“His writing is terrible!”

All too often the phrase “the writing is just so messy” is uttered. But what does it really mean? Are we talking about penmanship? Cursive writing or printing? The ability to write quickly while remaining neat? The ability to write on a whiteboard? And if we go about “correcting” it, what approach do we take?

For those of us tasked with the formidable responsibility of “correcting” the way a person expresses their writing, I have to say, it is hard to know where to start. For me, it is all about going back to the roots.

I spent some time, a few years ago, observing lessons at the Eaton Arrowsmith School. While the jury may be out for some on the power of Neuroplasticity, I have to say that I was intrigued. Students sat at computers and work stations completing drills with almost mathematical precision. Clock dials, squiggly lines, (why is there a patch on these children’s eyes?), repetitive work. It all seemed very foreign and daunting. But the underlying principle is the same: rewire the brain = do a task. Over and over and over. Anyone who has spent five minutes on Lumosity knows exactly what I am talking about.

It was with these images in mind that I tackled a recent request from a parent to help with her son’s printing. Rather than approach the task with basic printing worksheets and cursive writing traceable handouts, I decided to use the principle of Neuroplasticity to get back to the root of the problem: fine motor coordination.

The steps are simple:

1. Start with a challenge. Ask your student to complete two worksheets. The first asks the student to copy the images onto a dot grid, the second onto a 1 square inch grid. They may find that one is easier than the other. For example, my student struggled with the 1inch grid. When I asked him why, he told me that it was a lot easier to count the dots than the squares. This told me something significant: he struggled with hand-eye coordination.

I asked the student what would have made each worksheet easier. He suggested things like practicing, filling in the squares and so forth. It is really important to ask this question, because we are coming back to it in a minute.

2. Turn it into a game. I asked the student if he wanted to play a game on my iPad while I got the next part of the lesson ready. (I was, truthfully, ready but I find that saying this gives the kids a feeling of having a “break”). The game is a language learning tool, but mimics the drills from EatonArrowsmith (something I only realized in hindsight!). The App is called Arsaniil and teaches students the langauge spoken in Nanuvut: Inuktitut. For those without technology, an Inuktitut language handout will work well.  Similar languages are Russian and Arabic, both of which have natural flow and loops as well.

Once the student completes the game or plays for about 5 minutes, ask them what they liked about the letters. Ask them if it would be hard to learn that language. What does the letters they have just been studying have in common with English letters and words?

3. Reinforce the skills. Go back to the question “what would have made this easier.” Explain that you are going to give your student the “cheat sheet” to the symmetry game you first played, but that he/she is going to have to pass some basic training. There are some great worksheets if you google Fine Motor Skills. The good ones are designed to be worked though over a course of time. Try not to overdo it, even though the task seems easy. I recommend putting these sheets into a plastic binder pocket and using erasable markers.

Ask the student to say the direction out loud as they trace the page. As the student works through each page, be sure to erase tracings that go off the line significantly or seem like they can be more exact. Practice using the necessarily vocabulary with the student, but have them come up with the phrases themselves, using the language on the worksheet as a clue. For example “up to the left on a diagonal”, “curving line up to the right”

4. Let’s play again. Bring back the original worksheet and ask your student to listen to your directions. Provide them with a piece of blank grid paper inside the plastic sleeve. Provide instructions to complete one of the images on the page.

For example: “Start in the middle of the page and move two squares to the right. Now move a diagonal up to the left two squares…”

You are sure to get a good laugh the first time you do this because it is hard! Have your student switch. Now they give the instructions. They will be relieved that your picture is strange too!

Talk about the challenges. What was harder, listening or giving instructions? They will want to play again and again until they are perfect!

Finally, incorporate another app or worksheet. I really like the App Symmetry Exercise for Kids. Once they “copy the drawings” they will be able to play on their own, learning to give directions, as well as follow them.

Weren’t we talking about writing and penmanship? This seems more like math!

One of the beautiful thing about true remedial strategies in the classroom is that they don’t take an obvious form. Essentially what these activities are doing is re-training the brain to think about the connection between shapes and language.

The next steps are to continue using the motor skills worksheet until the students have a strong grasp of the language of the shapes. Next come the cursive writing worksheets. I am using these exercises with middle school students. This is really quite different than teaching letters and writing for the first time.

There are some great reads on the subject of neuroplasticity and brain re-wiring. I highly recommend starting with Medina “Brain Rules” or Diodge. “The Brain that Changes Itself”.

Be sure to post comments about your own suggestions, lessons and exercises for improving printing, penmanship and writing.

The Importance of Play (in the Middle Years and Beyond)

The importance of “play” in children’s lives is almost a mainstream belief in the education field these days. Never has there been a greater emphasis on “outdoor learning,” “physical activity” and “active learning.” What’s even more fascinating is that the discussion revolves almost primarily around EARLY childhood education. It is as though once children reach the middle years they loose their hands and legs and are asked solely to rely upon their cognitive facets.

