posted on October 21, 2023

Developing personal processes is a way we can increase effectiveness and efficiency in our lives. A process serves to support our decision making, and can be seen as a repetitive procedure we can use to solve a challenge or take advantage of an opportunity.

In personal coaching, we use a specific line of clarification and questioning to precisely target what the client needs to solve for themselves in each coaching session.

In Mathematics, developing a process frees up brain processing power to focus on the problem at hand. A mathematical process may be: read the question, understand the wording and what is needing to be solved, estimating the answer, doing the math, checking calculations, and comparing results to estimates. We can internalize this process to establish a framework for solving many math problems.

Process offers a framework and foundation for approaching and solving so many daily tasks and challenging situations, and for availing ourselves of amazing opportunities which may come our way.

posted on August 13, 2022

Some of the most successful elementary and middle school classrooms are those where students learn as much from each other as they do from their teachers. Such structures truly value student input and participation. 

Using manipulatives in math enriches the student experience by allowing students to experience their peers’ iterative processes first hand. These interactions, in turn, enrich the group experience. 

We designed intooba construction kits to offer a wide range of learning experiences in creativity, math, engineering, and budgeting. Teachers set their own values for the inputs thus enabling math interactions for a wide range of ages and abilities!

Here sixth graders build helicopters on a budget.

posted on May 22, 2022

I have the very good fortune to work with colleagues I both like and respect in a K-12 environment that espouses experiential education as a cornerstone of our programming. Within this approach to education is an understanding that we purposefully provide space for children to make mistakes and learn from them. This is fundamental to fostering the development of strong, independent thinkers and learners.

It has been my experience that at about fifth grade students cognitively realize that they are indeed independent people. With this comes the understanding of the responsibility for one’s own performance in the world, charging the individual and student with challenge, opportunity, welcome success, and certain failure. If we build into our education system the caring support to strive with determination through personal and academic challenges, then we empower students to accept the vicissitudes of process in their development. Successful people, using any definition of our choosing, are so because they have developed the resilience to forge on through the process of learning and adaptation toward a defined set of goals.

I accompanied students on a field trip. At this facility, my role was merely to support the teaching activities of the facility’s instructors. Facility administrators, it turns out, knew little of our education philosophy, and they were unwilling to adapt themselves to it. They laid out very traditional, strict, and outmoded practices which thoroughly disappointed me. At the beginning of each activity, a very rigid outline was presented, including sanctions for deviations. When students deviated in any way from the facility’s expectations, they were scolded.

My fascination with teaching middle school children is that they are personally developing concurrently with the delivery of a school curriculum throughout the school year. Effective educators need an extraordinary amount of insight and compassion to interact successfully with children. We are working with young people whose job it is to experiment with, and test the limits of, acceptable behavior as they experience their interests, capacities, and limitations first hand. To establish a space that encourages the individual to ‘intentionally grow themselves’ as opposed to having them exist within strictly prescribed boundaries stunts their potential. The practice of explicitly presenting sanctions upfront presupposes unacceptable failure, and the consequences thereof.

Not all practices work for, or in, all environments. Ideally, however, we are looking to create an environment where children develop their best selves both socially and academically. Thankfully, educators are not merely conduits of information. Rather, we add, through cogent argument and guidance, to a child’s self esteem and nurture their journey in finding their own way.

posted on February 10, 2021

Why do we not teach decision making skills in K-12 education? Our entire lives revolve, in a practical sense, around making decisions both large and small. We certainly, for example, ask students to make sound decisions by “making wise choices” about their behavior! Do we ever explicitly instruct students in the process and skill of how to actually make a wise decision from a series of presented alternatives? Do we further instruct them in ways to locate, investigate, and evaluate plausible alternatives?

As an instructive example, if you are teaching middle or high school students about personal finance, one might approach the evaluative and decision making process as follows:

PERSONAL FINANCE: the overall picture

Lesson objective: to be able to see your financial situation as integral to your life. This helps with setting goals, objectives, and forward planning. We will learn to think about maximizing opportunities, and minimizing risks.

