Morning Coffee: Professional Development for Homeschooling Parents and Other Teachers

Lately, I’ve spent most of my writing time thinking about the value of narration—the Charlotte Mason approach to teaching by getting kids to put ideas in their own words.

For students, I’m writing a new series of Math Adventure Journals to get them thinking about math and putting those thoughts into words. If you’re interested, sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter goes live.

But we parents can harness the value of narration in our own learning. After all, one of the best ways we can help our children learn mathematics (or anything else) is to be lifelong learners ourselves.

To that end, I’ve decided to relaunch my “Morning Coffee” series of professional development posts for homeschooling parents.

Here’s How It Works

As I read articles and follow rabbit trails around the internet, I’ll collect the posts that speak to me. Then I’ll share these in a printable format with journaling pages for your response.

Since I’m interested in math education, many of the articles I read will be about math—but the principles of learning apply to every subject we teach.

To kick off the series, let’s start with one of my favorite articles ever…

Morning Coffee # 1: Learning to Ask Good Questions

Download your printable Morning Coffee journal

David Butler’s post Twelve matchsticks: focus or funnel presents an interesting math puzzle. But even better, it opens up a rabbit hole of thought-provoking posts about how to talk with children—or anyone:

“The approach where you have an idea in your head of how it should be done and you try to get the student to fill in the blanks is called funnelling. It’s actually a rather unpleasant experience as a student to be funnelled by a teacher. You don’t know what the teacher is getting at, and often you feel like there is a key piece of information they are withholding from you, and when it comes, the punchline feels rather flat.”

The printable file includes links to three more articles as I follow the rabbit around the internet. Enjoy!