When my son wanted to study European Middle Ages, and we were living in Germany, I assigned him to "come up with a battle-plan to attack the Heidelberg Castle, using only materials and technology available in the Middle Ages". He had a ball! We hiked the hill that the castle sits on, went through the tours and asked a lot of questions, we talked to Germans who lived nearby to find out what it was like living near the castle, we went to the library and read books about the Middle Ages and military tactics of the age, we talked about what it was like to live in the city of Heidelberg in the days when it became the meeting point for armies from the north (Protestant) and the south (Catholic), we ate ice cream while we talked about what kinds of foods people ate in the Middle Ages, and so forth. We spent about a month touring, talking, studying, and learning. Then for a final project, he wrote a story about an old man sitting by the fireplace, talking to his grandchildren about the great battle that he led. Today, my son still loves to learn about the Middle Ages in Europe.
When my daughter was learning about "creative writing", she couldn't quite understand how to get the right creative writing juices flowing. She loved the project to make a silly sentence [We used a 3-ring binder and put sentence parts on each ring: noun phrases (My mother, The dog, Your friend, etc) went on the first ring; verbs went on the second ring (jumped, ran, flew, swam, etc); then the third ring held the prepositional phrases (over the moon, under the water, around the table, etc). Then flip through each stack of cards on each ring and randomly stop. You end up with silly sentences: "The dog swam around the table.", etc!], but she couldn't quite get over the mental hump of expanding the sentence into a story. The rule was that she could write about anything, but the silly sentence had to be in the story somewhere. After an emotional display of "I can't do it", we had to leave for her Girl Scouts meeting. When I was late to pick her up, I explained myself by telling an outlandish story about aliens who had scooped me up and whisked me off to outer space, then later dropped me on the other side of town. The Girl Scout leader was horrified that I was obviously lying to my daughter, but my daughter was laughing and laughing and finally understood the concept of the creative story.
When our young son was refusing to do any school work about Egypt (he wanted to skip it & move on to our unit on Greece), I made a deal with him that he could study anything he wanted about Egypt, but had to prove to me that he had learned something. He decided that the Egyptian gods would be interesting, and created a 27-page Power Point presentation on the Egyptian gods, complete with pictures, bullet points, and descriptions. I didn't know that he had even ever heard of Power Point, let along know how to use it! He learned, had fun, and we moved on to what was really interesting to him at that time.
One more ...
Have you ever had Spring Fever? We would get it bad every year, as April was a beautiful, warm, and sunny month, but May & June would be cold, gray, and overcast. Our children longed so much to be outside in the sun! So I planned a month of science experiments that could be done at the local pond. We would hike down the hill to the pond, racing between the exercise stations on the way, then we'd learn to draw the things we saw, we'd learn about the ducks that were choosing mates, the frogs "riding on each others' backs" and the strings of eggs, and tadpoles we later found in the pond, we talked to the sweet old folks who were also out on a walk to the pond, and tasted new foods for our lunch. Now, when our children are grown, they still talk about what fun it was to learn by being there, doing, and seeing things outside.
They might have read about those kinds of things in a book, but to actually do it, see it, feel it, and experience it was to truly learn it!
What have you learned today?!
I learned how organic molecules are attacked by other nucleophilic molecules through the anti-bonding molecular orbital. This attack breaks old bonds and forms new ones.
ReplyDeleteBut that's not the point. Making learning fun is a sign of great teaching. Unlike the Middle Ages we have a wide expanse of opportunities. A small-town kid from Idaho could get an education and cure cancer (hopefully that would be me). The point is that we want to do things that we like doing, and today we are more able to do what we like. Learning to have fun is good education.