Case in point, The Canadian National Survey of Children and Youth (2008-2009) states that their target audience for data collection are children ages 0-11. The study is designed to “collect information about factors influencing a child’s social, emotional and behavioural development and to monitor the impact of these factors on the child’s development over time.” Yet students who had reached the middle years were suddenly no longer of interest.

An her article “Let the Children Play,” Dr. Par Jane Hewes states, “Early childhood educators have long recognized the power of play. The significant contribution of play to young children’s development is well documented in child psychology, anthropology, sociology, and in the theoretical frameworks of education, recreation, and communications.” She concludes that play is not simply complimentary to learning, but ESSENTIAL.

My suspicion is that as students grow older, the pressure to “get through the curriculum” increases exponentially, limiting play time and increasing paper-and-pen learning. By the time students take provincial exams, the need for play and hands-on-learning is eclipsed by the need to “prepare them.” Most students, by the time they reach high school, likely only experience play during science labs and team sports.

The irony is that if educators introduced play regularly to ALL age groups they just might facilitate deeper-thinkers, more rational problem solvers, and model real world learning.

Okay, enough of the theoretical, let’s get down to the PLAY.  There are basically five ways to play: sensory play (exploration of objects and environments), constructive play (models and mixed media), physical play (kinesthetic, sensorimotor), dramatic play (scripts, role play and props) and games as play (invented rules or fixed rules).

1. SENSORY PLAY:

Sensory play is all about tactile learning. Whether students are learning multiplication or characterization, I use plasticine, pipe cleaners and foam “paper”, etc as a medium for the message.

A plasticine activity that continually reveals to me the students individuality is the Body Smart Characterization activity I developed several years ago. Whether grade 6 or grade 12, students create thoughtful, detailed and rich recreations of significant scenes from their novel study. The goal of the activity is to capture the character’s internal and external characteristics. What I have noticed is that students become completely focused on the activity; they continually flip through their novel, looking for details to add to their creation. On the “caption sheet” they write a direct quote and page reference from the novel. Students who have struggled with research and citation skills don’t even realize that this is what they are doing, because the attention has been shifted to the sensory activity. And for me, this is a true reflection of real world learning. Yes, it is important to do the background work, but isn’t what our society really values the object itself- the finished art?

Finally,  classroom stations  allow for exploratory play with of a specific topic. This can be especially complimentary to upper level science classes, as students prepare for secondary education and begin to think about what that actually looks like in practice.  Recently, I created “C.S.I” Field Kit as extension activities for a science class.  Whether students were finished an activity first or wanted to engage in a bonus activity outside of class time, the station was there for them to pick and choose activities from. Using the materials provided by The Science Spot, I bought a tool kit and filled it with an ink pad, plastic cars (with carious tire treads), gray glitter, a blush brush, tape, elastic bands, crime scene tape, chalk, disposable gloves, red food colouring, beads, etc.). Beside the Field Kit were sealed envelopes with the words “Confidential” written on them.” Each envelope provided a print out of the PowerPoint lesson, a worksheet, a reference card, lab challenge and quiz for different topics (Physical Evidence, fingerprinting, DNA, etc). Students performed up to 16 forensic science activities! I’m not sure who learned more, me or them…

2. CONSTRUCTION PLAY

The second method of play is construction play. Whether it is set up as stations or labs, extension activities or project work, the goal is to provide as many materials as possible for students to create with: model sets, Lego, play, cardboard, recycled materials, newspaper, and so forth).

Recently, students created models of the Earth’s layers out of plasticine. Interesting, in the past I have asked the students to sketch a cross section of the layers. What I noticed this time was that the act of moulding the different colours of clay into different layers turned the activity into an interpersonal activity. Students were repeatedly practicing the terminology (“astrosphere, lithosphere, crust, mantle”) out loud as they created the layers. They were showing others the way that the layers were mixing to create new colours. They created mountains on the crust and stuck in objects, such as rocks and pipe cleaners, to signify the difference between solid and liquid layers. Finally, they created flags or legends to label the layers and presented them on the window-sill for others to look at. Throughout the week, students, parents and coworkers looked at the models, picked them up and turned them over in their hand, examining the different methods and colour schemes. People were drawn to them! Whereas the sketched cross section activity created a dozen or more uniform results, no two plasticine models were alike.

At the Hobby Shop I recently saw Da Vinci Model kits that teach students everything from architecture to hydraulics. Ideally, students would take an Inquiry Based approach, and use the kit as a base model and create their own kit from scratch. So many of these kits compliment the grade 8 curriculum, as well as upper level physics and mathematics.

