CM and RDI Worlds Collide!

For the past year, I blogged the similarities between the Charlotte Mason and Relationship Development Intervention. I have covered in great detail the parallels between Charlotte Mason and one of the books on the RDI hot list (Awakening Children's Minds). The Winter 2007 issue of The Review published by ChildLightUSA, an organization dedicated to the Charlotte Mason philosophy of education, confirms exactly what I have been thinking for a long time. If you read any article from the free, online magazine, check out "Is Sequencing and Ordering the Curriculum Important for Scaffolding Learning?" by Carroll Smith. His insightful article covers the following topics:

• The Sequenced General Curriculum
• The Scaffolded Curriculum
• Prior Knowledge
• Vygotsky: Thought and Language
• Vygotsky: Social Interaction
• Vygotsky: Zone of Proximal Development and Scaffolding
• Inside a Mason Context
• Daily Scaffolded Learning through Narration
• Six Steps of the Narration Sequence
• Store of Common Information

Does it sound familiar?!?!?!?

Snoopy Dancing and Victory Lapping in Carolina!

Scaffolding and the Cutting Edge

In Chapter 2 of Awakening Children's Minds, Laura Berk discusses scaffolding as a way to help children in mastering new areas of competence. Today, we had a great example of how this works. Pamela finds cutting anything short or curved a challenge. We have been making toys from The Toymaker to practice cutting (among other things). Today, we cut out the Christmas angel box. When we started RDI, Pamela could handle simple cutting tasks that were straight and long. She was not very good at corners, short snips, and curves. She tried to cut curves with shorter straight cuts. She cut this piece all by herself today, a task she can do independently because it had all straight lines and right-angle corners. I assisted by cleaning up a couple of corners--the last skill she needs to learn for cutting corners.

When it comes to cutting, we have a shared understanding that Pamela will cut as much as she can by herself and I will cut the tricky parts. She got this far when she recognized the short, tight cuts in the roof were too hard. She told me, "Help me with this." I cut only the parts that were challenging and encouraged her to keep cutting.

She reached another tight, tricky corner near the floor of the house. I left one little triangle for her to snip and asked her if she could do it. She said she could and finished cutting the rest all on her own.

As you can see she had a couple of snags that were minor, so I cleaned it up for her. Her cutting has improved over the past couple of months, and I did not think it was worth drawing her attention to it since I had bigger plans in mind.

She did not know where to begin with the angel and handed me the entire piece, uncut. I decided to cut the inner part of the wings and section between the head and wings. I thought she could do the stand all by herself, and I would use the long curve edge of the wings to demonstrate how to cut curves. I filmed us cutting the angel: first, I told her I thought she could do the straight edges and she agreed. Then, we talked about how you cut with the cutting hand and you turn with the turning hand (she is left handed, so I wanted to avoid left versus right).

The first clip shows the straight cuts.



The second clip shows the curved cuts. This is the first time Pamela has ever successfully turned a paper while cutting a curve! You can see how pleased I am by the smile on my face!


The first technique of scaffolding I used was joint problem solving aimed at keeping Pamela in the zone of proximal development. I broke down the task into three parts: the interior, which I would cut; the straight stand, which Pamela would cut; and the long curves, which I would show Pamela how to cut. I provided very little direction in the straight cuts because she has mastered that skill. I provided detailed direction on the long curve because had never been able to do it before unless I held the paper and turned it for her. Since I knew cutting curves was at the edge of the zone, I moved in closer to narrow the zone of connection between us. I had to give her a little "tu" sound to help her think of the word, turning, which I was trying to spotlight. I also repositioned the paper to maximize success for her.

The second technique of scaffolding I used was self-regulation, or "the capacity to use thought to guide behavior" (page 49). Pamela and I talked about what my cutting hand was doing versus what my holding hand was doing. You can tell she put this new way of thinking about cutting curves into action. She made three of four curved cuts by turning the paper today. In my opinion, this is the major difference between behavioral techniques and RDI. The former focuses on changing the environment or finding ways to shape behavior; the latter focuses on thinking in new ways so that the person makes better informed behavioral choices:

In scaffolding, the adult encourages the child to grapple with questions and problems, and, thereby, to contribute significantly to the dialogue. . . The parent or teacher intervenes only when the child is truly stuck, granting the child as much opportunity to master his or her own behavior as possible. . . When adults ask children questions and make suggestions that permit them to participate in the discovery of solutions, then transfer of useful strategies to the child is maximized. by introducing language as a mediator of the child's activity, the adult's questions and prompts prevent the child from responding impulsively. They encourage the child to step back from the immediate situation and consider alternatives--in essence, to think (pages 49-50).

