Let Kids Create Lessons

Just a quick little post about the importance of allowing your 'students' to play an active role in devising and shaping their own learning.

I've been tutoring 3 really awesome kids for just under a year now... It's incredible the things you discover about how children learn when you have the opportunity to focus one-on-one attention on them.

The youngest is in Grade 2 this year; and we just started working together on 'official' tutoring sessions.
Yesterday, while practicing our counting to 100 we quickly discovered that we grew tired of that task..Sean would prefer to draw and create art.

This became the perfect opportunity to work off of this newfound excitement and get Sean pumped up about creating some 'Math Art', in which he picked one of the numbers we had been working with, and chose an object to draw that would correspond with that chosen number.  Since he was also working on writing and sounding out the words "I See" in his school work we incorporated this into the activity as well and ended up with an:

"I See  10 Planes" picture, as well as a more complex "I See 3  kids, 1 adult and 2 pets" activity (with the prompt being: "Who's In Your House?")

This extra extension activity probably took all of 10 minutes to accomplish, and really seemed to help Sean draw connections between some of the numbers he had just played with on his worksheet, and with something that mattered and was of interest to him in the current situation.
Remember to be open for these opportunities to present themselves, because a lot of times kids end up creating their own lessons, and if we let them and give them the opportunity to "roll with it" we could end up with something great!
                                                                                                                                            -Miss Pollard