agendas by dismissing those great thoughts out of hand simply because the authors were white and male and, ergo, privileged. I have had discussions with my scary-smart teenage niece who said, in so many words, that because the classic authors came from a privileged class of white men, they should be dismissed as irrelevant to our culture.
Her argument in 2020 is not new. Bloom was running into it forty years ago. But, culture is transient. The 2020s American culture is different from the 1980s culture, which is different from the 1950s, from the 1920s, from the 1880s. But, morality, which is the subject of all great thought through the ages, is universal in every culture. How do I relate to God? How do I relate to my fellow man? What is the nature of good? Is man capable of being good? No matter where or when you live, these questions govern our lives and must be studied if we are to be more than animals. Classic literature, old lessons, address these, no matter who wrote them. Questions of race or sexism are secondary to those issues but progressives would make them primary. Why do you think they would skip over the primary issue -- "how should I behave toward my fellow man?" -- to the secondary issue -- "how should others behave?" Isn't it so that they can continue to do as they please while other people are required to change?
Alan Paton was a white South African who wrote anti-apartheid novels while running a reformatory for black South African youth in the 1960s and 70s. He was addressing how people should treat one another -- an issue of morality -- and, as a white man, his books admitted a need for whites to treat all humans equally.
Ghandi, in a famous speech givin in South African (you can see it in the 1982 film, Ghandi) said, "I am willing to die for what I believe. I am not willing to kill for it." While he was trying to change how society treated each other, the most important issue for him was, "How do I behave toward my fellow men?"
This is all part of the Synthesis that your children will go through as they determine what is important to them and how they will live their lives. And, our job as parents is to be an example that change starts with me, not the other guy. Whether it is Socrates' argument to his disciples against escaping Athens illegally when he had been unjustly condemned to death, or Tolstoy's juxtaposition of a life lived for others as opposed to a life lived for self in Anna Karenina, Shakespeare's argument for mercy in The Merchant of Venice -- because if we live by the law, every letter of the law must be followed -- Jane Austen's observation that the more prideful one is, the more prejudiced one is both for and against his fellow man, or Tolkein's lesson that even the smallest person doing the right thing can change the world, the classics address this question: "What must I do?" It is the greatest of all the Old-Fashioned Lessons. If someone makes the point of their education all about them -- "How should the world treat me?" -- what a small world it would be! "How should I treat others?" causes us to look out instead of in. It broadens our world. How I treat my fellow man is a pertinent question anywhere in the world, on a farm in Wisconsin, in downtown Tokyo or in the Amazon jungle. But, progressives of all stamps are only pertinent in their own environments. Racism against blacks or hispanics disappears if they move to different countries where the majority of people are black or hispanic. Radical feminism is the most prevalent worldwide in countries where women have the most freedom to express themselves. I have not heard of a huge movement of American feminists taking action in Saudi Arabia or Iran for those women's rights. Switzerland, the last country in the western world to grant women the right to vote, was the only country to do so by referendum -- which means that MEN voted for women to have the right to vote. The point being that culture as a focus of education is destined to become irrelevant wherever it is.
Allan Bloom asked his Introduction classes, "What books really count for you?" A few people said, "The Bible," but the students rarely studied it after leaving home. Books don't matter to us, anymore. But, they should. We know what someone means when they call someone, "a Scrooge," or "Eeyore-ish." This is because of a common literary tradition that gives depth of feeling as well as of moral understanding. Allan Bloom says that classic literature gives students models of good and bad and, ". . . a fund of shared experiences and thoughts on which to ground their friendships with one another." (Bloom, Allan; The Closing of the American Mind; Simon and Schuster; New York; c. 1987; p. 344.) We can't communicate with each other on a deeper level if our entertainment is limited to pop culture through TV, movies, pop music, the latest vampire romance, dystopian novels or agenda-steeped social media. All those things are light, shallow, fleeting. Unless your media has passed the test of time, its influence on the world is insignificant. It is the difference between dipping out a puddle with a spoon or dipping out a pool with a bucket.
But, look how much time we spend on all that fluff! It's not as if people haven't been writing or painting or composing fluff over the millenia in dozens of languages. But, only the great lasted, the stuff that truly is life-changing. Even great authors rarely produce uniformly great books. Shakespeare's hack-and-slash lay Titus Andronicus, simply doesn't match up to Hamlet or Julius Caesar. Herman Melville wrote a couple of popular sea adventures, then wrote Moby Dick, which Mark Twain considered to be the only great book of world literature ever produced in America. It was a financial failure, none of his other books were worth much and he died in poverty working as a customs agent. Even Jane Austen's books, which are unusual in that they are all still in print, include Northanger Abbey, a farce on contemporary gothic novels which is a little bewildering to the modern reader.
