My Favorite Resource This Week: Circle the Date Planner

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My favorite resource this week is the simplest, yet most effective, organizational tool I have ever used with my children. It is the Mead Circle the Date Planning Notebook.

I bought one notebook for each boy at Wal Mart. I cannot remember the price I paid but feel certain it was less than $10 per notebook.

Here's how we use them:

1. On Fridays, I collect the notebooks and fill in the pages for the up-coming week. I circle the date on each needed page. This is normally five pages (one each for Monday-Friday); however, if we plan to take a day off, I will only circle the date on the number of pages needed for active school days.
2. I write in specific page numbers and specific instructions for independent work and a note that says, "See Mom" for lessons we need to complete together.
3. I write in daily chores.
4. When I have filled in all the assignments, the boys place their planners in a "special spot" on their desks and work down their to-do lists each day.
5. Before I declare each school day finished, I read down each list, make sure I have graded all independent work, that all together work is complete, and inspect the quality of their completed chores.  If everything is done well, they are FREE! 
6. When they have finished their Friday work, they bring their planners to me for a conference during which we finish step 5 for that day and restart the cycle with step 1, preparation for the next week.

Here's what I like about these planners:

1. They are available in different colors, so each boy has his own. I know the red one belongs to Wilbur and the black one belongs to Orville (as do they).
2. The pages are large with lots of room to write...cause I always have lots to say (and write)!
3. It is spiral bound so we can easily keep the notebook open to the page for the day and keep all the old pages as records of what we have done. (Can anyone say easy end-of-the-year record?)
4. The circle-the-date feature means that we don't "lose" any pages because they are date specific. I don't need to write in instructions for Saturdays and Sundays or days that we are on a school break. All those pages would go unused in a date-specific planner.
5. It has made the school day run MUCH MORE SMOOTHLY! Really!!

Here is the best deal I could find online. It is not the exact same planner that we use, and I don't think they are available in different colors. I suggest checking your local Wal Mart or office supply store before buying online, however, should you buy through the link above, Amazon will pay me a small commission. Thanks! (I have not received any other compensation.)

Happy Date Circling!
Dawn

Teaching a VSL: Tip Number 2

What is a VSL?  That's a complicated question to answer, but here's a start: A right-brained, highly creative learner who thinks in pictures rather than words.  You can read more about them here. 

Usually, my VSL dreads the study of history about as much as any rational person would dread a root canal.

And his handwriting assures me that he is destined to be a doctor. 

A REALLY good doctor.

While perusing the offerings of one of the vendors at GHEA's conference last year, I stumbled upon this little gem...



I was looking for resources to add more artwork into our school day.  One of my VSL's more obvious traits is his need to draw or doodle.  You can find his work in a variety of places around our home (including walls and furniture when he was younger; truth be known, I still have to keep an eye on him). 

When I first saw Draw and Write through History, my first thought/hope was that it would motivate him to improve his handwriting.  It is not a handwriting program per se; however, it includes copy work assignments.  I wondered if the marriage of art and writing would help him.

In short, it has.  He is beginning to see that writing is like drawing.  In the same way he has to use certain strokes of the pencil to sketch a pyramid, he must use particular strokes to form letters. 

Over the years, I have used a variety of handwriting programs with him, all of which teach those exact procedures.  However, there is something special about VSL thinking.  Step-by-step procedure often creates stress and difficulty, at least it does with my VSL.  However, a creative environment decreases stress and increases productivity.  The way Draw and Write through History inserts copy work between several pages of art instruction has caused something to click in his brain and his handwriting has improved more than it ever did with any procedural handwriting program.  It may be that the application created a place for the previous instruction to finally click, but whatever the case, there is improvement and I give Draw and Write two big thumbs up!

The second benefit of this book is that he now has a form of communicating his history knowledge other than speaking and writing, both of which require the use of lots of words and frustrate him.  He can draw intricate pictures that show me just how much he knows about a topic.  He is beginning to see history as less of a chore and more of an enjoyment which has increased his desire to read more and even to try his hand at writing about history topics. 

He completed the first Draw and Write book, Creation through Jonah, this week and is EXCITED to begin the second on Greeks and Romans.  And he has asked me questions like...

Will I get to draw the Trojan Horse? 

Do you think it will show me how to draw the Parthenon? 

I really want to draw the Colosseum; will it show me how?

There is historical knowledge in that brilliant mind of his!  It has been avoiding the light of day for a long time, and I am so happy to have found a resource that brings it out so readily!

Happy Teaching!
Dawn 

Visual-Spatial Learners: Tip Number One

In 1981, Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D., coined the term visual-spatial learner (VSL) and in her book, Upside-Down Brilliance, she describes the characteristics and learning needs of VSL's.
I bought this book upon the recommendation of Barb, a.k.a. Harmony Art Mom, and have found many useful applications for one of my sons who is most definitely a VSL.

In a nut shell, VSL's are right-brained people who tend to be artistic, intuitive, musical, excellent problem solvers, and a long list of other brilliant traits.  However, they do not always demonstrate their brilliance in the traditional educational setting (this includes many homeschools as well) largely because of two traits- thinking in pictures rather than words and processing information from whole to part instead of from part to whole (at least those are the two main applications I took away from my reading which have had the greatest impact on how I now teach my son).

As I read Upside Down Brilliance, I realized the concept of thinking in pictures seemed to hit the nail on the head for one of my son's biggest struggles in school, Latin vocabulary.  He understood the grammar concepts- could identify parts of speech, case and declension.  However, he struggled to memorize the vocabulary in every single unit.  (According to the book, this is another VSL trait- being able to do higher-order work easily while struggling with rote work.)

I had tried games, relays, drills, testing, retesting... lots of interventions, lots of reteaching.  But they had all dealt with words- writing words on the the board, flashcards, reciting, hangman, fill-in-the-blank...

But no pictures ANYWHERE!

And I'm just theorizing here, but I imagine he was constantly trying to translate those words into pictures but he already had words attached to those pictures- English ones.  When it was time to produce the new Latin word, he pulled the picture from his mental file and there was the English word attached to it, and he had to process that before he could get to the Latin....

No wonder Latin was exhausting him to the point of tears.  I'm tired just thinking about it.

So, I tried a very simple modification...

I asked him to draw pictures containing his Latin vocabulary words within the pictures themselves, like the example below.

As you can see, he did not create intricate or elaborate drawings (although as a VSL he was inclined to do so and I had to prompt him not to spend too much time on the assignment), just a simple representation of the the word which also included the word itself within the drawing, and guess what happened?

He remembered his Latin vocabulary! 

That's just one way Upside-Down Brilliance has helped me as a teacher and my son as a student, and I recommend the book with one caveat.

As with most books that deal with cognitive science, there are elements of Upside-Down Brilliance that do not mesh with Christian worldview or practice.  Therefore, I skipped some sections and took others with a grain of salt.  However, I would not throw the baby out with the bath water here.  There is some valid science within and knowing that my son sees the world in vivid pictures has helped me teach him better.

If you want to know more about teaching a VSL, you can also return to Olive Plants.  I plan to share more tips soon....

Happy Teaching!

Dawn

Disclosure:  I have not been compensated for writing this post.  I am an affiliate for amazon.com and if you purchase Upside-Down Brilliance from the link I provided above, I will receive a commission.