I have 2 awesome daughters that are both in Elementary School. My oldest daughter, Malori, is in fourth grade now. One thing we learned about fourth grade and the curriculum she is in is that there is a lot of memorization. Fourth grade also tests the student on how well they manage their time and their tasks. When I was in fourth grade, I have to say, I wasn’t very good at either. My strategy was to try to complete whatever work was assigned as quickly as possible, sometimes staying after class a little while just to finish the task. If it didn’t get done right away, chances are it wouldn’t get done until 10pm (or later) on a Sunday. This is a skill I’m hoping does NOT get passed on to my little girls.

I’ll leave the planning and organization part of my story for another day, but I would like to tackle the memorization and learning part in this post. I have merged some ideas that work for me as well as some things that have shown some success in Malori since the homework started piling on after first grade. No doubt there will be several iterations of this process, but at this point the results have been so good, I hesitate to change too much. Your results may vary as I think every student learns differently. The info presented here is kind of a baseline.

A little background.

A couple weeks ago, Malori was learning about Explorers from all over the world and their various attempts at finding the “New World”, gold, the Fountain of Youth, etc. There were about 14 of them. I think that is about 7 more than I learned about. Anyway, Malori was responsible for knowing the Explorer, where they were from, where they went, why they went there, and who funded their trip. A somewhat daunting task. Of course there was much more to the lesson than this, but the memorization was the key stumbling block as far as I could see.

Her main problem was that she was having difficulty remembering where the Explorers were from. Some of the Explorers had cues in their name such as Jacques Cartier. She doesn’t have the experience dealing with the French language as many adults so this was an issue for her. Or for example, she had trouble remembering if Vasco da Gama was from Portugal or Spain. Add the fact that Vasco da Balboa was also in the list of explorers and one was from Portugal and one from Spain, you could see how it could be difficult to keep track. So in my infinite wisdom and prowess as the best dad ever, I decided to help Malori map out the explorers in Spinscape. You can see part of the fruits of our labor in the image below.

So this was our first attempt. Now the caveat here was that Malori told me she was having a test the next day on this material and it was already 10:30pm. So needless to say, we built the map, but didn’t get a ton of time to study it.

End a little background.

This week, again basically at the last minute, Malori told me that she was going to have two tests. (Sound familiar dad? I guess you got your wish, my kids are doing the same thing to me that I did to you.) One test was on Science and one was on History. This time we had the evening to prepare.

The first thing we did was to take on Science. We took out her Science study guide and fired up Spinscape. We mapped everything that was on the guide and talked about each item as we mapped it. We added a section for definitions and then a node for each one of the topics. We talked about the topics as we mapped them. We also talked about how the topics related to each other. In the definition part, we put the word as the title of the node and the definition on the “lid.” The lid is a unique to Spinscape idea. You’ll hear more about that as we ready our 2.0 version for launch.

Here’s our basic structure (click to enlarge)…

Now just the definitions (click to enlarge)…

After the guide was mapped into Spinscape, we started using the lid notes as virtual flash cards. This worked out incredibly well. It only took us doing this for a few minutes and Malori had all the info down cold.

A node with a question in it, followed by the answer in the "lid"

So then we took a break and moved on to History. Her History test was a little more substantial so it required a little more organization. We started with four nodes. One each for definitions, maps, questions, and true and false. Granted true and false are questions, but who is going to argue that with a fourth grader?

History overview map (click to enlarge)…

We set up the definitions section much like the one in Science.

Definitions section of the map

The question node had children that were the actual questions. We put the answer on the lid and immediately we had our digital flash cards. The true and false was a no brainer to set up. Finally we added the data to the maps section. Now this one was a little bit more interesting.

True or False questions…

Malori was supposed to be able to find the following on a map: The Ohio River, Canada, Mexico, Plymouth, The Gulf of Mexico, The Atlantic Ocean, The Rocky Mountains, and Jamestown. No worries. We just grabbed a map from each from Google Images and put them on the top of the node. Now the images are visible along with the title of the node. Not too shabby. Next we started to study the content.

A few of the maps she was required to know. These look quite good when you zoom into them in Spinscape!

We used the same Spinscape Flash Card technique as we did when we were studying for Science. It went a lot like this…look at the node title, think about the answer, open the lid to find out if you are right. If you got it, color the node green. If you were wrong, make it red for the time being. After all the nodes are green, iterate again. Below you can see a couple of the Spinscape virtual flash card node goodness we came up with.

It didn’t take long to realize that Malori was having some issues with a few of the definitions. Truth be told, the definitions were actually people. In essence they behaved a lot like a definition so I okayed the organization.

In this chapter they studied three missionaries that had interaction with Native Americans. There was also a preacher, and a few other Native Americans to remember. The issue Malori had was that she kept thinking that the preacher (John Wesley) was one of the missionaries and vice versa. So the first thing we did was create a node called Missionaries and placed the missionaries in as children to that node. Now that we visually separated John Wesley from the others, she was able to separate who was who in her mind.

Next the confusion came in as to which one of the missionaries did what. This required a little in the way of mnemonics. As with me, mnemonics went a long way with my daughter. It turns out John Eliot was a missionary who translated the Bible into the language of the Massachusetts Indians. The first thing that popped into my mind was E.T. the Extra-terrestrial. Remember Eliott from that movie? The E in the mnemonic stood for Eliot, and the T stood for Translated. I put a picture from the movie poster in the node and the memorization had begun. We used the same technique for the other missionaries and in seconds Malori had everything neatly tucked in her cute little brain.

Nodes with our mnemonics as images on the Lid. Don’t underestimate how useful this can be!

We went through the Spinscape maps one more time yesterday morning. To my delight I got a phone call from my wife later in the day telling me that Malori had gotten 100% on both of her tests!

Now I know she has great genes, but this one I have to chalk up to Spinscape…and a dad who cares. Keep on the lookout for more information about Spinscape 2.0. You’re going to hear a lot more about it throughout November and December!