The River as an Educational Resource

Whether you are a home educator or a classroom teacher, if you have a river nearby, you have a wonderful educational resource. I live near the Salinas River and often hike the Salinas River Trail in Larry Moore Park in Paso Robles. It normally has water only a few months of the year, and only if there’s a normal amount of rain. Most of the year the Salinas River is subterranean. You don’t see the water. The river normally appears during winter, and I usually start searching for water around January. This year, though, we had our heavy rains start earlier than usual. So I went out in search of the river today, December 28, 2012. I found it.

Water in Salinas River flowing north toward Niblick Bridge, Paso Robles

I followed the river bed for some distance, since I always get excited about what I see. Today it struck me how much science there is to investigate in the river and the riverbed.

Is there a story under this willow?

As I walked along the edge of the river, I saw these small clumps of willows everywhere. Those closest to the west channel, which always stays full of water the longest, seemed to live on top of brush piles. Let’s take a closer look at one of these. Do you think a child might wonder how all this material happened to be under this willow? Might one try identifying different types of trees from what’s in these piles? What might one learn about a river by observing this small tree?

What’s under this willow?

Although the overall impression as one walks along the river in late December is colorless brown and tan branches and dead leaves, some plants show they are very much alive, or host things that are. On the ground beneath are new weed seedlings. There are red buds on some of the twigs. Moss and lichens also add color. Children turned loose with a hand-held microscope would have fun discovering this variety of mosses and lichens of different colors and identifying the new weed seedlings.

Do you see all the colors here?

Children would also be fascinated at all they can see growing on a rock.

What grows on a rock in winter?

Not all growing on this rock is moss or lichen. We also see green seedlings. They need soil. How did soil get on this rock? How about the weed seeds? Is soil created on the rock itself? Or does it all blow into crevices? And why does the rock itself look the way it does? How was it created? There is geology as well as life science to be learned. All these questions can be answered through research and observation. As a teacher, you can inspire the curiosity that will make students want to solve the mysteries.

If you aren’t in a position to take your students on a field trip, you can at least make the trip to the river yourself with a camera. Take the pictures that will arouse interest in what you want students to learn. And don’t forget the videos. Watch the river’s current. Study the rocks in the riverbed to try to understand how they became what they are. You can even collect a few rocks to bring into the classroom. Here are some specimens I found.

Egg-Shaped Rock and Some Other River Rocks

Interesting River Rocks and Milk Thistle Seedlings

New Consumer Math Series for Adolescents and Adults

The Mathematics of Banking and Credit

I am happy to announce that Steck-Vaughn has finally published a series of six  consumer math workbooks that go into detail on math subjects of great interest to teens and adults. These books are designed for classroom use in high schools, job training centers, and even junior colleges. The books can also be used for self-instruction at home.

Each 160-page book begins with instruction in basic math operations and concepts with whole numbers, fractions, and decimals, and percents. There is also help with solving real-life problems and interpreting data from tables and graphs.  The books also teach how to not only use a calculator, but also how to compute mentally and estimate — all necessary skills in the world of work.  The instruction pages at the beginning section of each book are the same, but the practice problems and tests are different. All student pages are reproducible for classroom use and answers for exercises are provided at the back of each book.

Once the student has finished the first section on basic math, each book has distinctly different instruction and practice in line with its title topic. Topics of books in the series include

• Housing and Taxes
• Banking and Credit
• Work
• Automobiles and Transportation
• Personal Finance and Investments
• Trades and Professions

Because each book is so specialized, a general class in consumer math might need to use all of them, whereas classes built around a special interest might only need one or two books to fit a math module into a unit study for a  class focused on learning what’s involved with car ownership, math in the workplace, or some other narrow topic.

