A Beka
Do you recognize the terms spiral approach, learning preferences, and cross-subject integration?
Because you’re in the driver’s seat, not your children, it means your kids aren’t running you.
Read on for some quick explanations and—more importantly—to find out why those methods make your job easier.
- Abeka’s Spiral approach—building from the simple to the complex, with frequent review and application within each grade and from grade to grade.
- This means you prevent learning gaps from the first day you teach with Abeka until the last.
- The work you put in now pays off later (like when thoroughly teaching and reviewing multiplication tables saves your child from dreading math).
- Since repetition is the key to learning, concepts are truly learned—and remembered.
- Because concepts aren’t presented just one time, or in one way, it means you’re giving your child multiple opportunities to be successful.
- Rough days are less stressful when you realize you don’t have just ONE CHANCE to make sure your child understands a concept.
- Learning preferences—when faced with the 3 major learning styles (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic, or hearing, seeing, and doing), learning preferences are how you prefer, if given a choice, to learn something. Instead of favoring 1 and neglecting the others, we incorporate all 3.
- By using all 3, you’re teaching your children to be adaptable, resilient learners.
- You’re preparing them for college and real life.
- You’re not putting your children—or yourself—in a learning-preferences box.
- You don’t have to feel guilty because you don’t use a different curriculum for each child.
- You’re doing what the best teachers do to help their students learn.
- Cross-subject integration—pulling in concepts from 1 subject into several others to reinforce concepts and tie learning together
- Learning comes to life more with cross-subject integration (like when students learn about Abraham Lincoln in history, read about him in language arts, do an art project with pennies and top hats, and write a story using what they know).
- Children feel a sense of familiarity and accomplishment when they see something they already learned (like spelling words) “pop up” in another subject (like science or literature).
- It engages curiosity and emphasizes the big picture.
