My earlier question leads to a new one: what do you do (if anything) re retention?

[StaceyL in Canada]

(No, not of water.....) As I mentioned below, my sons are dragging themselves through French, protesting that it's pointless because they "won't remember any of it anyway." Sad, but likely true.... Now, certain subject areas build on previous knowledge/ skills, such as math or writing skills. But what do you do about retention of content-focused subjects--history, geography, even science? Despite our years spent on studies in these areas, I know my sons have little recollection of much of what was in, say, astronomy or biology or Renaissance history. I confess that my great fear is that they will be put on the spot, as it were, by instructors they may encounter beyond homeschool and reveal what will appear to be (and perhaps truly be) their/ my educational failures. It's the rare person, like SWB, who has a photographic memory and just plan remembers everything she reads! But there must be some sort of happy medium--so how do you determine just what degree of retention is reasonable or expected in any given subject area, and to what end?

[Garga]

bump

[Laura Corin]

We have started to work towards public exams (similar to SAT subject tests). They have a defined curriculum, so we know what we have to study, and they also give us a goal to aim for. For example, Calvin just started studying French, so I expect him to be ready for an exam in about four years from now: we learn everything that comes up in the text book, because we have that goal.

 

We have a continual review system set up for content areas - I'm happy to explain it if you are interested.

 

Laura

[Moni]

But what do you do about retention of content-focused subjects

 

Continual review.

Or if I don't mind, I just let them forget ;)

[Colleen]

(Sorry. Couldn't resist.:D)

[CherylG]

(Sorry. Couldn't resist.:D)

 

That's funny!

 

I have a story to relate regarding homeschooling and memory or lack there of.

We belong to a huge support group-100 families and we sporadically do things together. I am not a huge fan of shoving info into my kids heads so that they can spit it out to all around, but on that occasion I sure wished I had jammed stuff in, to avoid the embarrassment.

 

Let me set the stage:

We were traveling by train to Los Angeles for a day of field trips with over 75 homeschooling people. The train was all of us...as we get rolling along, someone asked my then high school daughter what American History we did.

 

She looked at me for a second across the aisle; if we were only sitting together I could've whispered what we did for two years. But no, she just gave me a blank stare and then blurted out for all to hear-I have never done American History.

 

I wanted to slink and slide under that filthy train seating. Well, we did the entire 3/4 of Sonlight and then when she was in 7th we did all (yes-all) of the Sonlight 7 Historical fiction.

 

That lesson taught me to lighten up on what every Teacher's manual tells me to do. She is fluent in two languages and is the youngest nurse in her class. She just couldn't be bothered remembering dates.

Edited January 24, 2009 by CherylG

[Laura Corin]

That lesson taught me to lighten up on what every Teacher's manual tells me to do. She is fluent in two languages and is the youngest nurse in her class. She just couldn't be bothered remembering dates.

 

I did the equivalent of AP History when I was at school. I had always thought that dates weren't important, and didn't bother to learn them properly for the exam. Despite decent teaching, and doing lots of other review before the the exam, I got an E, which is barely a pass (despite getting As in other subjects). Yes, my result did not represent my intelligence, but it was a measure that universities wanted to see. At some point, I had to learn to follow the rules.

 

Now I very much disagree with the idea that children have to learn to follow at age five rules that won't be significant until they are eighteen. My eight year old learns history by absorbing stories, not by learning dry dates. However, I do think that there is a value to knowing, in the end, how the rest of the world judges achievement.

 

Regards

 

Laura

[laughing lioness]

I have found the key to retention is repetition and contextualization. We memorize the VP timeline cards as a base and then read tons of history, watch shows such as How Shall We Then Live, read about church history through Omnibus and tapes such as That's Why They Call it Grace, etc. It all builds on each other.

And review, review, review. Rose (Dragons in the Flower Bed) and Drew explain about the CM review file, as does Andrew Pudewa in the poetry program. The key is to create a way to review consistantly while you are adding new info. My kids review for fun -last night at dinner we had celery. They launched on "Celery Ray" and continued through the IEW poetry program into section 2, laughing and trying to upstage each other the whole way.

We also do drama -more contextualization.

With memory work you are training the brain to retain. The more you build this skill the easier it becomes and the more proficient you become.

[Nan in Mass]

I'm interested. Please would you explain?

[Beth in SW WA]

But what do you do about retention of content-focused subjects--history, geography, even science?

 

I've been wondering the same thing. Ds spent countless hours last semester studying Bio. All those terms! He doesn't recall much from last Nov. How will he remember all this minutia in the upcoming years? He might remember the bigger concepts...I hope.

[Laurie4b]

I think the answer varies.

 

There are some things that I want my boys to memorize, including certain Bible passages. We review those every year. The first couple times through the review, they may have forgotten, but it will only take a couple days to get it back.

 

There are certain things that they need to memorize because of academic hoops that they will not actually use. Again, if memory is the goal, you must build regular review into your schedule.

