Content Page What are Learning Skills?-----------------------------------------------
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Introduction to SOI------------------------------------------------------
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The Parents’ Role--------------------------------------------------------
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Dos and Don’ts----------------------------------------------------------
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Understanding the Skill: Figural Patterns---------------------------------
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Activity 1: Follow my Bead----------------------------------------------
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Activity 2: On the Go---------------------------------------------------- 9-10 Activity 3: Create Signs-------------------------------------------------- 11 More about Figural Patterns---------------------------------------------- 12 Contact Us--------------------------------------------------------------- 13
What are Learning Skills? Learning skills also referred to as Cognitive skills, are foundational skills needed in areas such as comprehension, memory, evaluation, processing, logic and reasoning, etc. Using sports as an analogy: In order to play soccer well, the player must first be equipped with the basic skills of dribbling, passing, control and tackling, etc. In the same way, we need to first equip our children with the basic skills of learning such as paying attention, reading words effectively, being careful with their work, retain their learning well, etc so that we can ensure a motivated, engaged and successful learner. At ThinkersBox, we hope to help children to ‘Learn to Think and Think to Learn’ by improving and strengthening their underlying thinking skills.
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The Structure of Intellect (SOI) The Structure of Intellect (SI) Model was established by Professor J. P. Guilford, a well-known psychologist in the 1950s, as a way to measure intelligence. The model was further developed into the SOI by Dr. Mary Meeker, Guilford’s student and a school psychologist, in the early 1960s. The SOI profiles was used to provide classroom teachers with information on how they can plan classroom materials that could meet the different needs of their students. The most important contribution however, was Dr. Mary Meeker’s realization that intelligence can be taught, trained and improved. At ThinkersBox, we work closely with SOI Systems to assess, train and improve the learning of children and help them become successful learners.
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The Parents’ Role In response to parents’ need for resources and ideas to help their child learn better, we have developed this series of guidebooks with simple, easy to implement home-based activities for parents to do with their child. These activities are meant to be fun, engaging and promotes parent-child bonding. As you work with your child, you would begin to realise their potential and the true meaning of educating our children (beyond school textbooks and subjects) **Instructions for the activities are suggested as a rough guideline. Feel free to change it to suit the age and learning of your child.
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Dos & Don’ts ✗ Scold the child if he does the activities wrongly, instead, explain to him the objective and tell him the instructions explicitly
✓ Do the activities with your child ✓ Encourage him/her to do better ✓ Encourage your child to be creative when doing the activities!
✗ Carry out the activity for too long (once the child gets bored or tired of doing the same activity, stop for the day)
✓ Have fun carrying out the activities!
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Understanding the skill: Figural Patterns
•  Figural Systems is the ability to see the spatial relationship of information presented in the form of pictures or tangible things (such as Venn diagrams)
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Activity 1: Follow my Bead " Present " Have
the child with a pattern of stringed macaroni/beads
the child replicate the pattern on another string
" Increase
the difficulty by adding the number of macaroni/ beads in the original pattern
" This
activity improves fine motor skill as well as hand eye coordination
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Activity 2: On the Go
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" While
walking along the streets or in a car, explain to the child the meanings of different signs (eg. “U-Turn means turn to the other side of the road’)
" Ask
the child how they think the sign brings or does not bring across the message (eg. The shape ‘U’ represents the way the car can move)
" Once
the child is able to understand more signs, have him/her to identify new signs and guess its meaning Note: A sample list of signs is on the next page!
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Activity 3: Create Signs " Prepare
a list of simple instructions (Be quiet, No eating, Jump)
" Have
the child draw appropriate symbols or signs to represent the instruction
" This
activity reinforces the child’s ability to see the relationship and meaning of signs and symbols
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More about Figural Patterns •  Being able to see figural patterns is a skill that would benefit academic subjects such as Math (number patterns) and Science (Chemistry)
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On an ending note... We hope that you would find these activities as fun and effective as we meant for it to be. Let us know if you’ve enjoyed using these e-Books @ http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WS8Q9CR For feedback and suggestions, email us @ enquiries@thinkersbox.com For more information, visit us @ www.thinkersbox.com For more interesting reads, follow our blog @ www.kidslearntothink.com
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The End!!
The key skillset for the upcoming April issue would be Logic and Reasoning. Stay tuned for that!