Wind Rose Homeschool Academy Blog

About a year ago, I read Jo Boaler’s book Mathematical Mindsets , and my understanding of mathematics education was completely transformed.  It’s one of those mind-blowing, life-changing professional books. Using combined research of neuroscience, educational studies, and growth mindset, Boaler provides the evidence to support the following tenets for mathematics education: Anyone can achieve to high levels. Mistakes grow your brain. When you believe in yourself, your brain operates differently. Parents’ beliefs about math affect their children’s achievement. When teachers believe in their students, the students perform better. Student assessment ought to align to brain science. Visual math improves performance. Speed (often called math fact fluency) is not valuable or important. Mathematics is about more than computation; it’s a multi-dimensional, open, and creative subject that is more about patterns than about computation. This year, we are using a combi...

Aesthetic Experiences & See-Think-Wonder Our Anchor Chart We have been discussing Aesthetic Experiences the last week or so. In her new book Engaging Children , Ellin Keene writes about the aesthetic experience being vital to true, authentic engagement with learning.  She urges us to directly teach and share an awareness of aesthetic experiences.  In our opening mini-lesson, we each shared stories of our own aesthetic experiences. Our second grader talked about seeing a hummingbird for the first time in the yard, the time she cried reading Charlotte's Web , and when I cried at Matthew's death when reading Anne of Green Gables aloud to her. Our fourth grader shared traveling to an Amish community and being moved by their simple architecture and clothing. Our fifth grader talked about the movie Christopher Robin . In reading, we are paying attention to lines we find aesthetically pleasing and tracking them in a Craft Study section in our Literacy Studio notebooks,...