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Category: The Science of Learning
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Math for the 21st Century
Why do we use the University of Chicago’s School Mathematics Project (Chicago Math) at Aim Academy Online? Our math teachers have concluded, it’s the best program we’ve found to prepare students for 21st century, college-level mathematics—whether students are heading into the humanities, social sciences, or hard sciences (e.g., engineering and chemistry).
Developed by one of the nation’s highest ranked mathematics department, the program is backed by decades of research and has undergone rigorous field testing and refinement.
- Some of the advantages we’ve found in the Chicago Math program include:
- A focus on teaching students to solve real world problems through mathematics.
- Students learning to think logically and defend their reasoning.
- A foundation for algebra is laid in middle school, giving students a leg up before starting a formal algebra course.
- Statistics is incorporated throughout the curriculum (a must have skill missing from older math programs.)
- Use of current technologies incorporated throughout, including graphing calculators and Internet applications.
AAO now offers all of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP) math courses starting with middle school. Additionally, Delta Math is included in the cost of all Aim Academy math classes. This highly rated online math practice solution gives students unlimited practice problems, immediate feedback, and an individualized progression based on their strengths and weaknesses.
After completing this sequence of courses, students will be well-prepared for our AP Precalculus, AP statistics, math classes and the math portions of the ACT and SAT college entrance exams.
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How to Get the Most from Your AAO Classes
Hey everyone, we’re so glad you’re joining us this year. We’ve been very busy this summer. We’ve been learning how to use Canvas and Zoom better to engage students. We’ve been meeting together to discuss our goals for growth and improvement. We aspire to lifelong learning ourselves and strive to model that for our students.
Our focus this year is on increasing student engagement and creating greater connections with one another across our community: teachers, parents, students, support staff, and administrators.
We can’t do it alone. So here’s a few tips for getting the most from your online classes at Aim Academy Online!
For Students
Engage!
Contribute to the class discussions, speak up in class, welcome your classmates, introduce yourself. Ask questions. Be curious. Take initiative. You will get so much more out of your classes if you decide to actively participate, and you invest in the success of the class overall—help your classmates and your teacher turn in their best performance as well. Be a great team mate!
Persist!
You’ll learn much more and not fall behind if you do a little bit in each class every day. If you don’t have specific tasks assigned by your teacher, then review what you’ve been learning. Read ahead. Read again. Read something not assigned about the topic. Watch a video in the subject area. A daily review and investment of effort will make deeper connections in your brain—you will be surprised how much more you learn. When you invest time daily in learning more about a topic, guess what? You get more interested in that topic. And interest is a key to learning. When you are interested, your brain comes alive. Learning flourishes.
Relax!
Give yourself time to reflect on and revise your assignments before you submit. Your brain consolidates information while you are at rest. That’s why you sleep longer during your teen years—you are learning a lot. When you take breaks between learning, you will learn more the next time you return to an assignment.
For Parents
Encourage!
Speak positively about your children’s efforts to learn and participate. Help the shy child to take small steps. Be aware of what your children are working on in each class. Provide an age-appropriate level of support and accountability. Once your children establish a routine of signing in daily to work on their Aim Academy Online courses, you won’t have to be as vigilant. But make sure everyone gets started on the right foot! You’ll be glad you did.
Ask Questions!
Get your kids talking about what they are learning—this solidifies their lessons and deepens their understanding. Model curiosity—an important characteristic of an independent learner. Take an interest in your kids’ online classes—this shows them you think their academic life is important.
Reach Out!
If you have questions or valuable insights that will help your child’s teachers or the AAO administration support your homeschool more successfully, let us know! We aren’t mind readers—I wish we were—but we are often clueless. We really appreciate it when we hear from students and parents about anything and everything—what’s going well, what do you like, what doesn’t make sense, what could we improve. Feedback helps us grow and improve in the same way feedback helps your children grow and improve. (support@aimacademy.online)
We’re all in this together. Let’s help one another have the best school year ever!
Thank you! We’re so glad you’re here.
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12 Things to Know About How Children Learn*
The child
- Happy children learn more than sad children. Stress and negative emotions drain a child’s cognitive resources. Laughter boosts a child’s memory capacity.
- Play is essential for emotional wellbeing and cognitive development.
