teaching Archives » Figur8 - Nurture for the Future

Teachable Moments: Healthy Diet Pyramid

I’ve been trying very hard to get Gavin to eat more healthy foods. This has been one uphill battle for me since our household isn’t exactly renown for healthy eating. There’s just too much junk food around the house… I guess this is one of the down-sides of extended family living (unless the entire family is health conscious).

One of the problems about exposing a child to junk food is that once they have a taste for it, they will always have the taste for it. It’s a habit that is difficult to kick. The best thing is to avoid exposing them in the first place. Unfortunately, that’s a little too late for Gavin.

So what’s a mother to do but try to encourage her child to consume more healthy foods?

In an effort to introduce greens into his diet, I’ve decided to take a two-step plan. Gavin’s been pretty resistant at dinner time. Even if I can get the veggies into his mouth, he gags and sounds like he’s about to throw up. So I figured the easier route is to start with the fruits.

Most mornings, I blend a fruit-yoghurt cocktail in the Vitamix to start our day. It’s like a smoothie, but better because I don’t dilute it with ice or water. The typical concoction might be something like this: yoghurt, banana, grapes, and orange. Sometimes I might add strawberries, raspberries, cherries, or an apple. If the mix is too thick, I’ll add some milk. I used to add ice to make it cold, but now I just freeze the banana or the grapes and it has the same effect. Personally, I think this is one of the most pleasant ways to consume a variety of fruits (including the sour varieties which I don’t like). Unfortunately, for Gavin, I might as well be trying to convince him to eat his greens…

This morning, I told Gavin that if he didn’t want to drink my very delicious yoghurt drink then he wasn’t allowed to have his junk food any more. Naturally, he went berserk. When he was calm again, I took the opportunity to teach him about the healthy diet pyramid. We talked about all the foods that he needed to eat a lot of and how they kept him strong and healthy. Then I explained that junk food were bad foods that we needed to limit. I acknowledged that they taste nice and that everyone likes to eat them because they taste nice, but because they weren’t good for us, we have to make sure we don’t eat too much of them. Most of all, we had to make sure that we eat all the good foods first so we don’t get full on junk food. We could have the junk food after we ate our main meals. Ideally, it would have been good to eliminate the junk food altogether, but I figured that was being a tad unrealistic, so I opted for reducing the consumption quantity. After that, I showed him pictures of the healthy diet pyramid and pointed out the different food groups.

I didn’t expect Gavin to absorb the lesson, but I figured it was a good start. I was pleasantly surprised after lunch, when I allowed him a treat of Panda biscuits, that he didn’t finish the packet. He gave the rest back to me and said, “I shouldn’t eat too much because it’s not good for me.” He did a pretty good reiteration of my morning’s lesson on healthy eating which did me proud. Unfortunately, the lesson didn’t stay with him until dinner time when he started asking for junk food again. Ah well, baby steps…

Early Childhood Education: Glenn Doman Tips for Flashcard Use

by Shen-Li Lee 2 Comments

Looking for more flashcards? Check out our Free Flashcards Resource Page.

Since around about November last year, I’ve been dabbling with flash cards using my own homemade ones on Powerpoint (you can read about them here – alphabets, colours 1, colours 2, numbers). If you click back to my old posts, you’ll notice that all my pictures are in some way related to Thomas and Friends. That is because Thomas was the only way I could keep Gavin interested in learning anything for any given length of time. I did try making flash cards for fruits and vegetables but he never wanted to look at those cards. I eventually stopped using flash cards because there are only so many subjects you can relate to Thomas and Friends before you run out of ideas (or maybe you can think of more but my creativity is kind of limited).

After reading about Glenn Doman and Shichida, I was re-inspired. I went out on a limb and bought several early childhood educational resources using the flashcard technique (which I’m still waiting to receive so I can’t review them yet). While I was waiting, I read the book by Glenn Doman on How to Multiply Your Baby’s Intelligence and started making a few of my own flash cards using A4 paper and a marker pen to test out the method on Gavin. Admitedly, I didn’t get too far with the program since the news of my pregnancy kind of threw our lives out of whack and it is never advisable to introduce new programs to children in the midst of such upheavals.

