- Take time when helping with homework to allow your child to write down words or concepts they need to remember.
- Give your child many real-life reasons to write. (Ex. Grocery list, to do list, letter to Grandparents)
- Encourage your child to keep personal journals and write about daily things that matter to him/her.
- When helping your children with multiple meanings of words, have them draw pictures that represent the different meanings of the word.
- When reading aloud to your children, ask them to visualize, or see what is happening in the story in their minds.
- Have your children draw each step in a multi step math word problem.
- Use food around the house as manipulatives (dry peas, beans, or macaroni) when practicing adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing.
Chapter 18
Make Memories
With Music
"The chances that new information will be remembered
are increased when that information is connected to relevant issues." - Sprenger, 2005
Metaphor, Analogy, Simile/
Mnemonic Devices
How Can I Make
It Happen?
Partner With Your Child's Teacher
Chapter 20
Comments and Questions
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How Can I Make It Happen?
- Be certain that the first interaction between you and your children's teachers is a positive one.
- Schedule periodic conferences with your children's teacher.
- Never let your children hear you criticize their teachers.
- Volunteer to participate in some school-sponosored functions.
- Volunteer to share your career choice or personal hobby or talent with the students in your children's school.
- When parents have children who have learning or behavior challenges, working hand-in-hand with the school is essential.
- Do not automatically believe everything your children tell you about what is happening at school.
Emotional Bank Account
- This concept also applies to the relationship between you and your children's teacher.
- It is imperative to work together with them to make decisions regarding what is best for your children.
- If you approach the relationship in a negative manner, then you are making withdrawals from the bank account that you and your children's teacher share.
- If you work together for what is best for your children, you will have established a strong bank account and great things can happen.
Action
Plan
- A parent's involvement in the schooling of the child affects the child's achievement and , in turn, influences the career choices and educational goals of the child.
- Even simple learning activities that children experience at home are effective ways that parents can use to help improve the academic success of their children at school.
Take Away
Make It Work For You
- Play calming or energetic music to set the mood.
- Provide the opportunity for your child to learn to play a musical instrument.
- Create songs to help children remember a concept.
- Use music to teach concepts.
Kinesthetic Learning
- The brain and body are made for movement!
- We are designed to stand, sit, stoop, squat, dance, hop, skip, and jump.
- In many classrooms, students are made to sit for long periods of time devoid of activity.
- Movement helps with procedural memory.
- Get your children up and moving when doing homework and watch their memory for content improve!
- Kinesthetic learning involves use of the whole body rather than just hands-on.
Advantages of Kinesthetic Activities
- Increases the brain's level of motivation
- Creates a positive state of learning
- Raises test scores
- Prepares body and brain to learn
- Increases attention, engagement, and participation levels
- Helps children more easily recall and retain information
The Math and Music Connection
Strengthen Your Child's Kinesthetic Mode of Learning
Of all the content area, mathematics
appears to be the one most closely
aligned to music. Music uses patterns
for notes and chords, counting for
beats, and rests, ratios, proportions,
fractions, and geometry for placement
of the fingers on the guitar. (Sousa, 2006)
Music and Memory
How Can I Make it Happen?
Tell me, I forget!
Show me, I remember!
Involve me, I understand!
-Old Chinese Proverb
Music can help children remember. They
can easily learn words to new songs since
the rhythms, contrasts, and patterns of music
help the brain encode new information.
(E. Jensen, 2005)
- Put movement into homework practice. For example, to help your child distinguish between common and proper nouns, have him stand if you read a proper noun and sit down if you read a common noun.
- Have children jump rope or clap while skip-counting.
- While reviewing vocabulary words, have them get up and act out, or role play, the word.
- Have your child dramatize part of a story that you have previously read to them or that they have read themselves.
Most anything you learned while you were physically involved or moving is more likely to end up in long-term memory.
Procedural Memory-Long Term Memory
Mnemonic Devices
- Another strategy that helps the brain connect ideas together.
- The word "mnemonic" comes from the Greek word "mnema", which means "memory".
- Recall and retention are increased when students are provided with mnemonic aid.
- 2 types: acronyms and acrostics
- An acronym is a word in which each letter of the word stands for the concept to be remembered.
- An acrostic is a sentence in which the first letter in each word of the sentence represents the first letter in the concept to be memorized.
For example, finish this phrase, "Like sands through the hour glass.....
......so are the days of our lives."
What about this commercial: "Like a good neighbor....
State Farm is there."
Metaphor, Analogy, Simile
- This is one of the best instructional strategies to use when helping your children understand a concept being taught in school.
- Metaphor -- compare 2 things without the use of "like" or "as" -- Example: The brain is a chain because it has many links.
- When children make connections with metaphors, their thinking is stretched and their understanding is increased.
- The knowledge of certain activities or procedures, which eventually become automatic with repetition and practice.
- Often used without conscious thought or planning.
- Examples include knowing how to ride a bike, how to swim, or how to play a musical instrument.
- Mostly anything you learned while you were physically involved or moving is more likely to end up in long-term memory.
Analogies and Similes
- Analogies can be invaluable since they give insight into students' inaccuracies and misconceptions regarding their knowledge of content.
- A simile compares two or more things using the words "like" or "as".
- Example: He was as quiet as a mouse.
- This strategy is used a great deal in the real world to help people see connections.
Music can change the
state of the brain.
For this reason, when you are
working with your children at
home, if you can find a way to
relate what you are trying to
get across to them to their
personal lives, the learning
appears to stick better and they
tend to remember the concept.
EXAMPLE
To teach the concept of ways in which the
layers of the earth settle:
Compare the layers to the way clothes are thrown in a laundry basket.
Question: When you are throwing clothes in a laundry basket over a period of time, where are the clothes that have been thrown in most recently?
Answer: On the top! This is the exact same way that sediment settles on the earth.
- When helping your children with homework, take a concept they are trying to remember and connect it to their lives.
- When helping your children write a paragraph, tell them that a paragraph should have a main idea and details.
Music has the remarkable
ability to relax or energize,
set the daily mood,
stimulate children's brains,
inspire, and make the learning fun.
(E. Jensen, 2009)
What Does That Mean?
- Use similes to connect things together.
- Use analogies to help children visualize similarities.
- Use metaphors to increase understanding.
- Use acronyms to help children remember content.
- Turn your children into detectives and have them find all of the acronyms they can in the real world. (NASA, CIA, IRS, NFL, etc.)
- Use acrostics to help children remember concepts.
- If your children are older, have them create their own mnemonic devices.
Connect Content
With Your Child's Life
Manipulatives
Drawing
When some children have trouble visualizing, they may need to draw pictures (Eide and Eide, 2006)
- Manipulatives can assist students in accelerating their ability in mathematics as well as science.
- Have children count objects, build a model, or conduct an experiment to help them comprehend a concept.
- The brain never outgrows its need for the hands-on activities.
- When people are involved in art activities, different areas of the brain are activated.
- Anything we draw, we have a better chance of remembering.
- Even many adults doodle as they sit in meetings or talk on the phone.
- Children do the same thing to help visualize as they learn.
Strengthen Your Child's Tactile Mode of Learning
How Can I Make it Happen?
Many children are hands-on learners and retain content better if they have an opportunity to use the three addition brain compatible strategies of writing, drawing, and manipulatives.
Writing
- Writing helps the brain remember.
- Writing enables children to become more proficient with language.
- Children need consistent and constant chances to write.
- Personal journals allow children to write down an important event or occurrence in their lives.
- Journals allow children to better process and understand their feelings related to that occurrence.
- Writing helps the brain to make meaning out of new information.