What are Learning Skills?--------------------------------------- 3 Introduction to SOI---------------------------------------------- 4 The Parents’ Role------------------------------------------------ 5 Dos and Don’ts--------------------------------------------------- 6 Understanding the Skill: Inferential Memory----------------
7
Activity 1: Who is the Middle Man? --------------------------- 8 Activity 2: Scavenger Hunt------------------------------------- 9-10 Activity 3: Say & Associate! ------------------------------------ 11 More about Inferential Memory-------------------------------- 12 Contact Us-------------------------------------------------------- 13
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 learning skills.
3
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.
4
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 homebased 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.
5
✓ Do the activities with your child ✓ Encourage him/her to do better ✓ Encourage your child to be creative when doing the activities! ✓ Have fun carrying out the activities!
✗ Scold the child if he does
the activities wrongly, instead, explain to him the objective and tell him the instructions explicitly
✗ Carry out the activity for
too long (once the child gets bored or tired of doing the same activity, stop for the day)
6
• • •
Inferential Memory is the ability to recognize associations and see connections in reading materials It is the underlying ability for advanced reading comprehension, associating facts and implications to new situations and advanced problem solving Improving this skill would enable the child to be better able to create associations and retain information which would reduce time and effort to find a solution
7
• Present the child with a list of words that are associated to each other by a common word • Have the child think what that key word is that links up all the other words • For example: Shake, Phone, Writing, Hold The key word is ‘Hand’ because it goes together with each of the given words to form a meaningful word/association • Words that parents can start with: Chair Multiplication Work Dining Key word: Table Read Paper Pages Paragraphs Key word: Book
News Commercials Electric Ben Ten Key word: Television Primary Secondary Students Textbooks Key word: School
8
Eraser Write Paper Wood Key word: Pencil Sky Passengers Pilot Stewardess Key word: Airplane
• Write down a list of items (not to be listed explicitly) to find around the house • Eg. Instead of “Find 3 pens”, it should be “Find 3 things used for writing” • Have the child look at the list for 1 minute • After 1 minute, the child should begin finding the items on the list
9
•
The game could be made more challenging by: ü ü ü ü
Increasing the number of items to find Setting a time limit to find the items Setting a shorter time to look at the list Describing items with more ambiguity (eg. Instead of items for writing, it could be “look for 3 things that are elastic and useful in some way”. When the child finds them, he/she has to explain how it is useful.)
•
For older kids, they could write down what they will find in the house that meets the criteria instead of going around looking for it
•
This game could also be played at the supermarket (have the child look for items on a shopping list by providing a description or category to locate the item)
10
•
Name a random object
•
Have the child find 2 other objects that are associated and explain the reasoning behind that association
•
Eg. Parent says “Computer” and the child could say “Key Board” and “Mouse”
•
This activity works on the child’s memory of past experiences and observations and it helps to improve association skills by exploring new associations between objects
11
• • •
You would often see individuals with good inferential memory in detective dramas. Inferential memory helps detectives link up pieces of evidence to hypothesise crime scenes Inferential memory also helps an individual link the pieces of information studied in one subject to another. It is a higher level skill that makes learning more effective
12
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 @ http://www.thinkersbox.com For more interesting reads, follow our blog @ www.kidslearntothink.com
13
Our next issue in May would be about Logical Reasoning skills and how applicable this SOI skill is for learning!