Motivate Your Child to Learn Using These Four Steps

Motivate Your Child to Learn Using These Four Steps

Children naturally love to learn.. Even children attending a traditional school setting enjoy learning–at first–when a kindergarten class is full of neat things to learn about like: goldfish, hamsters, seed sprouting, math manipulatives, play areas, etc.

But sometime around the second grade textbooks and workbooks are introduced and a child is forced to sit in a small desk area for six or more hours. Many children decide that school is boring. Studies show that seventy percent of children do not learn well in the way the schools teach -lecture/textbook/test–most students need more.

Learning Styles and 4 Step Learning Cycle
Twenty years ago, when I first began homeschool I read book 4Mat System: Teaching to Learning Styles With Right-Left Mode Techniques by Bernice McCarthy. I learned everyone perceives and processes experience in different ways. These preferences comprise our unique learning style. This made a profound impact on my teaching. My eyes were opened to the importance of understanding how children learn differently.

McCarthy and a dozen other learning style experts developed a four-step lesson cycle is a way to teach to all four learning styles. These four steps will work with any curricula or any subject.
~ Step 1 Excite: Cause an Interest
~ Step 2 Examine: Find Out the Facts
~ Step 3 Expand: Do Something with What Was Learned
~ Step 4 Excel: Share Work with Others

Once I grasped an applied the four steps, I recognized Jesus taught this way!

Step 1 Excite: Cause an Interest
Step 1 is a critical step. In this step the teacher motivate the student by making the lesson meaningful to their lives. They might discuss what the children may already know about the subject and what they would like to find out.

I want to spend time explaining this step because is almost always skipped (especially in public school classrooms). Adding this step to your current lessons can make a huge difference in your teaching effectiveness.

What motivates you to learn? If I offered you a free course in plumbing would you jump at the chance to take it? Probably not, but if you were standing in a basement knee deep in water you’d be interested.

Children, like adults need to know material they are learning is relevant to their lives. A workshop speaker asked this question to a room of 300 school teachers. “Why do we capitalize proper nouns? The only answer that was given was, “Because it’s a rule.” You can teach this as a rule by marking Xs on papers for a few years repeating the rule over and over or you could explain why we capitalize proper nouns. The workshop proved her point by asking one of the teachers in the audience, “What is your name?” The woman answered, “Susan.” The presenter asked, “Would you rather be called Susan or the lady in the red dress?” Imagine explaining this to a 6-year-old. “Would you rather be called Susan or the girl in the red dress?” Then explaining: We capitalize Susan because it is your name, the name of a specific person. We don’t capitalize girl because it could be any girl, not a specific girl. If I were writing about mountains I would not capitalize the word “mountains” but if I were writing about a specific set of mountains such as the “Rocky Mountains” I would use capitals. Spending a few minutes explaining why makes a tremendous difference. Explaining that a period at the end of a sentence is like a stop sign, is much more effective than repeating the rule about using a period at the end of a sentence.

Step 2 Examine: Find Out the Facts
Step 2 is the traditional step: This is where the student findsout the facts. The schools usually use textbooks. Textbooks are one option but homeschoolers know that using several different resources are more effective.

Some children are simply bored to tears working in text books. When is the last time you curled up by a fire with a good “textbook?” Resources such as “living books,” historical novels, biographies and classics can motivate an unmotivated child.

Step 3 Expand: Do Something with What Was Learned
To retain the material, a student must do something with what is learned. During Step 3 the lesson is reinforced by completing an assignment or creating a project. Projects can be simple ten-minute activities or elaborate three-day endeavors.

Step 3 examples:
~ Write a summery, paragraph, poem, essay, etc.
~ Create an Outline.
~ Complete a Crafts or Activities
~ Illustrate the Story – Student illustrates the story in any medium.
~ Create a cartoon strip or a create a storyboard.
~ Create a Scrapbook Page
~ Make a mini book or lapbook.
~ Act out the story in a skit.

Step 4 Excel: Organize and Share Work
In Step 4 the student shares what he has learned. When a student can teach someone else what he has learned, he really knows the subject.

Lesson Example: Rock Classification
Step 1
Create questions and curiosity. Give your child several different rocks, a penny, a paper clip, glass of water, and say “Use these materials to tell me the differences between these rocks.” Brainstorm and discuss how you can use the materials to show differences.

Step 2
Reading about rock classification in a visually stimulating book like Eyewitness Rocks or watching a PBS show on rocks, etc to learn how and why scientist classify rocks (answering the questions created in Step 1).

Step 3
Do something with what was learned. Create a scrapbook page (or chart, or outline, or report, etc)

Step 4
The child shares the scrapbook page (or chart, or outline, or report, etc) with father or sibling explaining what he learned about rock classification. This is synthesis, pulling it all together in a format to teach someone else.

Learning Styles Caution
Christians should be cautious when studying learning-style theories. As with other truths, nonbelievers take a discovery, as the secular world often does, and distorts the principle to fit their secular worldview. New Age and psychology take things like learning differences and brain dominance and use them as an excuse for sin.

The Bible describes how different people are given different gifts and talents. Anything you read about learning styles should line up with God’s Word and never be used as an excuse for sin or shortcomings. They should not be used to categorize or label. They should be used to realize the benefits of teaching new concepts through different modes of learning and to help children who are having difficulty grasping or retaining information. In fact, we should not teach to a particular style-else the student would only learn in one mode. We need to teach children to recognize their strengths and improve on their
weaknesses.

The most important thing to know about learning styles is that one style is not better than another. We all have different intellectual strengths.

For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also [is] Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether [we be] Jews or Gentiles, whether [we be] bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body [were] an eye, where [would be] the hearing? If the whole [were] hearing, where [would be] the smelling? But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him. And if they were all one member, where [would be] the body? But now [they are] many members, yet but one body. And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary: And those [members] of the body, which we think to be less honorable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely [parts] have more abundant comeliness. For our comely [parts] have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that [part] which lacked: That there should be no schism in the body; but [that] the members should have the same care one for another.

1 Corinthians 12:12-25

For More Information see:
Learning Styles: Reaching Everyone God Gave You to Teach
The Heart of Wisdom Teaching Approach
Learning Styles
Take a 4MAT Tour
Four Step Bible Lesson Example

Robin has been homeschooling for 20 years. She and her husband Ronnie are blessed with a “yours, mine, and ours” blended family of eleven children (ages 6 to 34) and thirteen grandchildren (ages 1 to 12). She is actively teaching the two youngest children still at home. Robin is also an author and business owner. Please visit her at Heart of Wisdom.

Tags: Curriculum, Encouragement, homeschool life, Homeschool Methods, homeschooling

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