The Dining Room table is sometimes referred to as the Mockingbird’s Nest. There we often pile on the textbooks as we study Chemistry, Physics and Math. We have a three year game plan:
- Grade 5 – gather together a lot of topics for the appetizers
- Grade 6 – go through and try to get a fairly good sense of completion on each appetizer (of course, nothing will ever feel “finished”)
- Grade 7 – make valiant moves into the challenging topics that we said were Driver Subjects, use these as entrees
As of now–we are at Grade 5, and we have found several hundred appetizers
While looking back over our studies, we concluded that Hierarchy and Propositional Logic cannot be introduced too early. Questions on “how” we think need to be considered before we focus on the “what” that we want to learn. That idea of “Abstraction” is slowly looking more and more important every day.
Appendix P
The number of ideas in Math called “Products” was surprising, as was how they end up with two or three names for a product concept. We always have to ask “is this just a case of the two names being synonyms, or does one name correspond to a specific and the other is a generalization?”
Rob Sterling 