I was just going through my email, and I came across one from Scholastic. Opening it and clicking my way through links, I eventually found myself reading this article about motivating learners. I recommend taking a quick look at it. ( http://www.scholastic.com/parents/resources/article/motivate-school-success/10-ways-to-motivate-your-child-to-learn) I especially liked #5 and #10 on the list. It reminded me that learning should be a continual process, happening in every place and with all people in our lives.
To show the class that I am learning too, every day, I recently shared with them a short article from Smithsonian magazine about a company in Japan that is planning to build a solar panel ring around the moon in order to produce enough clean energy to power the world (google Shimizu Corporation or Shimizu Dreams to find more). Pretty amazing stuff; and we will likely see it in our lifetime! This was not something that was in the curriculum (although it does tie in very nicely with our current unit on the moon and astronomy) or that I had built into my lesson plans, but it was too good not to share. This kind of "learning" stuff is around all of us, every day. Make sure to share some of it with your student.
It occurred to me again when I was grocery shopping. Are the "real life" problems that students have to tackle in math really "real life"? In a word, yes. I discovered two of them while I was grocery shopping yesterday where I really did have to be able to divide and multiply decimals by a whole number to determine the better deal. I'll be sharing these really real life problems with students on Monday. The next time you have to calculate a problem or draft a business letter or email, let your students see that, yes, there are real applications to what they are learning in the classroom.
To show the class that I am learning too, every day, I recently shared with them a short article from Smithsonian magazine about a company in Japan that is planning to build a solar panel ring around the moon in order to produce enough clean energy to power the world (google Shimizu Corporation or Shimizu Dreams to find more). Pretty amazing stuff; and we will likely see it in our lifetime! This was not something that was in the curriculum (although it does tie in very nicely with our current unit on the moon and astronomy) or that I had built into my lesson plans, but it was too good not to share. This kind of "learning" stuff is around all of us, every day. Make sure to share some of it with your student.
It occurred to me again when I was grocery shopping. Are the "real life" problems that students have to tackle in math really "real life"? In a word, yes. I discovered two of them while I was grocery shopping yesterday where I really did have to be able to divide and multiply decimals by a whole number to determine the better deal. I'll be sharing these really real life problems with students on Monday. The next time you have to calculate a problem or draft a business letter or email, let your students see that, yes, there are real applications to what they are learning in the classroom.