Consider your “financial self” as an avatar that you are responsible for. It has inputs and outputs, and you are responsible for its well-being. The inputs and outputs are very closely tied to one another; they feed and nourish each other in a continuous circle. Mentally, this gives you an opportunity to look at your life objectively from a distance.

Inputs: what does your financial avatar need to survive and thrive?

Circle of support

Education

Health

Insurance

Money

Motivation

Opportunity

Time

Outputs: what does your avatar produce as output?

Community

Energy

Interaction

Learning

Money

Production 

Socialization

Questions:

  1. What are some ways you can work towards making a positive impact on your financial future?
  2. What are some ways you can assess and minimize risk?
  3. Why is it important to set goals, and measure achievement?
posted on May 4, 2020

intooba construction kits for K-6. The benefits of using physical kits for mathematics and engineering in elementary and middle school are:

  • students can learn the vital skills of collaboration, listening, and expressing/explaining their opinions;
  • students learn that they may need to attempt to solve problems multiple times in order to meet the requirements of the problem;
  • students use their hands and minds in construction thereby giving a visual and practical application to math and engineering;
  • teachers can “see” how children are thinking by observing how they construct their engineering/building challenges;
  • teachers can see how children are working together and expressing themselves in collaborative project work.

https://www.intooba.com/

posted on

ONLINE RESOURCES FOR ELEMENTARY SCHOOL:

– Beast Academy (Math) (https://beastacademy.com/)
– BrainPop (https://www.brainpop.com/)
– Creative Bug (https://www.creativebug.com/)
– Curiosity Stream (https://curiositystream.com/)
– Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/)
– Outschool (https://outschool.com/)
– Tynker (https://www.tynker.com/)

YOUTUBE CHANNELS:

– Crash Course Kids 
– Free School
– Geek Gurl Diaries
– Geography Focus
– Kids Learning Tube
– National Geographic Kids
– SciShow Kids
– Science Channel
– Science Max
– SciShow
– TheBrainScoop

Elementary engineering
posted on April 8, 2020

CREATIVE FREE PLAY

This house design is an engineering marvel created by two 11-year-old students without any adult input whatsoever!

The structure was created in two parts – base and top.

Congratulations to these two budding engineers!

www.intooba.com

CONSTRUCTING CREATIVITY – intooba construction kits

Housing base
Housing top
Complete house
posted on April 3, 2020

From my years of teaching elementary school, a few ideas come to mind on what are essential skills for young people to learn. They are presented here, in no particular order:

  • the ability to substantiate and articulate your thinking and viewpoint
  • the ability to negotiate and work within a group
  • the ability to take information from one place and use it in another
  • the ability and fortitude to try something and rework it to make it better
  • the ability to try something new
  • the capacity and interest to learn about the world
  • the interest in connecting in-school learning to the ‘real world’
  • the opportunity to be both teacher and learner

Finding few engaging manipulatives attached to curriculum to achieve these goals, I have co-developed several products for hands-on collaborative learning in a variety of settings: the classroom, in after-school activities, in homeschooling, and in summer camps. These products offer open-ended opportunities for students to experiment with curriculum supported ideas and creative-free-thinking. They offer the possibility for students to teach and learn from each other, taking time to listen and contribute while using visually stimulating hands-on materials.

The first, the intooba construction kit for K-6, (www.intooba.com) is designed for hands-on collaborative learning in STEM/STEAM engineering and math. Rods and connectors are used to solve over 25 engineering challenges, each with several levels of complexity. A math manual is provided to support common core concepts such as shapes, measurement, and estimation.

Our challenging engineering projects encourage collaborative learning in designing, constructing, and budgeting.

diskii math (http://www.diskii.com) is a hands-on math manipulative for grades 1-5. Our instructor manual offers ideas on learning such topics as algebra, logic, fractions, and decimals, and is based on common core standards. Students may learn both as teacher and student when working collaboratively with diskii tokens. Each token is associated with a unique name, color, and face offering three variables for problem creators.  Users can vary the complexity of the product by assigning an age-appropriate value to each token when creating challenges. We have developed both physical and downloadable token sets.

All of our materials require minimal instruction to set-up and use. No professional development is required for these easy-to-understand products which are supported by instructor and student manuals where appropriate.