Mastery?

[mrsrandolph]

My children are still very young. They are just finishing up LHFHG. What I have been wondering about with HOD is "Mastery". Without the typical worksheet based approach and "tests", how do you make sure the children retain and master content? ( I am thinking toward the later guides)

Are they going to remember the who, when, why of the History Stories, for example.

Thanks for sharing with me!

[Mom2Monkeys]

These earliest of years are really for introduction and gaining a familiarity with the names and places. Later, mastery can be exemplified by dc's ability to narrate (oral or written). If you know they really understand it after hearing/reading their narration, they aren't likely to forget it. They'll only understand it better each time they are exposed. I have heard of some CM programs doing a end of the quarter (or semester or trimester) summary where the children tell all they can remember about what they've learned...I can see some flaws in this as it's hard to just recall facts like that, but if you have questions ready for them that date back to the beginning of the term, they should be able to give a reasonable answer if they understood it well.

That's just my humble opinion

[lmercon]

I agree with the pp's comments on the benefits of CM learning and using narration to be your evaluation. Narration requires attention, comprehension, synthesis, and analysis of ideas and stories. The child must then use his/her own words to tell back what was learned. I think that is a much more authentic way to tell if a child has actually learned the material. I don't get too concerned that my ds doesn't remember every detail from all the stories we have read. It's about gaining a familiarity with the subject and making relationships with the things he's learning. I taught ps for eight years. I gave lots of worksheets, quizzes, and tests. I can tell you with certainty that very few of my students came anywhere close to the kind of "mastery" you mentioned. Most were good at short-term memory and then quickly forgot most of what they had "learned."
Laura

[FiveLittlePeaches]

oops! Double post.

[FiveLittlePeaches]

Hi,

I would like to respond to your question about the effectiveness of this program since we just finished LHFHG.

Just yesterday my friend was telling me about a classroom situation where the teacher asked to students to name some great men, we're talking fifth graders here. They chose to be silly, and responsed with names like "Santa Clause" and the "Easter Bunny".

Later, when we got home, I asked my little ones to tell me the names some of the names of great men we just studied about in LHFHG. Blank stare. I asked them to think about their history lesson and I to name some of the great men we learned about this past year.

They listed off:

John Calvin
George Washington Carver
George Washington
Polycarp
Abraham Lincoln
William Tynedale
Lewis and Clark
Thomas Jefferson
Dwight L. Moody
Martin Luther

That's all I can remember off the top of my head, but there were a few others. Seriously, that's more than I could have named when I was their age. As a previous poster mentioned, the children are becoming familar with the names and events in history. A lot of this will be covered again, but more in depth in future guides. Once the kids start doing timelines, narrating and notebooking, it's bound to sink in!

Hope that helps.

Joy
Finished LHFHG
Looking forward to starting Beyond

[Carrie]

Shannon,

I fully agree with the previous posters comments as I found the same to be true in my teaching experiences through the years and at our house. In answer to your question, I invite you to think back to your own kindergarten/first grade years of eduction and to share what you recall about history from those years of your schooling? Think back to the worksheets you completed on history and how much those helped you recall what was learned? I share this to help you see that learning by the worksheet method is not really learning at all, but is more of a "completing an assignment" mentality instead. Real learning that lasts a lifetime typically doesn't get its inspiration from completing worksheets.

I was reading a poll the other day that stated that 50 % of high school seniors didn't know who was President during the Civil War. Not only that, but they also didn't know who the Civil War in America was fought between or when it was fought. Most students could not name more than 2 previous Presidents of the United States! It went on to state other similarly apalling facts, leading me to conclude that if we want a different product than what the schools are turning out these days, we will need to use a different methodology than what the schools these days use to produce "learning". My 10 year old could answer all of the questions above and then some!

Blessings,
Carrie