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RE: Curation With Style: The Best of the Unmentionables Ep. 6 (24/9/17)
Yea! So glad you caught and liked my post about living books. Yes, this is the best method I've found for teaching my kids and I wish more people would adopt it. I love that my kids love hearing the stories - they beg for Robin Hood and it is a challenging read! I'm impressed what they learn each day from our readings. Thanks! :)
My younger brother is a teacher in the regular public school system and when trying to teach "literature" to his class -- especially when it was something dense and difficult like Shakespeare -- he organized the class, assigned roles and had the kids act out the play.
They absolutely loved it. They made so much noise with their "presentations" other teachers complained. So the principal of the school moved my brother and his class out to a temporary (barracks-type) building where they could "do their thing" and make all the noise they wanted.
Kids would beg to get into his classes every year. They remembered their roles and presentations long after the school year was over. If you can get children involved in learning, they will practically teach themselves. (They do that all the time anyway as soon as they find something interesting. Often, it's a matter of finding ways to make what we want them to learn ... interesting.)
My brother has a gifted, agile mind -- and he remembers how he hated school as a kid. He thinks of what would have made the experience more enjoyable for him ... and some of his solutions are terrific. When he teaches history, he does it by telling a story ... as if he was there ... as if he's retelling something that he witnessed. He does it in the language of everyday conversation. He makes smart remarks about some of the characters and their choices. He makes them come alive to the kids ... as he teaches about the political climate they lived in, the implications and consequences of certain decisions, the cleverness of how they "gamed the system," etc. It's like sitting around the pub listening to your buddy talk about "office politics" over drinks after work.
Again ... it's far more memorable than telling kids to "read pages 176 through 203 for homework tonight." Maybe they'll do that, maybe they won't. But when he's got them for an hour a day as a "captive audience" ... he tells them stories. And they remember the stories.
That is awesome! I love that he engages the kids. I'm sure it's A LOT more work to do it that way than to just read through the pages in the book. I can imagine that the kids are super excited to find out they are in his class. He sounds like a super fun teacher and I bet it carries over into other areas of his life as well. :) Thanks for sharing! We need more public school teachers like that for sure!