Teachers using these books will not have to explain to their students why they might need to learn the skills covered. Everything taught has practical applications in the real world and that is reflceted in both the practice problems and the illustrations. Each book also has practice forms and supporting resources related to its topic. Example: the Trades and Professions book includes a Unit Estimate Sheet and  Job Application. The supporting materials in the book include a chart of  Fraction, Decimal and Percent Equivalents, a chart of Formulas for Perimeter, Area, and Volume, a Conversion Chart of measurements, a chart for Plumbing Measurements and Conversions, an Advertising Rates chart, and a graph of Education and Job Opportunities. Each book also includes a topic-specific Glossary.

For more specific information about what is included in each title, see our new Consumer Math Page, which includes all of our books one can use for consumer math. If you are more interested in books organized by specific math skills that are needed in the workplace, you might also check out the Math Skills for the Workforce books. You can order individual titles at discounted prices by following the title links on our web site to their shopping cart pages on our secure server at tomfolio.com. These books can also be ordered with a school purchase order.

It’s Time to Teach the World Geography in Earnest

Building Skills by Exploring Maps: The World

I remember in high school I took a ninth grade geography class, but it didn’t mean much to me. About all I can recall from that class was that the teacher had a habit of writing on the board and then sitting on her desk with her feet dangling very near the trash can beside it. We spent most of the time as we listened to her talk of products and regions, etc, waiting for the big moment that usually came — the moment the teacher would get off her desk. Very often, on her way to the classroom floor, she would land in the waste basket, and we anticipated it every day. What I don’t remember is if we ever saw a map of the world. We must have, but I don’t remember it.

I inherited a lack of interest in geography from my mother, who told me she used to keep a book she’d rather read inside her geography book in class. I think my first interest in the subject surfaced when I was homeschooling my children. A couple of things happened during those years that rekindled that interest. First we read a lot of books aloud that were set throughout the United States. We found an old AAA map of the USA and put it on the hall wall. As we read each book, we would use a map tack to pin the name of the book in the place it was set in. Later, we actually visited many of the placed we had read about and pinned.That travel helped all of us learn more about the geography of our country. Here’s how we incorporated this travel into our homeschool curriculum.

We got more interested in world geography when Desert Storm, the first war in Iraq took place. We used a globe and a map of the Middle East in a reproducible book we had so that we could follow what was happening as we got the news reports each day. All of a sudden what was happening in that part of the world became very relevant to our lives. We decided it was  a good time to study the Middle East and why it was important.

I’m wondering how many of our young people today would be able to find Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Egypt, or Israel on a map or globe quickly , and how many could give at least one reason why the United States is interested in them.  Perhaps someday soon I will conduct my own student in the street interview and find out.

When your students look back at the geography they learned in your class or at home, what do you think  they will remember?  Parents, do you ever get out the globe or a map after the news and see if your children can find the places the news anchors pointed to or talked about? Do you discuss the news with your children? Could you find these places yourself?

Teachers, do you care about what’s happening in far away countries? Do you know how to make your students understand what those countries  have to do with their lives? Or are they reading a textbook and memorizing population figures or product lists that they will soon forget after they are tested? The future of the world will someday be in the hands of today’s students? Will they know much about that world?  The answer is partly up to you.

The Election Season Seems to Have Started

We just got the results of the Straw Poll in Iowa today, and whatever you think  of them, they are evidence that the presidential campaigns are in full swing. Even some preliminary debates have occurred as candidates vie with each other to look electable.

Educators at home and in schools need to be ready to answer student questions about what they are seeing and hearing in the news. It’s time for students to learn more about the election process. That’s why Barb’s People Builders is ready to help you find just the right resources to help you teach your children or students what elections are all about .

You might want a simulation of the election process that your class in grades 4-8 can enact in a week of class time such as Electing the President: The Electoral Process in Action.  If you prefer hands-on activites for students in grades three or over for teaching about the forms of government, voting, and elections in the United States, including the Electoral College, Elections in the U.S.A. Activity Book might be just what you are looking for. It’s companion, Elections in the U.S.A. Photo Activity Cards, provides photos for bulletin boards, as well as research and hands-on activities for groups and individuals on the back.  If you are teaching at the high school level, Cast Your Vote High School , will be one of your best bets. It covers national, state, and local governments, and provides an opportunity for students to elect a student liason between students and the local police department to see how the process works. For additional resources, please check out Barb’s People Builder’s  page on Government and Elections.

