A Brain-based Learning Approach

Definition:
This learning theory is based on the structure and function of the brain. As long as the brain is not prohibited from fulfilling its normal processes, learning will occur.

At EMC, we believe:
People often say that everyone can learn. Yet the reality is that everyone does learn. Every person is born with a brain that functions as an immensely powerful processor. Traditional schooling, however, often inhibits learning by discouraging, ignoring, or punishing the brain's natural learning processes.

The core principles of brain-based learning state that:

1. The brain is a parallel processor, meaning it can perform several activities at once, like tasting and smelling.
2. Learning engages the whole physiology.
3. The search for meaning is innate.
4. The search for meaning comes through patterning.
5. Emotions are critical to patterning.

The three instructional techniques associated with brain-based learning are:

1. Orchestrated immersion -- Creating learning environments that fully immerse students in an educational experience. We do this through stories, songs and rhymes.

2. Relaxed alertness -- Trying to eliminate fear in learners, while maintaining a highly challenging environment. We work on this through games and friendly competition.

3. Active processing -- Allowing the learner to consolidate and internalize information by actively processing it. We do this through reading activities and study skills exercises.

There is a lot of movement during our workshops to synthesize knowledge gain and brain processes.

How Brain-Based Learning impacts the way EMC approaches education and our workshops.

Our Curriculum:
We design learning around student interests and make learning contextual.

Our Instruction:
We let students learn in teams and use peripheral learning. We structure learning around real problems, encouraging students to also learn in settings outside the classroom and the school building. While in classroom, we re-arrange desks and chairs so that our students learn in small intimate settings. The learning processes are enhanced.

Assessment--Since all students are learning, their assessment should allow them to understand their own learning styles and preferences. This way, students monitor and enhance their own learning process. At EMC, we believe and trust the child’s learning processes.

Developing Reading Skills
Course description:
Students learn the English Language through the holistic approach. This is done through reading, talking about what they have read, listening to the opinions of others and finally writing what they feel or creating a new story.

We will help guide your child to become an active reader.
We will provide sufficient sample texts for each lesson. We believe that the more examples we give to the students, the more they are able to analyze and emulate the different styles of writing.

In addition, students are exposed to different genres of books. We hope this will increase their love for reading and provide many opportunities for students to analyze different texts.

Rationale:

• Develop lifelong readers and writers
• Increase appreciation and enjoyment of literature among students.
• Discuss and understand a piece of writing/ iterature.
• Analyze the texts they have read and write stories of their own.

Special Features:

• We select excerpts from different types of literature
• We will prepare a glossary of key phrases or words for students to use in their discussions and writing
• We will include Cooperative Learning in our lessons.
• Students will be engaged in peer and group discussions.

Specific skills that we want students to acquire.

• Skimming ahead and jumping back.
• Highlighting or underlining key ideas or words.
• Students identify the main ideas in a passage.
• Distinguish main ideas from supporting ideas.
• Looking up unfamiliar words/ contextual clues.
• Asking and recording questions and comments.
• Looking for clues throughout the text.
• Helping students draw conclusions or make inferences about what they have read.
• Distinguish fact and opinion.
• Sequencing.
• Help students realize that there are many ways to tell a story. Events might not be presented in the chronological order.
• Compare and contrast.
• Students are taught the skill of classifying or analyzing what they have read. This will help students organize ideas.
• Point of views.
• Introducing the three points of view and showing how the use of different points of view to a story will affect the story.
• Style, tone and choice of words.
• Exposing students to different text samples and helping students develop their own style of writing.

To develop these skills, several types of activities can be used:
Dialogues with teachers and classmates
Students and teacher share responses to a text

Questions
Questions that can be about plain fact (direct reference), implied fact (inference), deduced meaning and evaluation

Mini projects
Students record their responses towards what they have read by writing how they feel. This can be in the form of a letter, diary, summary, character analysis, reading journals, script, a newspaper, a timeline or poem. Students can also create other forms of projects, which include drawings as visual and dramatic interpretations, help students focus on the literary elements that impress them.

These are some of the themes we will incorporate into our lessons:

Sails Readers Incorporating © Sails
This module introduces students to the essential skills of cloze and comprehension. Working through a systematic and structured series of steps, students are taught to make use of recognition, pre-reading, organization and inference in their understanding of a passage. Once they have mastered these methods, they will overcome the fear and reluctance that often act as stumbling blocks in their studies. We have called this technique Cloze and Comprehension Skills as it empowers the learner, making him the active participant instead of merely a passive student in the reading and comprehension process.

Throughout the lessons a series of different text types will be used including expository, evaluative and narrative.

Effective comprehension is dependant upon good reading and adequate understanding. If the learner is unable to read properly and to respond to the passage following its arguments, the responses and answers to the comprehension passages will be insufficient, and even wrong.

This module teaches the learner to approach comprehension by first understanding the passage, its main idea, the way this is presented, expanded upon and illustrated. Once the learner is able to pick up the thread of the presentation, comprehension will be made that much easier. Central to the module is the belief that a good reader is all the time making a summary of what he is about to read as well as is reading. The learner is taught the advantages of prereading as well as the skills of drawing conclusions.

These skills are conveyed through a series of easy to follow and interesting activities that are carefully structured to build upon the learner’s ability ands extend his confidence. In addition the activities feature a variety of text types that will familiarize the learner with different types of writing.

Note: These skills are carefully structured so that they benefit the primary school student.

Lesson 1- 2
Reading and Pre-Reading

The key to comprehension is effective pre-reading and reading. Both these
processes are important in the recognition of main ideas, the way these ideas
are stated in thesis sentences, identified in topic sentences and elaborated
through facts, details, generalizations, inferences and other linking devices.
Lesson 1 introduces the learner to these reading skills, the competency of
which will overcome his fears of the passage and words.

Lesson 3-4
Critical Reading

Looking for key ideas in paragraphs and sentences will help the learner to
build up a rapid mind map that have the following advantages: tracing out the
key issues, drawing attention to significant details as well as bringing into
play the main emotional and critical ideas in the text. The aim is to make the
student respond by searching out the leaning of the passage rather than trying
to wrestle vainly with its words. In this way the student meets the text
halfway increasing the pleasure of the reading process as well as accelerating
his understanding.

Lesson 5-6
Mental Maps and Anticipation
The importance of mental maps to the learner is that signposts and signals are
identified early on in the mental process so that understanding is enhanced.
The learner is taught to identify key words and the way these are associated
and linked up with significant areas of the passage as well as of its meaning.
Words than are read and recognized for their functional value; this aids in the
organizing of meaning as well as in the differentiation and development of the narrative flow of text types.

Lesson 7-8
Ordering of Ideas and uses of details
This lesson looks at some examples of text types and their language uses. The
learner picks out, anticipates and puts words within each text type and
context. A side bar is used to encourage the reader to pick out key ideas and
to link these through a series of graphic illustrations. In due course the
learner will scan and mentally mapped out the comprehending of the passage.

Lesson 9-10
The Task of Comprehension
Successful comprehension comes about when the learner draws conclusions and
predicts outcomes. This exercise encourages the learner to evaluate his
reading, identify the appropriate conclusion and map out the various ways ideas
are linked together and supported.