How many great French books can you name? Les Miserable and The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Spanish? Don Quixote. German? Mostly poets -- Goethe and Schiller -- and philosophers such as Kant and Nietzsche. Russian? A little more there: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov. There is just not a lot of literature that can be called great. So, instead of spending our lives on mountains of trash that add nothing to our lives, we should study great literature, the lives of great people and see what we can learn from them. They will give us a solid foundation.
Allan Bloom's concern as expressed in The Closing of the American Mind back in the 1980s was that students were coming to college not to have their minds broadened through the great thought of the millenia but to be confirmed in their own agendas by dismissing those great thoughts out of hand simply because the authors were white and male and, ergo, privileged. I have had discussions with my scary-smart teenage niece who said, in so many words, that because the classic authors came from a privileged class of white men, they should be dismissed as irrelevant to our culture.
Her argument in 2020 is not new. Bloom was running into it forty years ago. But, culture is transient. The 2020s American culture is different from the 1980s culture, which is different from the 1950s, from the 1920s, from the 1880s. But, morality, which is the subject of all great thought through the ages, is universal in every culture. How do I relate to God? How do I relate to my fellow man? What is the nature of good? Is man capable of being good? No matter where or when you live, these questions govern our lives and must be studied if we are to be more than animals. Classic literature, old lessons, address these, no matter who wrote them. Questions of race or sexism are secondary to those issues but progressives would make them primary. Why do you think they would skip over the primary issue -- "how should I behave toward my fellow man?" -- to the secondary issue -- "how should others behave?" Isn't it so that they can continue to do as they please while other people are required to change?
Alan Paton was a white South African who wrote anti-apartheid novels while running a reformatory for black South African youth in the 1960s and 70s. He was addressing how people should treat one another -- an issue of morality -- and, as a white man, his books admitted a need for whites to treat all humans equally.
Ghandi, in a famous speech givin in South African (you can see it in the 1982 film, Ghandi) said, "I am willing to die for what I believe. I am not willing to kill for it." While he was trying to change how society treated each other, the most important issue for him was, "How do I behave toward my fellow men?"
This is all part of the Synthesis that your children will go through as they determine what is important to them and how they will live their lives. And, our job as parents is to be an example that change starts with me, not the other guy. Whether it is Socrates' argument to his disciples against escaping Athens illegally when he had been unjustly condemned to death, or Tolstoy's juxtaposition of a life lived for others as opposed to a life lived for self in Anna Karenina, Shakespeare's argument for mercy in The Merchant of Venice -- because if we live by the law, every letter of the law must be followed -- Jane Austen's observation that the more prideful one is, the more prejudiced one is both for and against his fellow man, or Tolkein's lesson that even the smallest person doing the right thing can change the world, the classics address this question: "What must I do?" It is the greatest of all the Old-Fashioned Lessons. If someone makes the point of their education all about them -- "How should the world treat me?" -- what a small world it would be! "How should I treat others?" causes us to look out instead of in. It broadens our world. How I treat my fellow man is a pertinent question anywhere in the world, on a farm in Wisconsin, in downtown Tokyo or in the Amazon jungle. But, progressives of all stamps are only pertinent in their own environments. Racism against blacks or hispanics disappears if they move to different countries where the majority of people are black or hispanic. Radical feminism is the most prevalent worldwide in countries where women have the most freedom to express themselves. I have not heard of a huge movement of American feminists taking action in Saudi Arabia or Iran for those women's rights. Switzerland, the last country in the western world to grant women the right to vote, was the only country to do so by referendum -- which means that MEN voted for women to have the right to vote. The point being that culture as a focus of education is destined to become irrelevant wherever it is.
Allan Bloom asked his Introduction classes, "What books really count for you?" A few people said, "The Bible," but the students rarely studied it after leaving home. Books don't matter to us, anymore. But, they should. We know what someone means when they call someone, "a Scrooge," or "Eeyore-ish." This is because of a common literary tradition that gives depth of feeling as well as of moral understanding. Allan Bloom says that classic literature gives students models of good and bad and, ". . . a fund of shared experiences and thoughts on which to ground their friendships with one another." (Bloom, Allan; The Closing of the American Mind; Simon and Schuster; New York; c. 1987; p. 344.) We can't communicate with each other on a deeper level if our entertainment is limited to pop culture through TV, movies, pop music, the latest vampire romance, dystopian novels or agenda-steeped social media. All those things are light, shallow, fleeting. Unless your media has passed the test of time, its influence on the world is insignificant. It is the difference between dipping out a puddle with a spoon or dipping out a pool with a bucket.