 

There are other things that won't stick until there are the right "hooks" in the brain to hang them on. There is probably some technical name for that. But by "hooks", I mean some framework of sorting out the "whys" and "what's important" for certain subjects, as well as the unanswered questions in those. Prior to the framework being established, facts float by like so many unrelated data bits. Once the framework is there, the facts find their own "port" to "dock" and stay put. Building the framework is a matter of time and focusing on conceptual understanding.

 

Thinking about myself, other types of memory fall into three types: The facts I actually need and use in my daily life, I remember. This is the most important kind of memory: remembering what I need for the tasks I have to do. If there is trouble with this, the periodic review will need to be built in, but for many people, life builds it in and there is no need to add to that. So a musical son doesn't need to be told to review his guitar chords--he uses them all the time. There is another category of memory that is not memorization per se, but remembering that a fact is out there, so I can go look it up. I think this is a reasonable kind of knowledge. For a musical son, this may be a certain rare chord that may have been temporarily forgotten, but can be looked up and relearned in a fraction of the time as the first time. Lastly, there is a body of knowledge that I once knew over a period of years, and now do not, because I don't use it. Though I did very well in math in high school, I have not used anything but the simplest algebra and geometry since then and not surprisingly, don't remember any of the rest of it, seeing as how 3 decades have passed! I struggled to brush up for my GRE's, which I took just a couple years after college, and did fine, though I would have done better with the math part in high school.

 

So I guess a good part of the question is a matter of deciding "What kind of knowledge is this?" "What kind of memory is required?" and going from there.

[StaceyL in Canada]

I'm teaching/ leading a couple of co-op courses, one in Canadian History, and at one point was trying to get the kids to see that certain events in Canada were happening in the context of others in Europe and the US. Two sisters who had studied the French Rev. a year or two back thought it happened in the 1500's---after the American Rev! Amazingly, my guys knew better ("C'mon! We all know the Flood happened then!") and actually recalled that the fall of Constantinople and the invention of the printing press occurred in the same year.

 

I agree that part of the issue of retention has to do with usefulness. I've always appreciated Einstein's remark that he never memorized anything he could look up : ) (at least, I think it was Einstein.....) None of my older boys,at least, shows any inclination to go into sciences as a field of study/ career, so those finicky bio and chem factoids are likely to fly out the window; but I do think they are retaining the "big picture" view ("Biology: study of life forms. Chemistry: not the study of life forms.") It's sad but true that we all have to "jump through hoops" at certain points in our educations; fortunately, most of us can then get on to real life after that : )

 

Thanks for all the comments--good to know I'm not alone in this!

[Laura Corin]

I'm interested. Please would you explain?

 

The system is one from the Galore Park Study Skills book. We have a concertina file, with the pockets labelled 1 to 31. When Calvin has something new to learn, he writes an index card with the information (sometimes it gives the number of a page in a book, rather than the information itself). He puts it in the section for today's date (say 24 for the 24th). He learns the facts today, then moves the card to tomorrow (pocket 25). He reviews the facts on the 25th, then moves them to one week later (pocket 1). On the 1st, he reviews them again, then leaves them in that pocket, to be reviewed every month for as long as we think it's necessary.

 

So it goes: review after one day, one week, one month, the monthly. The system works really well - Calvin had no problem retaining the information for his biology SAT subject test equivalent. The only adjustment you have to do is to move cards around a little to cope with weekends. I do this routinely when I prepare for school each Sunday.

 

Laura

[StaceyL in Canada]

That, I fear, would be the issue with my guys. They *do* have reminders on their weekly schedules for review (not your system, but at least review), but all too often, it still does not happen. I'm more than a little tired of reminding them to review. :)

[Laura Corin]

That, I fear, would be the issue with my guys. They *do* have reminders on their weekly schedules for review (not your system, but at least review), but all too often, it still does not happen. I'm more than a little tired of reminding them to review. :)

 

Calvin is orderly by nature and likes to have structures to follow. Hobbes would be another story - I'd have to do a lot more chasing if he were old enough for that kind of system.

 

Laura

[Nan in Mass]

Thank you Laura! I hadn't heard of doing it this way, with a concertina file. I have figured out how to memorize flashcards, but we need a way of organizing them for review. This would work beautifully, with a few modifications. We need to sit down and do it all at once, then review every few hours for two or three days, then move to a daily schedule for a week, then move to a weekly schedule, then a monthly one. Sigh. Reading your post confirms my suspicions that we are truly, truly handicapped when it comes to memorizing. This information is going to be a lifesaver for my older son, who is going to have to be memorizing tons of rather disconnected facts for nautical science at college next year, and then hang onto them until the big coast guard exam in four years. They are going to accumulate alarmingly. I wonder if they sell room-sized concertina files LOL.

Gratefully,

Nan

[elegantlion]

Here's a link to Rose's memory system, which sounds similar to Laura's.