Sight Words or Phonics?

I just read a blog that discussed some of the virtues of rote memorization and it reminded me of the old question about whether children should learn to read by learning sight words or by learning phonics. Sight words are memorized and often learned by drilling on them. The late Dr. Edward Fry produced a lot of materials that help children learn sight words, but he also wrote materials on teaching phonics and spelling.

He recognized that some of our most often used words in English don’t follow the rules of phonics. He is widely recognized for his list of 1000 Instant Words which are intended for children to recognize by sight after a series of exercises, drills, games, flashcards, and other memorization aids. Some of these words, such as in, on, he, be and fish, also obey phonics rules and can be sounded out, but when a child is first learning to read, it’s discouraging to have to stop and sound out every word and lose track of the meaning. It’s very satisfying to be able to read a complete sentence or story without having to stop often and sound out words. Think what it would do to our adult reading speed and comprehension to have to sound out every word we read? By learning the most common words by sight, a child or illiterate adult can have the satisfaction of really reading, not just decoding words. She will understand “A doll is a toy.” if she reads it at a normal speed instead of struggling over every word.

On the other hand, as a child continues on the path of learning to read, it would be burdensome to have to memorize every single word he will ever need to read. Dr. Fry recognizes that understanding the sounds attached to letters is also necessary for a child to become an and independent and proficient reader. He brings these two approaches together seamlessly in his Spelling Book Grades 1-6: Words Most Needed Plus Phonics.

Let’s look at the first lesson for first grade. Only ten sight (or instant) words are introduced: the, of, and, a, to, boy, girl, man, woman, baby. Though the teacher is given teaching suggestions, this is not a workbook. The student pages may be reproduced for student use, but the teacher decides how to best teach the words.

Under the list of words is a list of phrases using the words so that the students can practice seeing and reading the words in context. Samples of the phrases are man and woman and to the boy and girl. Students could practice reading these aloud and the phrases could also be used for dictation exercises, since this book also teaches spelling.

The last parts of the lessons involve age-appropriate word study. In the first grade lesson we used as an example above, students learn about how the phonogram an is used in man, ran, can, and pan. Then they learn in the phonics section below about the short vowel a. The included notes to the teacher in these sections spell out the rules and explanations, but I seriously doubt that the first graders will have to memorize, “The Closed Syllable Rule states that when the syllable ends in a consonant, the single letter vowel is short.” (Examples are taken from Lesson 1 of the book linked to above. ) At this stage of the game, the student may not know or care about syllables, open or closed.

That's me, with my book at the age of three.

When I learned to read I taught myself in much this fashion. First I memorized a very simple picture book my mother read to me over and over and then I read it back to her. She knew I’d memorized it, but I knew which word was which, so I had learned some sight words that I could recognize in other contexts. My mother would tell me about the sounds that the letters made until I was asking her for the ones I didn’t know yet. I started asking my dad about the letters I saw in the headlines of his newspaper. I was only three, but I could read. By the time I hit first grade, I was sitting in the class library section reading whatever I wanted while the teacher taught reading to all the rest of the class except another student who shared my first and middle name, who could also read.

My mother was a wise woman who realized that although I was reading above grade level, I had holes in my phonics understanding, so she sent me to a private school for a semester to learn phonics in a systematic way. (This was in the late 1940′s, when the “look, say” teaching method was in vogue.) After my phonics instruction, I flew in my reading skills. I think I would have thrived with Dr. Fy’s approach, since I would have learned the sight words in and out of context, as well as the relationships of the sounds to the words I learned every week. Seeing those relationships brings this method of teaching beyond rote memorization to understanding. I think Justin Snider, the author of the blog that inspired this one, could live with this approach. Maybe he will stop by and let us know.