But, look how much time we spend on all that fluff! It's not as if people haven't been writing or painting or composing fluff over the millenia in dozens of languages. But, only the great lasted, the stuff that truly is life-changing. Even great authors rarely produce uniformly great books. Shakespeare's hack-and-slash lay Titus Andronicus, simply doesn't match up to Hamlet or Julius Caesar. Herman Melville wrote a couple of popular sea adventures, then wrote Moby Dick, which Mark Twain considered to be the only great book of world literature ever produced in America. It was a financial failure, none of his other books were worth much and he died in poverty working as a customs agent. Even Jane Austen's books, which are unusual in that they are all still in print, include Northanger Abbey, a farce on contemporary gothic novels which is a little bewildering to the modern reader.
How many great French books can you name? Les Miserable and The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Spanish? Don Quixote. German? Mostly poets -- Goethe and Schiller -- and philosophers such as Kant and Nietzsche. Russian? A little more there: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov. There is just not a lot of literature that can be called great. So, instead of spending our lives on mountains of trash that add nothing to our lives, we should study great literature, the lives of great people and see what we can learn from them. They will give us a solid foundation.
Friday, September 6, 2019
Old-Fashioned Lessons: The Analog Clock
Telling time. It's one of the first things we start teaching kindergartners. I remember the model clock in my kindergarten class. It had a huge wooden face with big, red plastic hands and big black numbers.
The public schools are not teaching time on an analog clock, anymore. There are so many children who have difficulty with analog clocks that they just skip over it, since we have digital clocks that can do the job. But, analog clocks show so much more than time.
An analog clock shows the passage of time in a way that a digital clock cannot. A child learns to "feel" time when he sees that five minutes is a small amount and a half hour is a large amount of time.
Reading an analog clock requires using both the left and the right brains since it is read globally and spatially, as a child learns to divide it into quarters (right brain), while teaching counting skills in ones, fives and fifteens and math fundamentals in base 10, base 12 and base 60 (left brain).
Reading an analog clock gives a foundation for advanced mathematics. Clock reading makes the angles in geometry more familiar than they would be if they hadn't seen them before. Geography and angle measurements are based on clocks. Every degree in an angle (and on a globe) has 60 minutes. Every minute has 60 seconds. The earth rotates 360 degrees one time in 24 hours. When navigators were learning how to measure the rotation of the earth and degrees of longitude (to find out where they were), they used clocks.
Without an understanding of the analog clock, there are so many other things that a child will not be able to understand. While it is, in fact, more difficult to teach a child to read an analog clock, it will stretch him in ways beyond his kindergarten skills and literally show him a wider world.
The public schools are not teaching time on an analog clock, anymore. There are so many children who have difficulty with analog clocks that they just skip over it, since we have digital clocks that can do the job. But, analog clocks show so much more than time.
An analog clock shows the passage of time in a way that a digital clock cannot. A child learns to "feel" time when he sees that five minutes is a small amount and a half hour is a large amount of time.
Reading an analog clock requires using both the left and the right brains since it is read globally and spatially, as a child learns to divide it into quarters (right brain), while teaching counting skills in ones, fives and fifteens and math fundamentals in base 10, base 12 and base 60 (left brain).
Reading an analog clock gives a foundation for advanced mathematics. Clock reading makes the angles in geometry more familiar than they would be if they hadn't seen them before. Geography and angle measurements are based on clocks. Every degree in an angle (and on a globe) has 60 minutes. Every minute has 60 seconds. The earth rotates 360 degrees one time in 24 hours. When navigators were learning how to measure the rotation of the earth and degrees of longitude (to find out where they were), they used clocks.
Without an understanding of the analog clock, there are so many other things that a child will not be able to understand. While it is, in fact, more difficult to teach a child to read an analog clock, it will stretch him in ways beyond his kindergarten skills and literally show him a wider world.
Saturday, August 10, 2019
Old-Fashioned Lessons: Drills
Fun, huh? Not! But, oh, so important!