 

http://www.ragamuffinrosies.info/

[Dee in MI]

Guys, have you looked at the flashcard programs recently mentioned on the main board? I use Mnemosyne, but another poster used Anki. I use them for Spanish and Latin, for both my son and me.

 

They both used "Spaced Repetition", which sounds a lot like Laura's system. When you're first learning a card, you're asked daily. You grade how well you recall it. As you give it higher scores (five, I know it cold, one, I don't know it at all), it will, from then on, ask you less and less often.

 

Here is the program that I use:

 

Mnemosyne

[StaceyL in Canada]

separate files for each subject? Either way could get a bit unwieldy! Which option works for you?

[laughing lioness]

In addition to the file system, A. Pudewa has a grid system laid out for the poetry program. Basically new poems are gone over daily. The 2nd week the new poem is gone over daily, the old poem is gone over every other day. The 3rd week the new poem is daily, the 2nd oldest poem is every other day and the 3rd oldest poem is every 3/4 days, etc. It's all laid out on this lovely logical sequential grid:001_smile:

For more global thinking moms (like me, who have high hopes of following grids and files but irl, don't) I have a notebook with all the memory work listed. I list the memory work on a large white board weekly. For previous memory we review after we've learned this weeks memory work by subject, based on the notebook, or study guide (such as poetry). For instance for Xian Studies, we review previous sections when we do our lessons (1-2 a week). We spend TIME reviewing. Mastery over overview.

The real deal is to find a system that works for you- that you will work, and do it.

Creating mental "hooks" for your kids is what M. Montessori called it. For us, for history, that would be our VP cards. Then when we memorize our history sentences or read a historical work of fiction or watch The Scarlett Pimpernel, everyone is wracking their brains and engaging in heated debate about during what years the French Revolution took place, who was reigning in French and England, who married who and how Napoleans' nephew ended up in power as well (and we get into family systems at that point, too :001_smile:) and usually what was happening in Russia about the same time. Not everyone is going to remember the same thing, obviously, and those things that stand out or are deemed important are going to be different for each person. My oldest will remember which monarch was married to whom, whose child ended up in what country and various odd details of their personal lives. My 14 yo will know dates and what type of weaponry was used, how it was developed. My 18 yo will know what types of horses were employed, that dalmations were the dogs of the royal courts and went ahead of the carriages to snap at commoners, etc.

My oldest loved apologia bio but didn't really memorize with mastery bio until she taught our first and 2nd graders at co-op. Last year, her retention sky-rocketed because she taught 7th graders bio. So, the baby "hooks" that she first created in bio, got stronger and stronger. Her intro to high school bio class was more of an overview. We didn't camp on it because she wasnt' going into science so mastery wasnt' as much of an issue for us in that class.

Isnt' it the same with us? I have many recipes memorized (like pancakes) because I make them so often, they are quick, easy, cheap and healthy. I don't have a recipe for brisket memorized becasue none of us like brisket.

[Nan in Mass]

Yah, it took me forever to learn that a routine is a very nice tool, and if the routine doesn't work, it is the routine's fault, not mine, and I should alter it until it does work. I used to hate routines because of the guilt associated with them, until I hit on a few that actually made my life nicer and easier and realized a good routine is helpful.

[Laura Corin]

separate files for each subject? Either way could get a bit unwieldy! Which option works for you?

 

We had a big clear out after Calvin passed his bio exam, but otherwise it's all in there on index cards.

 

Laura

[CherylG]

I did the equivalent of AP History when I was at school. I had always thought that dates weren't important, and didn't bother to learn them properly for the exam. Despite decent teaching, and doing lots of other review before the the exam, I got an E, which is barely a pass (despite getting As in other subjects). Yes, my result did not represent my intelligence, but it was a measure that universities wanted to see. At some point, I had to learn to follow the rules.

 

Now I very much disagree with the idea that children have to learn to follow at age five rules that won't be significant until they are eighteen. My eight year old learns history by absorbing stories, not by learning dry dates. However, I do think that there is a value to knowing, in the end, how the rest of the world judges achievement.

 

Regards

 

Laura

 

Hi Laura,

I didn't mean to offend you or imply that teacher's manuals and standards were not of value. This information was just what I found that works for me.

 

I tended to be overly concerned about achievement and meeting certain, really high standards back then; when in actuality our whole family tends to be over-achievers. I didn't know that then.

 

So, for me it was a good lesson in letting go and relaxing. We had been homeschooling under ten years then, I think.

 

BTW: When she lived abroad for three months-she told me she understood history much better seeing the places that were in the books. She is a kinesthetic learner.:)

Edited January 28, 2009 by CherylG

[Laura Corin]

Hi Laura,

I didn't mean to offend you or imply that teacher's manuals and standards were not of value. This information was just what I found that works for me.

 

I tended to be overly concerned about achievement and meeting certain, really high standards back then; when in actuality our whole family tends to be over-achievers. I didn't know that then.

 

 

It's a difficult path to tread: finding our own way towards having educated children whilst keeping an eye on society's expectations.

 

Laura