Listen to Plato

Close up of Plato from School of Athens, a fresco by Raffaello Zanzio, 1509.

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”- Plato

This is just so plain and simple, but the bureaucracy will get in the way of seeing what we are doing to these bright children that just need the right methods to bring out their brilliance.

How to teach math? How to teach science?

It was Wednesday night, Theo and I decided to play cup stacking. It is a great fine motor skill task and it is fun. Just stack up the cups as fast as you can without letting it toppled over. You learn about strategy since we have two different kinds of cups, he has to decide whether to put the small cups on the bottoms or the bigger cups. You learn about gravity. You learn to count to make things even out.

Just so happened we have a basket of marbles. Marbles are always so much fun. I decided to grab some and put it in the cups. And then an idea came to me that I had grabbed my mini food scales down. I asked him which cup do you think weights more. I taught him how to use the mini scale. And something so simple as playing turns into teaching and that could be applied to many things.

Now he is weighing everything in sight. And he learns about numbers and the higher the number correlates to heavy. And also not everything that looks big is heavy. It is so much fun to see him light up.