Today for her history lesson, Mali played Archeologist. I hid some artifacts in the sand box. She brought her tools (shovel, brush, magnifying glass, camera, and chart) and began digging. As she found an artifact, she carefully brushed it off, observed it, took a picture of it, and wrote a sentence about it on her chart. She was much more attuned to this hands-on lesson than she was sitting at her desk today!
Also, you may notice her 10-month-old assistant busy at work, too.
6 comments:
The amount of information retained by a child that learns with hands-on techniques is OVERWHELMINGLY higher than with worksheets. The charter school I worked at in DC studied this and I can't remember the exact stats, but I do remember everyone banging their heads against the walls trying to figure out how we could get MORE hands-on since we had the lovely NCLB testing to think about. Sigh.
I'm glad everyone's enjoying the experience! :)
OH! what a lucky, lucky girl she is!!!!!!!!!
What a great homeschooling shot!
I love this! Katie, when I took Anthropology here at the Community College (2 semesters I loved it so much!) our teacher would bring in "artifacts". They would usually be every day objects that we had to look at and figure out what they were used for. This was a great exercise for us - looking at something out of context and deducing it's function. Think in terms of a hook and eye - not something Mali would see every day but might be able to think - Hey, that holds something together.
My FAVORITE thing that I ever did in school was an archeology project like this. I love these homeschooling updates!
We never did this in school...but the Madison Children's Museum currently has an archaeology exhibit that included a tent with camping gear, dinosaur costumes, and a sand pit with fake dinosaur bones and digging tools. There's also a play truck/land rover, which is what all the kids fight over (of course).
The more hands-on, the better!
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