As part of our schooling today we pulled out "Are you smarter then a 5th grader" game.
We haven't really ever played it before, it has been sitting in the closet from last Christmas. Anyway, My husband, Kelly & I played, I found alot of the questions to be pretty hard. We were on the 1st grade questions and having to think about a few of the answers - Yikes! This whole thing kinda back fired in my face because Kelly felt very frustrated not knowing the answers to a number of the questions. She said to me about herself "I sure am dumb!". I felt terrible! Hearing and seeing her struggle with alot of the questions really made me question what I have been teaching her. One question was about Mozart, She had no idea who he was. To be honest we have not covered him or much of any other music, I have just felt that with her learning disability going into to many directions would just make things harder for her...... I may be wrong though. She felt very down and it didn't help that her father kept giving me "the look" when she didn't know things. If you have read my blog you know I have struggled with the topic of what do you teach a child with a learning disability who has no plans to go to college... does knowing who Mozart is something that we just should cover.... Or one of the other questions was about Aesop's Fables, We haven't ready any of those yet either.... It's funny how playing one game can really open ones eyes!
2 comments:
My daughter Tink has no plans for college either since she has a processing disorder that will stop her from that most likely. I have a lot of thoughts on this however. I expose her to everything curriculum wise that her peers are exposed to. She cant read at their level so I read to her or we watch movies about it. We have read many of Assopes fables. We have studied Gullivers Travels through video along with many other pieces of literature. I check out books on Mozart and the other famous composers from the library. I check out many of them in the picture book area for little kids. Then I have the kids read them or I read them to them. It at least gives them the basic facts of all the composers, artists, forefathers or whatever. And most grownups only recall the basic facts anyway.
So to sun this up I would make huge use of the local library and the internet and start exposing her to these things.
All the best to you and her.
I agree with the post above. Expose her to as many things as possible and don't worry about her "learning" any of it. Expose her to things and then as they come up in real life, like in this game or on a show you are watching, then she can reflect back to that time she was originally exposed to it and may now have a true interest in it since it is coming to her in her real life and may want to explore it more or may not. Either way she will have a basic understanding of many different things without the weight of having to memorize non-relevant facts applicable to her life. Just knowing that he was a famous composer who was considered an outrageous rock star at the time is good enough. Here's link to some of the stuff we've come across over the years. There are some good picture books listed at teh bottom. http://toadhaven.com/Mozart.htm
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