Drills are part of memorization. For the Grammar stage of subjects such as playing musical instruments and sports, drills are physical rather than mental or verbal. Drills, once again, form neural pathways. During the Olympics several years ago, they put up a quote: "An amateur practices until he gets it right; a professional practices until he can't get it wrong."
Just as you don't have to think when you pick up a pencil, by physically or mentally drilling you get to where you don't have to think about what you are doing. The more neural pathways are formed, the more capability a person of any age will have.
I started learning my first instrument, the flute, at age 9. I began my second, the piano, at age 10. Visiting my aunt at age 11, I dabbled with her recorder, which she then gave me. I sprained my pinky finger in gym when I was 12, so I picked up my mother's mandolin and was playing the theme to Romeo and Juliet by the end of the evening. My parent brought me home a mountain dulcimer from a vacation they took to the Appalachians when I was 18 and I play it regularly in church. I then went to college and got a degree in Music Education, learning eleven more instruments.
Here's the thing: I don't believe I had more than a little bit of talent. I had a lot of friends at school who played far better than I did. My college advisor complimented me on how easily I picked up instruments to my junior high supervising teacher. The supervising teacher didn't think I deserved much credit! Simply learning one instrument taught me how to learn the next and each instrument forged new neural pathways, making each subsequent instrument that much easier to learn.
The same thing has been documented in learning new languages.Even just in the skills of housework, learning to clean one type of surface teaches you skills that transfer to other surfaces, both visually -- what does clean look like? -- and physically -- what does the surface feel like when dirty or clean and what movements are used to clean? Drilling information makes it yours so you don't have to count on your fingers to know what 7 X 8 equals.
A friend's husband was deployed from the National Guard to Afghanistan in September. He would be returning the following September, but his unit didn't leave the country until March! What were they doing all that time? Drilling! They were training for 6 months of the time that they were paid to be full-time soldiers. Drilling would get them to the point that they responded automatically in crisis situations when they didn't have time to think.
Our family does a Doctrinal Drill that is part of the Bible Lessons from Christ-Centered Curriculum for Early Childhood. Along with reading through the major events of the Bible, they learn a catechism that teaches them over 70 verses in support of the main doctrines of the church and for application to life. Since this is our family Bible time, every child in the family studies it from age 2 to when they graduate high school. The drill has made those verses a solid block in their memories. In life situations or in family discussions, we'll ask them what the Bible says about this (whatever it is) and it is wonderful how often they will pluck a verse out of their Doctrinal Drill and apply it perfectly. Awana Clubs do this as well, with review built into every level, and many verses expanded in each succeeding book.
Children (and adults!) complain about drills. But, to make any skill go from short-term, temporary, fluid, electrical memory to long-term, concrete, crystalline, chemical memory requires hundreds of repetitions. No fun, but so helpful!
Drills are part of memorization. For the Grammar stage of subjects such as playing musical instruments and sports, drills are physical rather than mental or verbal. Drills, once again, form neural pathways. During the Olympics several years ago, they put up a quote: "An amateur practices until he gets it right; a professional practices until he can't get it wrong."
Just as you don't have to think when you pick up a pencil, by physically or mentally drilling you get to where you don't have to think about what you are doing. The more neural pathways are formed, the more capability a person of any age will have.
I started learning my first instrument, the flute, at age 9. I began my second, the piano, at age 10. Visiting my aunt at age 11, I dabbled with her recorder, which she then gave me. I sprained my pinky finger in gym when I was 12, so I picked up my mother's mandolin and was playing the theme to Romeo and Juliet by the end of the evening. My parent brought me home a mountain dulcimer from a vacation they took to the Appalachians when I was 18 and I play it regularly in church. I then went to college and got a degree in Music Education, learning eleven more instruments.
Here's the thing: I don't believe I had more than a little bit of talent. I had a lot of friends at school who played far better than I did. My college advisor complimented me on how easily I picked up instruments to my junior high supervising teacher. The supervising teacher didn't think I deserved much credit! Simply learning one instrument taught me how to learn the next and each instrument forged new neural pathways, making each subsequent instrument that much easier to learn.
The same thing has been documented in learning new languages.Even just in the skills of housework, learning to clean one type of surface teaches you skills that transfer to other surfaces, both visually -- what does clean look like? -- and physically -- what does the surface feel like when dirty or clean and what movements are used to clean? Drilling information makes it yours so you don't have to count on your fingers to know what 7 X 8 equals.