Here is what I think of the method based on what I’ve read and tested so far…

Although I had heard about using flashcards to teach very young children to read, I’d never really dug deep enough to understand how it worked. Even though I had tried using flashcards with Gavin before, the problem was that I was trapped in my limited understanding of how children learn. I assumed that Gavin learned the way adults did – that is, he would need to study each flashcard carefully and for a length of time before he could commit it to memory. I also taught it to him the way I was taught growing up – by testing. I showed him a flashcard, taught him what it was and tested him to see if he remembered. As a result, Gavin grew bored of the flashcards and didn’t want to play the game any more.

What I found useful about reading Glenn Doman’s book was that it helped me understand how very young children learn, what are the triggers that excite them and what puts them off learning. Only with this understanding did I realise where I went wrong when I first attempted to use flashcards with Gavin.

Mistake Number 1: Going too slowly.
Children learn quickly – much, much more quickly than adults. I think we can all agree on this one. Just think of how many adults you know of that can learn a brand new language as quickly as a child learns to speak for an illustration.
Glenn Doman explains that when babies are born, they are very much right brain users. It is only as they grow older that they start to shift towards the left brain. An interesting quality of the right brain is its photographic nature – it can remember whole images of things that it sees as opposed to the left brain which only remembers parts. For this reason, speed is of the essence.
While adults need time to commit a picture or word to memory, all a child needs is a moment (long enough to take a photograph). By showing a flashcard for longer, we bore the child because he’s already gotten it. We all know that very young children have short attention spans and cannot wait while we deliberate over whether we’ve shown them the card for long enough. In the meantime, we’ve lost the child’s attention.
So when you play the flash card game, you need to show the card quickly – about one second per card as a rule of thumb.
Mistake Number 2: Testing.
Children hate to be tested. Well, not surprisingly. Think of how many times you were proud of something your child learned and you wanted to boast about it to your friends and family. Then when you asked your child to repeat what he learned, he refused and pretended he didn’t know what you were talking about. Sound familiar?
After I had taught Gavin the flashcards, I started to go through them waiting for him to tell me what he saw. In essence, I was testing him. He obliged me initially but after a while, I noticed he started to lose interest in the game.
So if you can’t test, then how do you know if your child has learned it? Ah… That’s the part of the book I haven’t gotten to – yet! Bear with me, we’ll get there.
Mistake Number 3: Showing too many cards.
The rule of thumb is to show only ten flashcards – or a set number based on your child’s attention span. Never persist if your child is starting to get bored or if his attention is drifting away. You want to keep the game fun and exciting – which means having your child beg for more rather than giving too much of the game away. In other words, always offer less than your child would like.
Mistake Number 4: Showing the same cards too many times.
This is almost the same as showing the cards too slowly. After a while, your child will have learned the cards by heart and the game will start to get boring. You need to start introducing new material to keep the game interesting.

What Glenn Doman offers in his book is a recipe for teaching very young children using flashcards. The method taps into the enormous potential of a very young child by encouraging you to begin as early as possible. That is, a 3 year old learns more quickly than a 4 year old; a 2 year old learns more quickly than a 3 year old; a 1 year old learns more quickly than a 2 year old; and a 6 month old learns more quickly than a 1 year old – you get the picture. The earlier you start, the easier it is for your child. By the time your child reaches 6 years of age, Glenn Doman believes this early childhood potential for learning is lost – hence the urgency to tap into it as early as possible to make the most of it.

Glenn Doman offers specific instructions, such as the exact measurements of the card, the colour of the ink on the cards, the size of the words, uppercase or lower case, how many cards, how quickly, how many times a day, a week, etc. In short, it is a recipe. You don’t have to follow the recipe – you can use it as a guideline as long as you keep to the basic rules:

Begin as young as possible
Be joyous at all times
Respect and trust your child
Teach only when you and your child are happy
Create a good learning environment
Stop before your child wants to stop
Introduce new materials often
Be organised and consistent
Do not test your child
Prepare your materials carefully and stay ahead
Remember the fail-safe law: if you aren’t having a wonderful time and your child isn’t having a wonderful time – stop. You are doing something wrong.