- An element of risk (risk of failure, risk of danger, risk of pain, risk of embarrassment, etc.) produces a greater sense of accomplishment and reward.
- Persistence predicts progress more than talent or intelligence.
- Children who believe they will succeed achieve more than children who expect to fail.
The teacher
- Praise and encouragement help children persist.
- Criticism and punishment undermine motivation.
- Targeted feedback is essential to help kids improve.
- Assignments should be challenging but attainable with effort.
The environment
- The learning environment should be secure, comfortable, and free of distractions.
- Surround children with others who know and love them.
- Children should be free to move around, change positions, and take a break without asking permission.
*These research-based principles of learning are true for how you learn, too.
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3 Easy Ways to Help Your Child Learn Anything
1. Retrieve It
Every time your child recalls what she is learning, she thickens the neural pathways to that information in her long term memory. Research shows that recall practice is more powerful than almost any other learning strategy. You can help your child accelerate this process by routinely asking questions about what she is studying.
- What did you study today in math?
- Explain to me how to solve this kind of problem.
- What are the reasons this historical event happened?
- Tell me about the process of photosynthesis again.
Every time your child recalls specific details or re-solves a problem, such is 3×5, that information becomes slightly more fixed in his long term memory. And he becomes just a bit faster at retrieving it.
Once your child can retrieve this information effortlessly, move on to retrieving newer learning.
2. Question It
This is what a healthy brain does: It craves new information because learning fuels cognitive growth. Without effort, your child’s brain calls questions to mind to pique his curiosity and to motivate him to engage in learning. Raising questions. Asking questions. Pondering questions. These are the indicators of a healthy, growing brain.
Your child participates in this process by purposefully raising questions about what she is learning—Don’t require her to immediately find answers. It is merely enough for her to ponder questions about the subjects she is studying.
You can maximize this strategy by asking your child to write his questions from the school day in a special journal. He doesn’t have to write the answers down—just the questions. You don’t want to make this task laborious. It should be fun and rewarding.
At the end of each week, sit down and discuss these questions with her—talk about any answers she may have found or theories she has formulated. Ask what new questions have emerged. The act of raising questions about what she is learning fires active learning—a brain on high alert for answers—a brain primed to make connections to prior learning—a brain attentive to the subjects she is studying.
If your child asks you to answer a question he has—please do! But otherwise, just let the answers present themselves naturally over time.
3. Draw It
Finally, ask your child to use that special journal to draw pictures about what she is learning. We think in pictures. We remember more details about information and events attached to images (not words). As we read text, we convert what we are reading into a movie in our mind—the words themselves do not scroll across the screen—the pictures we associate with them do.
Again, just as with the previous two strategies, we can contribute to these automatic brain activities by intentionally engaging in them—drawing a picture about the word problems from a math lesson or the processes in a science book or the events in your history studies will help him remember more details about those lessons.
Want to know the 20 Power Tools of Learning? Download a free printable here.
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Teach Your Kids to Fail Forward
Bonnie Gonzalez current course offering
My vivid memories from elementary school are the days we got tests back. As the teacher walked slowly around the room, we all tried to catch a glimpse of her face as she carefully put the tests face down on our desks. Fear of failure was the overwhelming emotion we felt as we quickly flipped the test over and glanced at the first page, looking just long enough to see the grade written in red marker. Of course, we didn’t want anyone else to see the grade, just in case it was bad. “Bad,” that was the operative word. If the grade was low, then it meant I was dumb or at the very least not smart enough to earn a good grade in that subject. Of all of the adjectives associated with failure, “bad” was the most profound. Even our parents knew that failure was bad.
But then I grew older and I learned that important, intelligent people like Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and athletes like John McEnroe (the tennis player who won the most matches in his career) all experienced significant failures. The word “failure” took on a new meaning. It became something that could happen to successful, intelligent people.
In recent years failure has taken on a more positive meaning. Researchers now know failure is something humans can learn from—it is considered a key path to healthy intellectual growth. In the words of growth mindset icon Carol Dweck, “Learning how to cope with failure can lead to humility, adaptation, and resiliency.”
But I have to ask myself, if failure is so important, then what happens to those of us who fear failure? And what happens to our children, influenced by our fears. Recent research into the concept of failure has shown that many of us who fear failure also have what is known as a fixed mindset. We see our failures as indicators that we don’t have what it takes to succeed. The other view, as identified by psychologist Carol Dweck, is a growth mindset. We see failure as a chance for growth, where learning can be enhanced.