A friend's husband was deployed from the National Guard to Afghanistan in September. He would be returning the following September, but his unit didn't leave the country until March! What were they doing all that time? Drilling! They were training for 6 months of the time that they were paid to be full-time soldiers. Drilling would get them to the point that they responded automatically in crisis situations when they didn't have time to think.
Our family does a Doctrinal Drill that is part of the Bible Lessons from Christ-Centered Curriculum for Early Childhood. Along with reading through the major events of the Bible, they learn a catechism that teaches them over 70 verses in support of the main doctrines of the church and for application to life. Since this is our family Bible time, every child in the family studies it from age 2 to when they graduate high school. The drill has made those verses a solid block in their memories. In life situations or in family discussions, we'll ask them what the Bible says about this (whatever it is) and it is wonderful how often they will pluck a verse out of their Doctrinal Drill and apply it perfectly. Awana Clubs do this as well, with review built into every level, and many verses expanded in each succeeding book.
Children (and adults!) complain about drills. But, to make any skill go from short-term, temporary, fluid, electrical memory to long-term, concrete, crystalline, chemical memory requires hundreds of repetitions. No fun, but so helpful!
Friday, August 2, 2019
Old-Fashioned Lessons -- Memorizing
How boring!
Who likes to memorize? And, everyone always talks about how hard it is. But, if you read Little House on the Prairie books or Tom Sawyer or Elsie Dinsmore, that was what they did. Every lesson was memorized. Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't actually write a single thing until she was sixteen years old. It wasn't required.
The basis of Western education for over a thousand years was the Trivium, meaning, where three roads meet. Those consisted of the the Grammar (Memorizing), the Dialectic (Logic) and Rhetoric (Speaking or teaching). We are going to focus on the foundation: Grammar.
Whether it is a child or a subject, if you skip the Grammar/Memorizing skills and principles, you will never progress beyond it. Children are wired to be champion memorizers from before age 5 to about age 11. But, if they practice memorizing a lot, their brain actually forms more connections so that they memorize even better! Every subject has its Grammar, or foundation principles and you cannot proceed in that subject unless you have learned them.
I once worked with a 10 year old for three weeks on memorizing a single verse in Awana. She ought to have been at the tail end of the Grammar phase of development, about to start the Dialectic/Logic phase. But, not having learned to memorize at a young age (thank you, public schools), the synaptic pathways had not been formed and she was almost incapable of memorizing. She was not prepared to learn any kind of logic.
Dorothy Sayers, friend and fellow teacher of Tolkein and C.S. Lewis, in her essay, "Discovering the Lost Tools of Learning," advises that you have your 6-12 year olds memorize.
Anything.
Bible verses, nursery rhymes, dinosaur names, the Periodic Table of Elements, the Gettysburg Address, the days of the week, anything. It forges pathways in the brain and makes learning Dialectic/Logic and Rhetoric/Teaching possible.
Who likes to memorize? And, everyone always talks about how hard it is. But, if you read Little House on the Prairie books or Tom Sawyer or Elsie Dinsmore, that was what they did. Every lesson was memorized. Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't actually write a single thing until she was sixteen years old. It wasn't required.
The basis of Western education for over a thousand years was the Trivium, meaning, where three roads meet. Those consisted of the the Grammar (Memorizing), the Dialectic (Logic) and Rhetoric (Speaking or teaching). We are going to focus on the foundation: Grammar.
Whether it is a child or a subject, if you skip the Grammar/Memorizing skills and principles, you will never progress beyond it. Children are wired to be champion memorizers from before age 5 to about age 11. But, if they practice memorizing a lot, their brain actually forms more connections so that they memorize even better! Every subject has its Grammar, or foundation principles and you cannot proceed in that subject unless you have learned them.
I once worked with a 10 year old for three weeks on memorizing a single verse in Awana. She ought to have been at the tail end of the Grammar phase of development, about to start the Dialectic/Logic phase. But, not having learned to memorize at a young age (thank you, public schools), the synaptic pathways had not been formed and she was almost incapable of memorizing. She was not prepared to learn any kind of logic.
Dorothy Sayers, friend and fellow teacher of Tolkein and C.S. Lewis, in her essay, "Discovering the Lost Tools of Learning," advises that you have your 6-12 year olds memorize.
Anything.
Bible verses, nursery rhymes, dinosaur names, the Periodic Table of Elements, the Gettysburg Address, the days of the week, anything. It forges pathways in the brain and makes learning Dialectic/Logic and Rhetoric/Teaching possible.
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