Update: This post was written some years ago. Please see our updated notice on the Glenn Doman Program.

Looking for more flashcards? Check out our Free Flashcards Resource Page.

Early Childhood Education: The Shichida Method

by Shen-Li Lee 11 Comments

The further I research the topic of Early Childhood Education, it seems the more uncertain I am about which direction to head towards. I had heard about the Shichida Method from a friend but knew very little about it except that it was a flashcard method of teaching infants – or so I thought. It appears that the true Shichida Method is more than that. I wasn’t able to glean much about the Shichida Method from their website as much of the information explaining it was rather obscure.

In a nutshell, the Shichida website tells you that babies have great potential and that it is important to help them realise this potential. Tell me something I don’t already know. If you want to know more about how to do this, you need to sign up for their course. They say you can implement the Shichida Method by reading about it from the books but the courses give you practical guides that you cannot get from reading alone. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single Shichida book that was written in English and available for sale on Amazon or Kinokuniya. No wonder they say it is difficult to implement the Shichida Method without having attended one of their courses…

After a little more digging, this is what I have been able to find on the Shichida Method. I do not know if this is an accurate depiction of the philosophy since it did not come directly from any official Shichida source, but I think the gist of it is here.

What is the Shichida Method?

Also known as “Right Brain Training”, the Shichida Method begins with the premise that all babies are born geniuses. From birth to about 3 years old, an infant uses mostly the right side of the brain. However, as the infant grows older, the left side of the brain begins to develop and to dominate the right side. This makes it harder for an individual to access abilities from the right side of the brain.

Both left and right sides of the brain have different capabilities. The left brain is logical, sequential, rational, analytical, objective and tends to look at parts. The right brain is random, intuitive, holistic, synthesising, subjective and capable of capturing images as a whole. Both sides of the brain function as opposites and compliment the other.

It has been found that most successful individuals demonstrate a key ability to utilise the right brain’s distinct image visualisation. It is also believed to hold the potential for genius as it lacks the concepts of limits that are imposed by the left brain. This is one of the reasons why flashes of genius are often witnessed in autistic individuals – because of the poor communication between the left and right brain, the left brain is unable to exert the usual controls over the right brain that is present in a normal individual.

So to help out children maximise their potential for genius, the Shichida Method focuses on training the right brain of infants (as young as possible – preferable between the age of 0-3) with right brain specific activities.

How Do you Stimulate the Right Brain?

One of the methods described by Shichida is to use flash cards which are presented quickly. Information that is presented slowly and repetitively exercises the left brain.

What is the Difference Between Glenn Doman and Shichida?

According to Brainy-Child, the fundamental difference between Shichida and Glenn Doman is that Shichida “believes in not over-emphasizing on knowledge education, and that the cultivation of the child’s ability to learn on his own is of utmost importance.” If the child’s brain is overstuffed with knowledge, it becomes difficult to exercise and develop the right brain.

However, if you read the article from the International Parenting Association, it quotes Shichida saying that presenting large amounts of information at a fast pace to infants, toddlers and preschoolers stimulates the right brain and can activate photographic memory. If presenting large amounts of information isn’t stuffing the brain, then I’m not sure what is.

Is there a difference between Shichida and Glenn Doman? I’m not sure, but I believe it has something to do with the number of repetitions. Any parent who has tried either or both methods – please feel free to share more about the differences between the two.

Early Childhood Education: The Gentle Revolution

by Shen-Li Lee 79 Comments

Since I started down the road of homeschooling Gavin, I’ve been hearing about a lot of early childhood educational programs that have left my head spinning. Uncertain about which way to proceed, I’ve decided to take a closer look at these programs.