Other kits that I love are Physical and Life Science kits that teach students about Electricity, Chemistry, and Ecology. Ideally, teachers can create the raw kit with recycled materials, or have the students create the kits with their own materials. In grade 2 I remember our teacher asked up to create our own cardboard lunch boxes; we filled them with the IDEAL lunch and engaged in a lunch box exchange that I remember to this day. Have students create their own Science kit on a specific topic and engage in an exchange. Provide a list of materials, or photographs for them to work off of and see what amazing things they come up with!

3. DRAMATIC PLAY

Dramatic play is perhaps the most widely used in middle school and upper levels of education, though I’m not sure how often it is used in actual lessons. How often in math class, for instance, do students dress in togas to explain Pythagorean theory? How often in science class do students stick name-tags on their forehead and play the classic parlor game “Who Am I”? What I love about this activity is that in the weeks that follow, when the name of a famous scientists or mathematician comes up, students always say “Oh, that’s ME!”

Recently, a group of grade seven students wrote scripts for famous Mesopotamian women. They appeared on green screen “Talk Shows” to discuss all things love, men and the trials of living in early civilizations. What is wonderful is that despite the lack of available information about these women, they were able to take elements of the culture that we had learned about and apply it to their scripts, effectively creating the FIRST in-depth content on Ancient Meso women!

Prop boxes are essential for dramatic play. No more is the tickle trunk relegated to the corner of a kindergarten classroom. Our prop box makes frequent appearances throughout the term! Students love to bring in their own objects and figures (yes, even Barbie made an appearance, dressed as Taylor Swift no less). Create entire worlds. Capture student’s incredible imaginations with video, green screen, or radio shows.

4. PHYSICAL PLAY

Sure, in the past PE had a monopoly on Physical Play. But who is to say that Social Studies, LA, Math and Scence can’t get a little mobile once and a while? During our unit on Ecology, I took the students outside to play Predator-Prey. Students wore different coloured pipe cleaner bracelets on their wrist to signify herbivore, omnivore and carnivore. The kids were so into the game that they begged me to play “just one more time” several times. What was wonderful was that in the weeks that followed they were still talking about the game, but with scientific language: “If you had just been a carnivore, you would have had more of an advantage!” As we studied Biotic and Abiotic factors, the students grabbed white boards and their explorer hats (literally… we have explorer hats in our tickle trunk 😉 to check out the schoolyard. Talk about coming to life. Students were running, skipping, climbing and crawling on hands and knees! Again, I learned more from the students than the textbook had ever taught me.

Even math class got physical! Students learning about angles used their whole body, lying on the ground to create 180 degrees. The dancers in the class show off their ¼, ½ and ¾ turns during a fractions unit. As we talked about geometry, students created polygon tableau and rhombus modernist art with their bodies. Something about using the whole body to learn allows the students to internalize otherwise staunchly facts. Students adorned pedometers the other day as a way to track data for our graphing unit. In short, never has our classroom broken such a productive sweat!

5. GAMES

Finally, games as learning tools. Whether students are creating their own board games, engaging in self-organized playgroups or creating complex narratives for activities, there is sometime timeless about the ability to play formal games.

My grade five PE teacher used to play two games with us that I have incorporated into Math Class: Man Your Station and Pirates Cove. In battleship, students are assigned physical movements for a signal word. For instance, when the teacher says “Port”, students run to the south facing wall of the classroom (or gym, field, court, etc.… if you are able to use another space). “Crows nest” signaled students to lay flat on the floor with their feet in the air. Same movements, different terms: “right angle” means flat on the floor with feet in the air. “180 degrees” has you pressed against a wall, etc. Warning, students get REALLY into this game. Once they have the basics they create their own rules for each new unit.

In Pirates Cove, the teacher creates a 5×5 grid on the board. Label the x-axis A, B, C… and the y-axis 1, 2, 3… Divide the class into two teams (Pirates names a must). Team A chooses a grid (ex. B3). Using a pre-made grid, with the treasure already determined, the teacher presents the teams with a question. This can work for any subject… If the team answers correctly, the grid they chose is filled in with the missing piece of map. The goal is to create enough of the pirates map that you can make an educated guess as to where the treasure is hidden. Teams only get 3 changes to guess. I have seen 15-year-old students go banana’s over this game. It is ideal for unit review!

I love the results of student-created games. This idea came from my friends Richard and Lucia, who teacher middle years math. They asked students to create a game as a calumniation to an integers unit. What they discovered were projects as diverse and varied as the kids themselves. I asked my grade 7 students to make their own games this term. I was so impressed with the depth of their results. One student made Integer Bingo, another made a Memory-esk/Go-Fish Integer game. Yes another group made a game board with intricate playing pieces.

 I came across this website, which inspired me for our Ancient Egypt Unit. The best part of a games activity is inviting parents, classmates and teachers to come and play during a “games tour.” For printable game board and flashcards, check out mes-english.com.

So there it is. Play for the Middle Years and beyond. To quote Nietzche: “In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.”