Two summers ago at the annual Elementary Physical Education Workshop held on the campus of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, presenter Pat Vickroy shared a wonderful journal prompt. Last week, I asked my students to respond to the prompt as part of their weekly homework packet. The prompt reads as follows: “If you could give yourself one superpower, what would it be and how would you use it?â€
Last Wednesday morning, at our school’s monthly professional development meeting, each staff member was given a few minutes to solve a challenging math word problem involving fractions. One teacher, who normally pays obsessive attention to detail, misread the question and then, during the share-out, unwittingly revealed the result of this error with the group. Of course, that teacher was me, and I was a bit embarrassed at what I had done.
By far, this has been the website’s busiest week since it debuted in August of 2010. So, I thought I would use this week’s blog post as an opportunity to welcome all the new visitors stevereifman.com has been receiving recently and share some of the exciting things that have been happening.
This week I conclude my “Learning How to Learn†video series by presenting “Champ’s Big Week,†a story of how one student practices over the course of several days to prepare for his Friday math facts quiz. In the video Champ demonstrates how kids can use a variety of brain-friendly study strategies to learn academic content. The video also shows how parents can support their kids in this effort. It is recommended that parents and teachers share this video with children to empower them with useful strategies and help them become more independent learners.
Three Brand New "Learning How to Learn" Strategies:
This week I share three short videos that feature the final three independent learning strategies from the “Learning How to Learn†Workshop I presented to parents and students last fall. “Looking for a Pattern,†“Making Learning Implicit,†and “Using Metacognition & Reflection†round out my list of learning strategies that, taken together, offer children a variety of ways to learn and remember academic content. About two-thirds of my students attended the hour-long, after-school workshop, and I followed up with the families of the remaining children at a later time. Though I try to create rich, authentic, contextual learning experiences for my students on a daily basis, there are still times when they need to learn how to study and remember discrete pieces of information independently, especially as they progress through the upper elementary grades and into middle school and high school.