Today we look at how to create a learning center at home.

Why is a learning center important for a student at any age?

Think about it:

Every day - whether your child goes to a private, public, Montessori, or is home-schooled:

The teacher has to:

1. prepare the lesson for all the different learning styles in the room (there are 9 different types)
2. account for the different reading levels (only 35% of students are at grade level - USA Dept of Education)
3. teach to students of different nationalities
4. adjust for students from broken homes, abusive environments, etc

Whether you homeschool or send your kids to school, they need your help to survive and YOU need to know how they are developing every day...even if it for a 5-10 minute check-in.

How do you do that?

A Learning Station!

The Learning Station is a quick and easy way for you (and your child) to measure and celebrate their progress on a daily basis.

Avoid making the mistake that because your child goes to the "right" school they are getting all their needs met.

VERIFY this every day - and at the same time reinforce and celebrate your child's accomplishments EACH DAY.

Daily reinforcement - even 5-10 minutes - locks content into LONG-TERM memory - so it does not disappear like the shopping list!

A Learning Station is easy and inexpensive to create - go the local SchoolBox (or WalMart) store and get the following:

• a ream of multi-colored construction paper (9x12)
• a box of colored crayons (Crayola is worth the extra expense - cheap crayons (like Chinese) have a lot of wax and don't produce bold color
• a set of FAT and THIN Magic Markers for projects
• A set of ready-made templates for Time, Weather, Days of the Week, Months, etc. Changing the Learning Center each day allows your child to ANCHOR the terms and concepts into LONG-TERM Memory because it addresses all the senses: touch, sight, sound (saying the colors) , etc.

Once you have these, the first thing is to introduce a "Content Board" from which your child (at any age) can reinforce in 5-10 minutes the information they were exposed to that day...a month of 5-minute reviews builds curriculum into LONG-TERM memory by building associations with all the content on the content board.

As your child learns content in school (at any age) you can reinforce the content they learned DAILY in 5-10 MINUTES.

And the best part - THEY tell YOU!

You have only 2 things to do:

1. Positively Reinforce everything they tell you about
2. Don't worry if they skip around....anything they say will reinforce their learning
3. MAKE time EVERY day to do this 5-10 minute exercise.
4. make it a habit to INVEST 10 minutes in your child's future...and the rest will take care of itself!

Tomorrow's Post will be to harness the power of all 9 Intelligences!

Happy Learning!

Philip and Libyan