Public School Success

by Miriam Carey Brown

The other day, I spent a few hours cleaning up garbage at one of my parent’s rental properties. I lost track of time and realized I had to go pick up Yogi at school to take him to his soccer practice, so I jumped in my trash filled truck and headed to the pick-up line at school. I took a long way to soccer practice so I could stop by the landfill transfer station and dump the trash. After I loaded the address into the phone, I handed it to Yogi to help me navigate. I can have my car do it, but he learns so much about maps and things by helping me this way. We almost missed the turn-off though, because he had so many questions about the waste transfer station. What is a transfer station? Where do the trucks take the trash when they are filled up? What if the landfill is filled up? Why do people throw away so much stuff? I could answer most of his questions, but since kids are supposed to stay in the car while adults unload the trash, I found a video that explained landfills for him. After I unloaded my truck and headed to soccer practice, he taught me all the things he had learned. It was like a really educational field trip.

After the last article I wrote, I was talking to my friends with small children and I started to get discouraged. I was looking at which kindergarten standards to teach my listeners and I started feeling frustrated on your behalf. You have so little time and energy, there is not much left for teaching your kids. Why should the parents have to teach all these things, anyway? It should be the school’s job. That’s true, but the reality is the schools do teach them but in a large group learning setting, like a public classroom, they aren’t going to be able to make sure every single kid understands and some kids fall through the cracks. The kids who have parents that help them at home have an unfair advantage. So I guess my goal is to help every parent give their child that same advantage.

The more I thought about it, I realized it’s not so overwhelming after all. You don’t have to teach everything. In every grade, there are a few key concepts. If your child knows those really well, the rest is easy enough that they will pick it up at school. The two things that are really important for kids to know by the end of kindergarten are counting to 100 and reading CVC words -three-letter words that have a vowel in the middle and consonants at the beginning and the end. Those two things take quite a while to learn, but with practice, they should be pretty good at it by the end of the year. So today I wanted to talk about a really fun way to build your child’s reading comprehension ability: the family field trip.

One of my friends, who is the principal of Yogi’s elementary school, told me about a learning disability called Reading Comprehension Deficit.  Kids with this learning disability are good at sounding out the words and reading fluently, but they really can’t understand what they are reading. Of course I was fascinated so I went home to do research. There are several factors that play into this learning disability, but one of the main ways to help treat this problem is to build the child’s vocabulary and teach them to activate their prior knowledge.

There is a great article in the Journal of Reading Psychology. that looks at how a child’s background knowledge affects their ability to understand what they are reading. When we read, our brain first sounds out the letters and then it tries to connect those sounds to a word or an idea that we already know. Our brain has a limited working memory. In other words when you are trying to create new knowledge, there is only so much you can take in. However, our working memory has a huge capacity for retrieving information that is already stored in your long-term memory (D’Angiulli, A. et al., 2013). If you can connect what you are reading to something that you already know, it is much, much easier to understand what the text says. 

Another interesting fact is that some information is more accessible for your brain to retrieve. How vividly you can picture the information plays a large role in how easy it is to remember (Smith, R., et al., 2021). That is why helping your child to have interesting experiences can be an important way to help them build a large reservoir of memories that they can use to help them understand new information. Family field trips can be a powerful, if roundabout, way to help them do well in school.

As a teacher, I really dreaded field trips. There is so much paperwork and volunteers and buses to organize. There was so much chaos and travel time, I also felt like the kids really didn’t learn much for the whole day it took to do a field trip. As a mom though family learning adventures, they have been some of my best memories with my kids. They don’t take very much planning or paperwork, and you can answer their questions directly and have really interesting conversations, like the conversation I had with Yogi about waste management.

So how do you find good places to take your kids? Sometimes, like when I took Yogi to the transfer station, it happens by accident. Curious kids will often be really excited by ordinary places that they have never been to. Luckily, these days you don’t have to answer all of their questions by making things up, although my husband still likes to do it. Usually when Yogi asks me something I don’t know, I hand him my phone, and he asks the google. When he was younger, he would find a video, but now he reads the summaries instead. It’s great practice.

You can also use google to find places around you to visit. When we lived in the city, it was easy to find museums, aquariums and zoos. We would buy a family pass to the children’s museum and we found that when we went on road trips, we could stop in cities along the way and our pass would get us into their museum for free or at a big discount. It was a really fun way to take a break from driving and let the kids burn off some energy. One piece of advice I have about museums and zoos is to let your child guide you. Kids have a very different learning pace than adults. They will spend forever on one exhibit that they find interesting and just rush past others. If you try to get them to slow down or speed up, they lose interest really fast. So don’t feel like you have to see everything, just let their interest and energy levels determine what parts you learn from. If you let their questions guide you, it helps to make sure it’s age appropriate.

Now we live in a small town, but a quick google search will tell you that even rural areas have a lot of great learning opportunities. We have a very interesting historical site just ten miles outside of our town. When we go to the bigger town to shop, there is a local community college with a small museum. I love to stop in there, because it makes running errands more fun and it is small, so it doesn’t take up too much time, sometimes just a half an hour and it’s free. And my kids enjoyed it more than the McDonalds play place. One of my friends always takes her kids to a local farm to pick fruit and learn about where food comes from.

Some of my other favorite field trips we went on as a family are national and state parks. They often have little learning centers or signs that we can read to learn something new. My kids love to do the Junior Ranger activities at national parks. When she was seven years old, Evelynn earned her first Junior ranger badge. She proudly pinned it to her outfit every morning for about a year. One day I asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up and she said “A park ranger because I am a junior ranger so I am already halfway there.”

But a family field trip can happen even without a car. I used to call these “adventures”. We would go on a walk around the neighborhood, trying to listen for all the sounds we could hear. Or sometimes we scouted the yard for different bugs. In the winter, it’s fun to see if we could follow animal tracks in the snow. The main idea is to talk to your child and to help them start to notice and to question the world around them. These conversations help build your child’s critical thinking skills. At school, the teachers ask most of the questions and they often teach by telling. At home, your child can ask the questions and learn by making their own observations. 

So it’s pretty obvious that adventure and family field trips are interesting and fun, but how do they help your child at school? They can help build your child’s background knowledge and vocabulary. Kids with bigger vocabulary have a much easier time reading because when they sound out an unfamiliar word, they can compare it to things they already know to help make adjustments. Then they can hold a picture in their mind of what the text is saying, which helps them understand what they are reading. If they have never heard the word in the first place, they get really stuck. So the more experiences and conversations you have with your child, the bigger their vocabulary gets and the better they become at thinking critically. 

So next weekend or on your child’s next break from school, don’t let them waste all of their free time on their I-pad. Fire up your google machine and find an interesting place nearby to go have a family field trip. Or go on a simple learning adventure in your neighborhood or your own backyard. 

References

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (n.d.). Disorders of Reading and Writing. ASHA.or. Retrieved 12 20, 2024, from https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/clinical-topics/written-language-disorders/disorders-of-reading-and-writing/?srsltid=AfmBOoq7itDoISbJ6OIKUI44UGMGBt00PAB40OMCoJUWpZz31uK0Gw2U

D’Angiulli, A., Runge, M., Faulkner, A., Zakizadeh, J., Chan, A., & Morcos, S. (2013). Vividness of visual imagery and incidental recall of verbal cues, when phenomenological availability reflects long-term memory accessibility. Frontiers in psychology, 4, 1.
Smith, R., Snow, P., Serry,T.,  & Hammond, L. (2021) The Role of Background Knowledge in Reading Comprehension: A Critical Review, Reading Psychology, 42:3, 214-240, DOI: 10.1080/02702711.2021.1888348