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The Secret Ingredient to Real Learning
A remarkable trick to help a child read.
As a relaxed homeschooler increasingly persuaded of the power of a child’s natural ability to learn, I’m always reading the thoughts of educational reformers who have tapped into this forgotten phenomenon.
The Everyday Genius: Restoring Children’s Natural Joy of Learning, is the incredibly fascinating book I’m reading now, and so far, I love his ideas on how children learn so much differently from the way schools teach. (He’s not a homeschooling advocate, per se, but where school teachers benefit from his research, homeschooling moms so much more.)
Method of Teaching Miners to Read
And quite by accident, I had the chance to see one of his learning examples played out this week. In one way it’s simple, in another, quite profound. He tells the story of a method by which a group of miners were taught to read. They were asked to tell about themselves, while the woman teaching them recorded their words. She then typed them out and the next day, handed them their own words to read.
Once the words were recognized as their own, both familiarity and intrigue/interest in seeing their words typed out, caused them to much more easily learn the words they were reading, which encouraged them, gave them…