Two sides of the same coin, summed up by Winston Churchill in his quote, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” Yes, according to this view failure is something positive and those of us from the fixed mindset generation must not only accept but even embrace the new definition. Even the biological evidence supports the finding that having a growth mindset is beneficial. Measuring brain waves at the Moser Psychophysiology Lab, Hans Schroder has observed that those who focus on trying to figure out a mistake, rather than fearfully avoiding it, quickly improve on tasks that require accuracy. According to Schroder, glossing over mistakes or shying away from them undermine our growth potential.
As homeschool parents, we can help our children view mistakes and failures in a new, more positive light. West Point Academy strategist Richard Bard suggests using an Action Review Approach. This includes asking the following question about a failure:
- What actually happened?
- What are three things that could have gone better?
- What are three things that I did well?
Helping kids identify and evaluate failure, rather than fearing it, will improve their character, intellectual growth, and psychological well-being.
Bonnie Gonzalez has 36 years of experience as a licensed counselor and is passionate about helping families apply the latest research in their home schools. She teaches Introduction to Psychology, Intro to Sociology, and a series of mini-courses related to a positive psychology. See her classes here.
References
Hans S. Schroder, Megan E. Fisher, Yanli Lin, Sharon L. Lo, Judith H. Danovitch, Jason S. Moser. Neural evidence for enhanced attention to mistakes among school-aged children with a growth mindset. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 2017; 24: 42 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcn.2017.01.00 -
Training the Adolescent Brain
Bonnie Gonzalez’s current course offering
As a professional counselor, teacher, anhttp://debrabell.com/product/secrets-of-success-getting-things-done-for-teens/d former homeschool parent, I want to give you some information which will help you to navigate the emotional angst that often comes with homeschooling teens.
Teenage Angst and the Brain
As a homeschooling parent, you have been the market leader in the field of parenting – an expert at understanding the personality and learning style of your children. But now at the onset of adolescence, “the times they are a changing.” Teens are a “different animal” and it’s a “whole new ballgame.” From both a psychological and parenting perspective we have many theories about why our kids are suddenly risk takers, judgement-impaired, contrary, and unpredictable. For years we’ve heard that teen behavior is a result of early childhood experiences, peer pressure, hormones, and sometimes bad parenting. But the latest research suggests another cause—structural changes in a teenager’s brain may largely be to blame for the chaos.
Without going into a lot of technical terminology, recent studies have discovered that the brain does the bulk of it’s maturing between the ages of 12 and 20 (and in boys this may even extend into the mid 20’s). The prefrontal cortex, where most of our ability to calm our emotions and make rational decisions occurs is the slowest part of the brain to develop. So, yes, there may be a reason for the irrational behavior you are seeing in your adolescent son or daughter.
Wiring Through Homeschooling
Okay, so what does this mean to you, as the homeschooling parent of this wildly emotional, and often irrational, growing teen? First, there is some good news. Positive things such as sports, music, school achievement, and responsibility can be “wired” into that changing adolescent brain, by you as the parent and teacher. There is lots of room for change and second chances abound during this prefrontal expansion. The bad news is that if those teen years are filled with anger and alienation, these characteristics may too, get “set in stone.” Adolescence is an important time, and you have the ability to guide your teen through this time.
My caution to you is this: in this time of unpresedented brain development, many new and unpredictable thoughts and behaviors can arise. Often emotions and actions can outrun judgement capabilities, just like they did in early childhood. Teens find it difficult to process emotions such as anger and fear; and their behavior in the midst of this emotional turmoil, can be maddening. But remember, this behavior is not a character flaw, but rather simply a function of some confused wiring in the brain, which will eventually straighten out. The goal is to respond to this behavior with responses which will allow the teen to become well-adjusted. Remember the impulsiveness and risk-taking behavior are critical to growing up into an adult.
(Thanks to Michael J. Bradley in his book, Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy, Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind, for some of the scientific content in this article. Photo credit: Affen Ajlfe)
Bonnie Gonzalez has 36 years of experience as a counselor. She has taught high school and college classes and teaches an Intro to Psychology course and an Intro to Sociology course through Aim Academy.