Here is a list of some of the ones I’ve heard about (if you have heard of others, please feel to tell me about them in the comments section below – thank you):

Some of these are specific programs designed to teach only specific subjects. For instance, Your Baby Can Read and BrillKids Little Reader are focused on teaching infants to read, while DreamBox Learning K-2 Math is about learning Math. Others are educational systems, like the Montessori Method, Glenn Doman and Shichida.

I’ve explored most of these programs already and the ones that currently interest me are the educational systems – the Montessori Method, Glenn Doman and Shichida. Being a homeschool educator with no former experience in education, I figured the best way to get started would be to find out what’s out there, trial and test them on Gavin and then adopt what works.

The common tips I seem to keep coming across over and over again whenever I research the topic of early childhood education are:

Begin as young as possible
Be joyous at all times
Respect and trust your child
Teach only when you and your child are happy
Create a good learning environment
Stop before your child wants to stop

I think these are some pretty important take home points for any parent interested in early childhood education so I have reiterated them here.

I first heard about Shichida from my friend C who was taking her son A to classes somewhere near Centerpoint. From our conversation, all I understood was that Shichida method is a flash card system designed by a Japanese. I’m afraid I never gave it much thought after that.

Glenn Doman was brought to my attention by my friend SM who told me it was that latest craze of the Singaporean Mums. I had heard that it was a flash card system but I didn’t know much else about it.

There appears to be a strong similarity between Glenn Doman and Shichida, although my grasp of both programs are admitedly rather superficial. Stick with me and we’ll explore the differences over the course of the next week or so. For the purpose of this blog post, I just want to highlight what I’ve learned about Glenn Doman and what I think of it so far.

Glenn Doman is the founder for the Institutes for The Achievement of Human Potential (IAHP) whose initial focus was to help develop a program for treating children with brain injuries. They later adopted these approaches with normal children and thus began the “Gentle Revolution“. The objective of the Gentle Revolution is: “to give all parents the knowledge required to make highly intelligent, extremely capable, and delightful children, and, by so doing, to make a highly humane, sane and decent world.”

The Glenn Doman method is intended for children from birth to 6 years. Most of the testimonials I’ve seen so far are from parents who have implemented the series from birth so I don’t know how well the materials are received by an older child who was not exposed from birth. I did find one mother on epinions who successfully implemented the reading system with her older children and came back with positive feedback so I was encouraged to explore further. Perhaps all is not lost – yet.

The main books written by Glenn Doman for “well children” are as follows:

They also have DVDs that accompany the books. They are purely instructional and designed to educated parents on the Glenn Doman method. To facilitate implementation of the Glenn Doman method, they offer a range of kits, flash cards, and CD ROM dictionaries.

Based on what I’ve seen online, the material looks pretty impressive, however, I was hoping to get a physical look at the materials before commenting. A search online revealed that there is a local distributor for Glenn Doman materials in Malaysia. However, before you rush over there to have a look for yourself, let me tell you about my experience yesterday…

The local distributor is called GS World of Knowledge and on their website, they state they are located along Telawi 5 in Bangsar Baru, but they aren’t. As to where they have relocated to, if they have even relocated (as opposed to “closed down”), nobody knows. At least, telekom doesn’t and I haven’t been able to find out. There is no forwarding number and no listing for GS World of Knowledge. What a wonderful way to do business (note: heavy sarcasm). Their website is still up – which suggests they are still around – but clearly no one has bothered to update it since 2007. So I posted a message on their “contact us” page and I’m still waiting for an answer.

In the meantime, I decided to be a little more pro-active. Since SM told me she found about about Glenn Doman from the Singaporean Mums Forum, I figured there had to be a local distributor in Singapore. And there is – GD Baby’s Programs. They state that they are the authorised and sole distributor for Glenn Doman products and that they also have an office in Malaysia, so I wrote to them asking for the whereabouts of their Malaysian office. I’m still waiting for a reply on that one, too, but I’ve since discovered that GS World of Knowledge is the Malaysian office because they have the same baby logo. Terrific. I wonder if the Singaporean office is still open as well…

So where does one get Glenn Doman products if we can’t get them locally? Well, I’ve seen some of the books are available in MPH (Bangsar Village), and Kinokuniya. You can also buy them online from Amazon. However, if you want the kits, DVDs, flashcards and CD ROMs, you need to buy them directly from Gentle Revolution who do deliver internationally.

