Hi Everyone,
I've mentioned before about how I am finding my way with how to educate Jay, my 6 year old who is predominantly a kinesthetic (tactile) learner. He learns primarily by experiencing the world around him.
Up until now, in addition to playing board games with the family, Jay has copied out letters and words, built words out of Lego, been read copious amounts of story books and readers done some Jolly Phonics all at his own prompting.
I have been really pleased with how motivated he is to learn, and have decided to trust this intrinsic motivation as a guide to which direction to take next. Now he has moved onto another stage of development....story creation.
Jay has been telling detailed stories to us, starting invariably with Once upon a time, then he narrates the plot while he jumps around, uses various character voices (he's got a pretty impressive range), usually the 'good guys' end up defeating the 'bad guys' and ends with: And they lived happily ever after. The End. We record this word for word, he binds the pages with string ("like a real book") and asks us to read his book back to him.
This tells me as his parent that he understands the importance of a beginning, middle and end of a tale. To keep a story interesting you need some twists and turns, and a bit of conflict which is usually resolved in the final paragraph, and character development is crucial...all of which he's pegged.
I take this as a reminder that our children already know how to learn, it's our job to facilitate them where we can and trust them with the rest.
Talk Soon, Cynthia x
