As a teacher, I often met with parents who felt like teaching was a craft that was similar to a foreign language. Somehow I was trained to do the impossible – teach children. While I was indeed trained – with a teaching degree from a liberal arts college, many teacher mentors and varied experiences – I always considered what I did to be more common sense than brain surgery.
As a writer I have attempted to share some of those secrets with my readers, but as a teacher, most of my writing focuses on, well, teachers. It’s time to shift my focus to parents this month. Teachers, let your parents know about this and let’s all learn a little more about how to teach our children.
Today’s secret is the fact that teaching is in fact common sense. It takes patience, thought and hard work but is a lot of common sense. One great exercise a professor had me do in college helps to illustrate this fact. To teach any one skill, a teacher must simply break that skill down to the basics. This is so simple it may be hard at first. Let us look at an example: Learning how to write your name.
To write your name you must:
- Know your name.
- Know the letters that make up your name.
- Be able to form the letters with a pencil.
In order to form the letters with the pencil, you must be able to hold the pencil correctly.
In order to hold the pencil correctly, you need to be able to grip with your fingers (fine motor skills). This limits how young a child can learn how to write their name.
Knowing the letters that make up your name requires knowing the sounds that the letters make. Knowing the sounds the letters make requires knowing the name of each letter in the alphabet.
So now a Kindergarten teacher can use common sense to teach a child how to write his name:
First be sure that the child knows his name.
Second, teach the child how to properly hold a pencil (this can happen while scribbling/drawing)
Third, teach the child the name of each letter in the alphabet. (Sing ABC song)
Fourth, teach the child the sounds of the letters. (Alphabet books are great for this)
Fifth, teach the child to recognize the letters in his name. (Write his name for him, have him trace his name)
Sixth, have the child practice writing the letters in his name. (Practice tracing each letter first, then write the letters by himself)
Seventh, have the child practice writing his name.
Now the child knows how to write his name!
Breaking down a skill into the pieces will help a teacher teach any skill. The teacher only needs to go back as far as the child doesn’t know. For example, say the child in our example above already knows the names of each letter, how to hold a pencil. So the teacher can skip those teaching moments.
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