The system appears to be dependent upon the use of flash cards. Off-hand, I have my doubts as to whether this method will work well with Gavin based on my past experience with the BrillKid Reader. Not that I have tried it recently but it appears that only Thomas and Friends can hold his attention and most other unrelated books and materials are deemed uninteresting.

SM also shared the experience of a mother she knows who implemented the Glenn Doman method with her son and received very encouraging results. However, when she tried the method with her daughter, it did not work. Her daughter did not enjoy learning with flash cards and begged her Mum to stop. I suppose this system depends on the receptiveness of your child to learning by flash cards.

If you’re eager to give it a go, I found a website offering free flash cards based on the Glenn Doman method. I find it a bit cumbersome and messy to use however it is a good way to test how well the Glenn Doman method is received by your child without having to spend the money buying the products (as they are not cheap).

I’m still looking for Glenn Doman products so if you know where I can find them, please drop me a line. Otherwise, stay tuned for my updates on this journey.

Glenn Doman on why children love to learn:

For more videos, visit youtube.

Update: This is new local distributor for Malaysia – Glenn Doman Intellectual Program.

This post was written some years ago. Please see our updated notice on the Glenn Doman Program.

Why We Need to Pay Our Teachers More

by Shen-Li Lee 4 Comments

When I was approaching the end of my high school years, my Uncle tried to give me some careers counselling advice. Except that I don’t think it was advice so much as it was more like him telling me what I should do. So what did he tell me to do? Become a teacher.

Yes, well. Here’s the reason why I could never become a teacher: I have no patience. None. Zero. If a student had difficulties understanding my lesson, I’d probably have to bite my tongue and tie my hands to keep from flinging a pencil case at him and screaming out obscenities regarding his intellect.

Almost reminds me of a teacher I once knew in highschool. Whenever a student had the audacity to tell her he didn’t understand, she would say with increasing volume not unlike the crescendo in a piece of music, “You don’t understand? You Don’t Understand?? YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND???” After which, no sane student would dare say they didn’t understand, but meekly return to his seat and keep his head bowed low. Yeah, she was probably in the wrong vocation, too.

Well, lately, after observing my efforts to homeschool Gavin, my MIL told the hubby, “If your wife is so interested to teach, why doesn’t she take a course and learn to teach then she can give lessons at a kindergarten or something.”

To which hubby laughed and replied, “She’s interested to teach our son, not other people’s children.”

Actually, I think it would be more correct to say that I feel responsible for my son’s education which is why I take the effort to homeschool him. Quite frankly, it worries me that there are people out there teaching with my very limited patience and who are about as enthusiastic about teaching as a giraffe is about jumping through hoops. Given how important it is to lay the foundations right as early as possible, I guess I’m not willing to take a chance on someone else in the hopes that they get it right because they don’t have the kind of vested interest I have in the development of my child.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t wanted to run up against a wall and fling my head at it because I have. The only thing that keeps me going is the fact that my one and only student is my son and well, everyone knows that it’s always different when it’s your own child. It is also times like these that I really appreciate the educators in the world because I realise how tough a job it really is. If I can be at my wits end with just one student, who is my own child to boot, I can’t imagine how teachers might feel with a classroom full of students with no relationship to themselves.

For instance, I bought these Kumon books for Gavin which he really enjoyed doing at the start. He was particularly good at the Mazes and I was rather surprised that he would navigate the maze without having to study it. After a while, I noticed his behaviour had changed. He began to run down the dead ends which confused me for a while until I realised he was having me on.

