Design A Study
Today I was browsing through a website called Design A Study with a catch line: 
Unlock the love of learning! You have to love that. I was mildly interested in the materials available. Natural Spelling looks good and I would buy it only to assuage my guilt of the current spelling system I am using (which is fine..but there is always potentially bigger, better and brighter).
Then I looked at the third product that they have which is called Critical Conditioning. The whole idea here is you have to train your brain to be critical of what you are reading. I hear this from authors also. You have to turn your analyzing brain on and dissect the book you are reading in order to learn to write. Like other mothers, I don’t want my child to follow peer norms like a sheep and to have her formulate her own opinions. However I also want her to have a childhood.
We are naturally conditioned to judge, to compare ourselves and evaluate without hesitation. Especially those children who have strong, authoritarian parents who already know all the answers!
I’d like to find a course in hesitation before passing judgement.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Critical Conditioning is fantastic!
It basically is a reading comprehension program by oral discussion not doing reading comprehension workbooks. It teaches a parent how to discuss things with the student and to figure out if they really get what they are reading.
Stout has taped lectures which are very good too.
I wonder how her ideas mesh with yours.
Stout was a teacher first, then became a mother, homeschooled her kids, and was a tutor. She comes from the public school America mindset of education but she wants more learning and higher quality experiences than are offered in American public schools. She wants kids to think and evaluate.
She doesn’t push this idea of evaluating and critiquing books to very young kids though.
You would hate Deconstructing Penguins I guess…
June 29th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
BTW if you want Natural Speller I will give you my copy since we moved on to Spelling Power.