Previous Knowledge in Content Areas is Essential to Reading Comprehension

As a supplier of educational resources for teachers,  I probably sell more materials to help teach reading skills — especially comprehension — than for any other subject area. (Those are available here.) I know teachers are under the gun when it comes to preparing for those all-important standardized tests, but maybe they should take some time away from the reading comprehension workbooks and spend more time in science, social studies, art, music, and even sports. I’ve always believed this is important, but now I’ve found a short video that makes this point very well. I turned off the sound because I found it distracting; having it on won’t add to the content.

Most home school families have already discovered the value of  using a lot of “living books” — those books which capture the imagination as they satisfy a child’s thirst for information. Many children, especially boys, are more interested in the real world than in fiction. They want to understand how things work. They want to explore the world of nature. They like true stories about real people who made exciting discoveries, explored far away places, and had exciting adventures in various periods of the world’s history. Girls will also appreciate nonfiction about their interests. Historical fiction will also help children acquire a frame of reference for what they may later read.

Other  resources home school families have more access to than school classes, as budgets are cut, are field trips and educational travel. There’s nothing quite like taking children to visit historical places or science museums to help them make connections when they later read about places they’ve seen and processes they’ve observed. How different my understanding of the Civil War was when I visited Gettysburg’s Battlefield, saw the peaceful rolling hills, observed the living history enactments and  saw the maps of the battles light up in the visitors center as I listened to the narration of the battle events during those bloody days of war. Visiting the living history parks at Sturbridge Village, Salem, Jamestown,  and Plymouth helped me understand the early history of America much better than reading about places I hadn’t seen.  Something as simple as visiting a local working  farm, post office, newspaper,  adobe, or factory can supply a lot of information children can later draw on. I still remember visiting the old Helms Bakery  and a paper factory in Los Angeles on school field trips when I was a child.(The picture here is of Carl’s Sandburg’s family Bible on display in his childhood home in Galesburg, Illinois, which we visited on our way to Massachusetts in 1989.)

On one of our first family vacations after we had adopted our two children, we visited the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park. If we had been reading an unillustrated book about these Native American homes, even if they were described in words, I doubt if the children would have really understood what they were. But we walked past them, went into them, and then went to see some dioramas in the visitor center. When we got back to our cabin by the lake, re went into relax while the children played outside. The picture you see here is how Sarah processed the information she received from that portion of the Mese Verde visit.

When we were home schooling we our children had many more chances for this type of field trip than they would have had in school. But even if your children are in school, you can take them to places where they will learn. Go on nature walks sponsored by your local parks. Have a scavenger hunt for bugs, different kinds of rocks, leaves, pine cones, acorns, or other things to be found in your yard or on your block. During the summer, take your child to the local court house to see a court case being tried. Read a book about it together first so your child will understand what he is seeing — and so will you. Since our children were in the foster care system, and then adopted, we had a lot of required trips to the courthouse. Our children had some personal experience about what social workers do and how protective services works. Visit an animal shelter. Visit the closest zoo. Do anything that will expose your child to first hand information he would not otherwise have.

Another wonderful place to visit is your local library. Find books that will help your child learn more about the things that interest him.  Bring them home. If they are above your child’s reading level, make sure they are well-illustrated so your child will have something to look at as you read to him. If you can’t get to the living history museums, check out these beautifully illustrated books that will show you what you would see there.  Even very young children can learn more about the world they live in by reading (or having you read while they look at ) a Gail Gibbons or Ruth Heller book.  Crabtree also publishes some wonderful books on science subjects which are illustrated with  full color photographs of animals, habitats, life cycles, and more. Whether you are a parent or a school teacher, you can use your vacation time or weekends to give your child a better frame of reference in subjects that will help fill those content knowledge gaps, and that will make your child a better reader. You will all enjoy those shared experiences.

When should we start formal instruction of math and grammar ?

I have just finished reading a blog by Harvey Bluedorn, Research on the Teaching of Math, that confirms something I have always believed – we waste the first few years of a child’s school years teaching subjects they are not yet mentally prepared to learn. The result is that we instill a dislike for school that kills a child’s natural desire to learn, for the student comes to relate education and school to increased frustration. Instead we could be building on a child’s natural curiosity and predisposition to love learning by laying a foundation of experiences that will increase vocabulary and model language usage. Then when the brain is ready, children will learn in a couple of years what they were learning to hate because of endless repletion of the same content for several years in the early grades – grammar and formal mathematics.

Bluedorn quotes Raymond and Dorthy Moore from School Can Wait, p. 228:

. . If we expect reading and arithmetic based on understanding rather than on rote learning, delay of formal training in these areas appears wise – although informal education through warm parental responses is desirable. Some scholars and clinicians conclude that formal education should wait until ages ten to fourteen . . . . Strong clinical and research evidence indicates that early exposure to the so-called stimulation of school often destroys childhood motivation for learning. By grade three or four many children become stranded on a motivational plateau, never recovering their early excitement for learning. Most primary teachers agree.

In Endangered Minds, Why Children Don’t Think and What We Can Do About It, by Jane M. Healy, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1990, Healy says on p.289 :

Abstract rule systems for grammar and usage should be taught when most students are in high school. Then, if previously prepared, they may even enjoy the challenges of this kind of abstract, logical reasoning. Only, however, if the circuits are not already too cluttered up by bungled rule-teaching.

One ninth-grade student who came to me last year for help with grammar was hopelessly confused about the simplest parts of speech. Although she was intelligent and could, at her current age, have mastered this material in a week, she had been a victim of meaningless “grammar” drills since second grade. As Michelle and I struggled on the simple difference between adjectives and adverbs, I often wished I could take a neurological vacuum cleaner and just suck out all those mixed-up synapses that kept getting in our way. It took us six months . . . But finally one day the light dawned. “This is easy!” she exclaimed. It is, when brains are primed for the learning and the student has a reason to use it with real literary models.

She continues on p.290:

Immersing children in good language from books and tapes, modeling patterns for their own speech and writing, and letting them enjoy their proficiency in using words to manipulate ideas are valid ways to embed “grammar” in growing brains . . . . No amount of worksheets or rule learning will ever make up for deficits resulting from lack of experience with the structure of real, meaningful sentences.

It is folly to ignore the importance of oral storytelling, oral history, and public speaking in a world that will communicate increasingly without the mediation of print. These skills build language competence in grammar, memory, attention, and visualization, among many other abilities.

Now the experts seem to believe that if we start teaching children to read and write sooner, they are getting an early start in learning and that this is a good thing. But wouldn’t it be better to use a child’s natural desire to understand his world by taking him outside and learning the names of the various trees, flowers, animals, birds, insects, and other creatures that he sees? Then the teacher could also tell stories that the sights suggest, perhaps in answer to the questions children ask: What makes a flower? Why do leaves change color? Why do leaves fall off the trees? Why is the sky blue? What is a cloud made of? Where does snow come from? This is a great time to build vocabulary and do hands-on science demonstrations or experiments that will lay the foundation for more formal science instruction later.

The best way to help children become successful in language skills later on is to model good language for them now. Read wonderful stories that model standard English or offer opportunities to explain English that’s a bit different and why it’s different, and what the words we use say about us. Discuss the stories with the children to lay a foundation for reading comprehension skills later. Help them find main ideas, see sequence of events, and predict outcomes. See if they can guess what new words might mean from their context. Take a book like Rosie’s Walk (Pat Hutchins) or Pancakes for Breakfast (Tomi de Paola) and let children use the pictures to tell the story orally. Let them tell their own stories, with or without prompts.

In their early years, children have an innate sense of wonder that makes them open to learning all they can. We can lay the foundation for many subjects before teaching them to read and write by helping them explore the world around them, reading to them, talking to them, and answering their questions. We can also introduce many skills needed for critical thinking and reading comprehension orally as we converse with children and let them tell us stories. It’s such a shame that so many children in the early grades only learn to hate school because they are pushed into tasks they are not developmentally ready for too soon. When children are ready, they will be able to learn grammar and reading and formal math quickly, without endless repetition from first grade on.