The third technique of scaffolding is what I covered in another blog post: warm parenting.

Of course, I cannot help but close with some Charlotte Mason musings. I think she instinctively understood the idea of scaffolding. For example, when teaching children under six outdoor geography, she encouraged parents to break it down into many little steps and to engage children in conversations about what they observe and concepts of geography. Children could learn to think of a duck-pond as an island sea, a hill as a mountain, and a brook as a mighty river. To prepare them for map reading when older, she broke down directions and distances: talk about observing the sun's movement and time, observing the sun and compass directions, paces and distance, time of a walk and distance, direction different windows in the house and other buildings face, the connection between wind direction and weather, the compass and directions, measuring boundaries (property boundaries, building dimensions) by pacing, making their own plans of their house, their property, the block in which they live, the neighborhood, etc. You can read her ideas on outdoor geography here.

Scaffolding and Differentiating First versus Last

Here is an example of how I taught Pamela to differentiate first versus last from a side view. Pamela has a difficult time deciding which animal is first or last and basically guesses! I tried demonstrating how the animal with its nose on the outside is first and its tail on the outside is last, but Pamela was still confused when I mixed up the animals and/or flipped them in the other direction.













At this point, I began thinking about how to scaffold this by simplifying the elements. I pushed together all the animals to make the penguin's beak and the beaver's tail more prominent. But, Pamela continued to be confused with successive trials.













My final step worked! I covered up all the animals with a placemat, leaving only the penguin's beak and the beaver's tail uncovered. The mat made it so obvious that Pamela had no trouble picking first and last. We did some trials with the placemat and she picked correct animals for first and last every time. Then, I tried some trials without the placement, and she clearly understood! I plan to spend one more week on this because I want to make sure she remembers this from day to day.

Pause, Rewind, or Eject?

One of the benefits of homeschooling is being able to adjust the pace of learning to the child. This is especially true for an autistic child. Today, we came across one of those bumps in the road to mastering decimals. Making Math Meaningful occasionally takes a leap of logic too large for Pamela to navigate, and today she bumped into one. The book went from activities like the one I described last week to comparing two decimals (a greater than, less than, or equal symbol). She did not immediately grasp concepts like 12 being the same as 12.0 or 12 being different from 12.3.

Pamela has taught me three different strategies when this happens:

• Pause – Stop the activity. Get a fresh sheet of paper and possibly concrete objects and re-teach the concept in a different way. If she seems completely confused, then it is time to rewind.
• Rewind – Go back to what she knows thoroughly, rerun the ideas covered since until we see where she stops understanding. Get a fresh sheet of paper and possibly concrete objects and re-teach all missing concepts in a different way. If we have covered a concept in a myriad of ways to no avail, it is time to eject. A sure sign of this is when she has developed the habit of frustration and screams every time I pull out the activity!
  
• Eject – Pull out other activities and goals for that subject and work on them. Table what is confusing her for some time. Sometimes, she is not developmentally ready and needs more time before she can master a concept. A great example of this is how we took an entire year off writing to develop her pre-writing skills!

Today we paused, and I covered what I could in the spur of the moment. Later, I typed up a sheet in Excel to add a few more steps to the teaching process that were not included in the book. My concrete objects for tomorrow’s sheet will be dollars and coins. I have fake paper dollars and coins for teaching money concepts, and I will drag them out to teach comparison of decimals. Since Pamela understands money, I plan to set up each side of the equation with one-dollar bills and dimes. I think it will be easier for her to fill in the equation properly. Then she follow my example and pull out the proper number of bills and coins for each side. When she shows an understanding, she can work independently.

If she gets it, our normal progression is to fade from objects to drawing them on paper. In time, she will fade to thinking rather than drawing. If she does not get it, I may have to fall back on my strategies and rewind.