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My son finds it amusing to frustrate his teacher by acting “dumb”. He would deliberately draw a line to a dead end and say, “Dead end!” Then he would look up at me with a little smirk on his face. This isn’t the first time he’s pretended he can’t do something. He does it with his jigsaw puzzles, reading the time or even with simple things I know he can do because I’ve seen him do it. For instance, he can slip a note into the coin slot of his piggy bank by himself but sometimes he’ll insist he can’t do it without my help. Other times he’ll deliberately misread colours despite the fact that he’s known his colours even before he turned two.

It makes me wonder how he’ll manage in class because if he keeps up this behaviour his teacher is likely to either get annoyed at him for playing around or she’s going to think he’s stupid. Even I have underestimated him at times, thinking him incapable of specific activities because he pretends he can’t do them. It is only when I spy him doing them from a distance that I realise I’ve been had – I confess the discovery of which annoys me to no end.

Sometimes he would just scribble over the maze, draw a line outside the maze from the start to the finish or a straight line cutting across all the “walls” of the maze. Sometimes I want to correct him for breaking the rules, but other times, I try not to because it shows he’s thinking outside the box. I never said he couldn’t go around the maze, neither did I say he couldn’t cut across the lines. All I said was get from the arrow to the star.

While I want him to learn that there are ways that certain things must be done, I don’t want to squash his creativity in thinking beyond the problem. Although there are some things that do need to be rote learned, I don’t want rote learning to override his ability to think for himself. Perhaps I’m thinking too hard, but right at this point, I’m not very sure how to do that.

So yes, a teacher, especially one who can remain fired up about teaching despite having some pretty hair-raising students, ought to be commended with the highest award.

If you’re a teacher or a homeschooling parent, please share your experiences on how you manage these situations with your children. I welcome any feedback. I knew it was difficult to teach, but I never thought I’d want to tear up all the books and throw the pencils on the floor in the process.

QoW: What's Your Edu-Parent Style?

by Shen-Li Lee Leave a Comment

This is an interesting article I received from DreamBox Learning which I wrote about some time back. Here is the full newsletter. The article is about educational parenting styles, which is a topic that I have been particularly interested in lately. At the end of the article, you can take a quiz to identify what your educational parenting style is and learn what are the advantages and disadvantages of each parenting style.

Here is the article:

Parents can get lots of help understanding their parenting style — the way they raise and interact with their children. Because parenting styles can influence our children’s development and behavior many parents want to learn about their own style, and there are probably thousands of articles and books published on the subject. Parents often try to make conscious choices about their parenting style, always aiming to become more effective and raise responsible, independent, happy children.
At DreamBox we recognize how hard parents work to help their children learn, and even more importantly, to grow up loving the process of learning. So we’ve worked with a group of recognized educators — experts on parent education with over 30 years of community leadership — to co-author The DreamBox Edu-Parent Quiz.
The DreamBox Edu-Parent Quiz is designed to help parents assess the style with which they interact and engage with their kids on variety of educational topics. The authors have identified a range of edu-parent styles. There’s no right or wrong style — each offers benefits and presents unique challenges. It is valuable, therefore, to recognize your style and be conscious of ways to use it most effectively! The five different styles that our experts have identified are:
The Coach
Coaches expect their children to always do their personal best and become successful learners. They steer them towards situations that play to their learning strengths. The feedback coaches give helps their children course-correct, and learn from any experience.
The Historian
Historians share knowledge and confidence born out of experience. They want kids to understand and benefit from valuable lessons they have learned. Historians take time to explain how to complete tasks and projects, and show their children how to take proven and effective approaches in their life.
The Mentor
Mentors are focused on preparing their children for life-long learning. They listen and guide with questions, often providing decision-making opportunities. By modeling independent problem solving, Mentors hope their children become independent learners and thinkers in their own right.
The Observer
Believing that children learn from their experiences, and with a high tolerance for mistakes, Observers feel children do best with minimal parental interference. They know the more experiences their children have, the more confident they will be as adults.
The Superhero
Superheroes understand the value of hard work and persistence, and have high standards. Because Superheroes are dedicated to the end result, they help their children finish projects and provide encouragement and assistance to make sure they always do their best.
Take the Quiz.

I took the quiz and this is my Edu-Parent Style: