So my friend, Cindy, over at The Right Side of Normal is a homeschooling mom who loves to share her views on right brain vs. left brain learners AND she just published her first book on the subject!!! Congrats, Cindy!!! One of the things she does in her book is give these "shift begins with me" moments and I LOVE them! They are these "ah-ha" moments when certain things just sort of...click for you when you aren't expecting them.
So my last post about easing up on the printables and going for the child-led environment was a result of a shift I had a few weeks ago. The girls were graphing. They were rolling a die, then marking the graph, then...you know...repeat. I took a picture to document and upon review of the picture I noticed something. They were bored out of their minds! In that moment I knew that every piece of paper I had just printed would never be used...oops! I realized that our hopscotch numbers game where I took paper and wrote numbers on them and had the girls hop to each as we count was WAY more fun than sitting, rolling, and marking. Guess what else I figured out? They actually retain the information when we do it the good 'ole hopping way and we're all so much happier during school. Which I'm not sure why I even thought switching from the hopping method was a good decision considering that most people retain information better when it's in an interesting book or they are moving and connecting with the information.
So there you go. One of my "shifts." At this moment I can't remember my first shift because I did not write it down. So Cindy, if you remember the story please shoot me an email so I can put it in a post:).
Do any of you have any "shift" moments? It doesn't have to be homeschool related. I can tell you that I've had "shift" moments in several other areas of my life too.
Erika
Good shift story, Erika! I love that the picture gave you the opportunity to see from another vantage point what was going on for your children. I had a similar experience that I called, "The Death of Show Me Work," with my oldest when he was 5.
ReplyDeleteThe shift story you told me about was when you read Chapter Three of my book that linked with your experience with your girls' social styles. We value the extrovert and not other social styles. We want to "fix" the shy child by putting them with more people, or "dumb down" the intellectual personality style. But in actuality, each social style offers something good and useful to our society.
Thank you, Cindy! I was so mad at myself for not documenting that first shift.
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