Help Your Child Make Connections to Improve Learning

Last fall I posted a series of articles about the brain and how it collects and stores information. Today I'd like to revisit a concept that I first posted as Wired to Learn. The learning process involves the addition of new information to what is already known. Each day of our lives, our brain is continually reorganizing, adapting, and restructuring itself to expands its ability to connect information and thereby retain it for future retrieval.

You could envision a child's brain as a large wall, and each concept to which he has been exposed can be represented by a hook on that wall. As further information is added, it is hung on a corresponding hook, and often connected to several hooks on the wall. The more information hung on each hook, the more complex the child's understanding of that concept becomes. These "hooks" could be referred to as schema, defined as an underlying structure, or conceptual framework. When we organize our educational efforts to work in conjunction with our children's existing schema, we can expand their ability to retain the information ... and to learn effectively.

Another way to 'picture' this concept is to consider how a color printer works. The printer requires cartridges of black, yellow, blue, and red ink (yes, the official color names are different, but let's keep it simple). When you tell the printer to produce a color picture, it will use a combination of these four ink colors, and produce a much more intricate picture than if you were to print it in black and white or grayscale settings. Our brains do the same thing with information - the initial concept gives us a black and white framework, and additional related information adds the color variations to create a beautiful picture that excites our senses. You can add "color" to your child's learning process by following some basic steps as you teach.

1. Make connections to things your child already knows. When teaching history, expand your child's connections to the information by utilizing maps and timelines to help your child "see" where and when the events happened or the person lived. If they are already familiar with the time period or another historical person, show them how the new information fits with what they already know. For example, if your child has already been introduced to George Washington, he can connect Thomas Jefferson to several points of reference - both lived in Virginia, both had plantations, both were political leaders and U.S. Presidents, etc. And Justin Morgan developed his Morgan horse breed during their lifetimes - I wonder whether Washington and Jefferson had Morgan horses on their plantations?
2. Use analogies. An analogy is a comparison between two things that are otherwise dissimilar. Enlist your child's help in developing analogies by selecting symbols for different events in time or historical figures. You may want to color code entries on your timeline (see my last blog post), or use symbols to indicate parts of speech that words hold in a sentence. There are a variety of ways you can connect information by attaching symbols or analogy comparisons, and link that information in your child's brain.
3. Provide content with unifying themes. This is already done for you when using Sonlight Curriculum. Sonlight's Core programs are organized around 3 themes - World Cultures, World History and American History. These themes are reviewed 3 times in the span between Kindergarten and High School studies, beginning with introduction of information (setting the hooks on the wall, or creating the black and white framework) and then adding greater detail and complexity to the information as they visit the themes again.

When you are selecting educational materials, look for programs that are designed to help your child build organized schema. If you are creating your own materials, keep in mind how you can add to information your child already knows. By doing so, you will help him build long-term memory with a lot of interconnected information, and your teaching will be more effective.

Kelly

Attention!

Does it matter if we pay attention when learning?  You bet it does!  The more attention the brain pays to any stimulus, the more effectively the information will be encoded and retained.  Better attention always equals better learning in every academic category.

So do we use the military approach of yelling "attention!" whenever we want our homeschooled children to focus on what we have to say?  I really don't think that would be effective - we'd be hollering too much during the school day, and some of our children would be so distracted with the effort of sitting still that their brains would be anything but focused on what we are saying.  [By the way, the handsome soldier in the picture is my youngest son, demonstrating his good Army posture ... with the addition of a slight smile.]

The fourth rule that John Medina explains in his book, Brain Rules, addresses what attracts the brain's attention.

Memory - in everyday life, we use previous experience to predict where we should pay attention.  Even different environments create different expectations in the brain.  This could affect your child's willingness to pay attention if he is facing a subject that has felt defeating in the past.  Experiment with different settings for working in this subject, looking for an upbeat place and a new approach to give him success.

Interest - regardless of our culture, "interest" or "importance" is closely linked to our level of attention.  Marketing professionals actually believe that the reverse is also true - that unexpected attention getters can also spark interest.  Some commercials use unusual, unpredictable or distinctive features to harness our attention.  Likewise, you could use a story or picture to draw your children's attention and pique their interest before beginning a new lesson.

Emotion - emotionally arousing events tend to be better remembered than neutral events.  When the brain detects an emotionally charged event, it releases dopamine into the system which greatly aids memory and information processing.  This is one of the primary benefits of a literature-based approach to learning, where the story is written so as to immerse your child into the environment and emotion of the event, thereby fixing the detail into memory much more effectively than reading a dry narrative in a textbook.

We humans are terrific pattern matchers, constantly assessing our environment for similarities.  Our memory is enhanced by creating associations between concepts.  When you are introducing a new concept in Math, try showing your child how this concept can be utilized in real life before you explain how to do it.  This may seem like approaching it backward - most Math lessons would teach the concept and then show how to apply it - but you may find that your child's attention will be more focused and their grasp of the concept itself more firm if you use this approach.  He may even take the problem solving further than you had demonstrated, which makes the lesson all the more effective.

There's more to this topic of attention that I will share in my next post ...

Kelly