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Every time you feel in God's creatures something pleasing and attractive, do not let your attention be arrested by them alone, but, passing them by, transfer your thought to God and say: "O my God, if Thy creations are so full of beauty, delight and joy, how infinitely more full of beauty, delight and joy art Thou Thyself, Creator of all!
- Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain

You can’t get to joy by making everything perfect. You can only get there by seeing in every imperfection all that’s joy.
-Ann Voscamp

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Teaching a visual-spatial learner

This was day 2 of my new approach to educating my 5 yo. I feel a bit like I'm going backwards, but it's actually been a lot of fun. I'm trying to incorporate some ideas I've gotten from reading online. I'm trying to keep in mind that VSL's tend to learn best when what they're learning is based in the context of their experience. Well, that seems reasonable. I think anyone would!

Yesterday, I divided a piece of paper into 6 sections and wrote the name of a family member in each one. I had her trace each name and draw a picture of each member of the family. That was it for the "reading" lesson. I guess it covered handwriting as well. I then asked her questions like, "How many people are in our family?" "How many children?" "How many parents?" "How many girls?" "How many boys?" That was it for the math lesson. That really seemed like going backwards, but I could see her "wheels" turning as she categorised all of us into different groups. Then I hung the "poster" up in the dining room so we can talk about it and see our names there. One other thing that was actually VERY funny - Dani drew something in each picture that each of us liked. She drew me sitting on a couch, because that's what I like. ;) She's got me all figured out!
We then "read" a book together that had text something like this, "A cat...a tan cat...a tan fat cat...a tan fat cat ran...a tan fat cat ran fast..." You get the idea.

Today, we reviewed our poster from yesterday. After that I gathered a bunch of art catalogs, clothing catalogs, and seed catalogs. I had Dani cut out pictures of things. Things like flower, hat, shirt, dress, shoes, bag, apple, pear, corn, peas, cat, and some longer words like watermelon, raspberries and elephant. We glued each picture to the back of a recipe card and wrote the word on the other side. So, guess which words she was able to read?? Apple, blackberry, elephant and necklace. Hmmm... yep, she's different than the others! What an adventure I'm on! :) God is good, and I'm really enjoying something I thought I'd seriously dislike! Thank you, God!

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