Cite this SiteEducational CyberPlayGround Teaches the secret motivation that makes students read.
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MOTIVATION
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MOTIVATION
Debates about improving student performance rarely take into consideration an important perspective of students, that is, how much they value an education and whether they see education as a path to success. In this Education Sector First Person, Abdul Kargbo gauges such perceptions in contrasting settings: the secondary school he attended in Sierra Leone, one of the world's poorest countries, and the suburban high school he attended in the U.S., one of the world's richest countries. Despite the poor condition of the facilities, getting an education was a privilege in Sierra Leone. But it was not free, and the only children who went to school were those whose parents could afford tuition fees. Still, education was so highly prized that even the poorest people, who daily had to do without basic amenities, strove to get enough money to send their kids to school. Discipline and competition were central elements of schooling in Sierra Leone. Corporal punishment was liberally meted out for infractions both major and minor. But the psychological consequences of academic underperformance were even more devastating than the physical because students competed against their peers for status. In every class, students' average grades were tabulated to produce a hierarchy in which everyone was ranked. Needless to say, nobody wanted to be last. Upon moving to the U.S., Kargbo discovered that troublemakers had a disproportionately negative impact on teaching and learning. Teachers often spent as much time trying to enforce discipline as they did actually teaching. And most students seemed to not care about their actual grades. In fact, some of those with the lowest averages almost seemed proud of their bad scores.
HOW WE BEGIN TO LEARN
- WE REMEMBER WHAT WE FIRST HEARD IN THE WOMB WE BRING THAT MEMORY WITH US AFTER BIRTH THEN WE TRY TO IMITATE WHAT WE HEAR/HEARD BECAUSE WE ARE WIRED TO DO THIS.
- EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE RESEARCH DOCUMENTS THE IMPORTANCE OF PLAY IN LEARNING
- EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE RESEARCH DOCUMENTS THE IMPORTANCE OF LAUGHTER IN LEARNING
- Brain Based Learning and Brain Development
- How to motivate children. Remember you PLAY music your don't work it.
EMOTIONS LOCK IN MEMORY
A specific area of the brain's temporal lobe called the amygdala is the center of emotion in the brain and, it is becoming clear, a very strong tool for solidly hammering in a memory. When the amygdala detects emotion, it essentially boosts activity in areas of the brain that form memories" And that's how it makes a stronger memory and a more vivid memory." These can range from painful or fearful memories to ones happy ones such as Children who are emotionally involved by having fun and enjoying the activity. Test subjects are able to remember twice as many emotional words and pictures as neutral ones. This is evidence why children who while learning to read and are ridden with anxiety or feelings of failure will NOT remember, the likelihood of learning to read will decrease.
WE REMEMBER
- 10% of what we read
- 20% of what we hear
- 30% of what we see
- 50% of what we see and hear
- 70% of what we discuss with others
- 80% of what we personally experience
- 95% or what we teach others
IMITATION IS THE FIRST IMPULSE SO WE CAN GET IN SYNCH.
Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't.
Summary: Human Evolution
How 3 and 4 year-olds learn.
Mr. Lyons and undergraduate, Jennifer Barnes at the Yale Cognition and Development Lab,led by Mr.
Lyons's adviser, Frank C. Keil and Researchers. Mr. Lyons paper published in the July issue of the journal
Animal Cognition by Dr. Victoria Horner and Dr. Andrew Whiten, two psychologists at the University of St.
Andrews in Scotland.
Mr. Lyons having watched 100 children, agrees with Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten that children really do
overimitate. He has found that it is very hard to get children not to. If they rush through opening a puzzle,
they don't skip the extra steps. They just do them all faster. What makes the results even more intriguing
is that the children understand the laws of physics well enough to solve the puzzles on their own. Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by
imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big
evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate
doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.
CHIMPS:
Young chimps were shown how to retrieve food from a box.
Because the chimps could not see inside, they could not tell that the extra steps were unnecessary. As a result,
when the chimps were given the box, two-thirds faithfully imitated the scientists to retrieve the food.
The team then used a box with transparent walls and found a strikingly different result. Those chimps could see
that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all
went straight for the door.
HUMANS:
16 young children from a Scottish nursery school were showed the transparent box. After putting a sticker in the
box, they showed the children how to retrieve it. They included the unnecessary bolt pulling and box
tapping.
The scientists placed the sticker back in the box and left the room, telling the children that they could do
whatever they thought necessary to retrieve it.
The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top
of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway. "It seemed so spectacular to me," Mr. Lyons said. "It
suggested something remarkable was going on."
It was possible, however, that the results might come from a simple desire in the children just to play along.
To see how deep this urge to overimitate went, Mr. Lyons came up with new experiments with the transparent box.
He worked with a summer intern, Andrew Young, a senior at Carnegie Mellon, to build other puzzles using
Tupperware, wire baskets and bits of wood. And Mr. Lyons planned out a much larger study, with 100
children.
As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore.
Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn't understand the
intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.
Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring
out the intentions of others. But that is changing. "Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than
people thought," Mr. Lyons said.
We don't appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well.
"It is so adaptive that it almost never sticks out this way," he added. "You have to create very
artificial circumstances to see it."
LITERACY PROBLEM:
Children can experience learning to read as an extremely stressful task and can also experience themselves as failures because of the difficulties involved.
LITERACY SOLUTION:
Playground poetry a natural part of the children's play which helps reduce stress and promotes relaxation, fun and laughter.
It don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing . .
.
~ Duke Ellington
"Make everything as simple as possible,
but no simpler".
~ Albert Einstein
The Indigenous Folksong Reading Curriculum uses the National Children's Folksong Repository (SEE Video )
This curricula also taps the multiple intelligences affording the added benefit of considering children who are learning different, music is, after all, an aural art. You will have MUCH more success if you play along with them. Students concentrate on listening (isn't this the point?!) which encourages community. Students perceive the teacher as an equal partner in the reading / music-making experience, rather than the proverbial "sage on the stage.
Steady Beat: Children are using the playground poetry repertoire to practice and establish beat competency. If you work on this in Kindergarten and find that it has congealed by first grade, your kids will keep the beat together while singing, by simply listening to each other.
1. Students must keep their own beat with non-locomotor movement.
2. Students keep a common beat with non-locomotor then locomotor movements.
This is done by all students chanting a rhyme or singing a song.
3. Students keep common beat with bilateral movements on the beat before trying bilateral movements which would
correspond to the division of the beat.
4. Students keep common beat with bilateral movements with hands on knees.
5. Teaching sequence:
Express, Explore, Extend, Create, Read and Write
Your body is locked precisely with your speech.
You play music you don't "work" it.
Article explains why using Indigenous PlayGround Poetry is the perfect form of Play that naturally bridges
from the home language to the standard.
Fun Learning: Study Ties Mental Abilities To Interaction of Emotion and Cognitive Skills
MOTIVATION AND DIALECT SPEAKERS PDF FILE