The comforts of simple pleasures – leaf collecting, raking leaves, enjoying a homemade family meal – sustain you in difficult times and help you create your own well being.  I’m reminded of countless days as a kid, sitting in my grandma’s kitchen, filled with the steamy aroma of the vegetable soup that was simmering on the stove (made with all the great vegetables my grandpa grew). The smell of fresh biscuits and homemade noodles lingering in the air; visiting her was such a treat!

I’d get up and look out the window to see the yellow carpet of Norway and Susan maple leaves blowing about the yard, anxious to go leaf-collecting. I would charge out the door to collect leaves – Susan maples were the best! Reds, oranges, yellows – oh, the brilliant colors! My grandpa would rake huge piles for me to jump in, and I’d come back inside exhausted and happy, with my collection of autumn treasures to show grandma. She helped me pick the best leaves and we would iron them between sheets of waxed paper, cut them out and tape them to the windows, creating our own beautiful stained glass windows.

The time adults spend with children is vital both to the child and the adult. “Making things” has always been important to me; it gives me a focus, comfort, delight and a sense of accomplishment. I look to share that delight with others, old or young. When people say to me, “Oh, you’re so creative! How did you get that way?” I reflect on how I grew up – I kept that creative channel open always. Important adults in my life spent time with me “making things,” whether it was my parents and grandparents, teachers, scout leaders, 4H leaders or friends. The simple act of doing something creative gave me a life-long gift to create and share my delight with others.

So create and share your delight with the children in your life! Make a shaped book and fill it with Fall Facts, Fall Poems, Fall Recipes or Fall Memories. Take a field trip to an apple farm, a pumpkin patch, a cider mill. Take field notes, collect artifacts, leaf rubbings,nuts, etc…the possibilities are endless!

Get a jumpstart creating by visiting our website! 

Shapes Etc. Website: How-To Idea Sheets!

Visit our Idea Sheets page to see lots of creative ideas for crafts, activities and much more!

Here’s a quick list of some great Idea Sheets for Fall:

• 12 Terrific Fall Ideas (pdf)
• Turkey Ideas (pdf)
• Apple Pie Activity (pdf)
• Create a Shaped Book! (pdf)

Thanks for reading, and I hope you have fun creating this Fall!
Susan

I stumbled upon this article online a few weeks ago and was very intrigued by Kohn’s argument that there is no data to support the theory that homework is necessary for students to learn. This article supports our mission here at Shapes Etc. to inspire creativity and make learning fun.

What is your opinion on the “homework debate”?
Comment on this post to let us and other readers know what you think!

Printable Version

“The Truth About Homework”

“students tend to fare better in smaller…
democratic caring communities”

There’s something perversely fascinating about educational policies that are clearly at odds with the available data. Huge schools are still being built even though we know that students tend to fare better in smaller places that lend themselves to the creation of democratic caring communities. Many children who are failed by the academic status quo are forced to repeat a grade even though research shows that this is just about the worst course of action for them. Homework continues to be assigned – in ever greater quantities – despite the absence of evidence that it’s necessary or even helpful in most cases.

The dimensions of that last disparity weren’t clear to me until I began sifting through the research for a new book. To begin with, I discovered that decades of investigation have failed to turn up any evidence that homework is beneficial for students in elementary school. Even if you regard standardized test results as a useful measure, homework (some versus none, or more versus less) isn’t even correlated with higher scores at these ages. The only effect that does show up is more negative attitudes on the part of students who get more assignments.

“decades of investigation have failed to turn up any
evidence that homework is beneficial for students”

In high school, some studies do find a correlation between homework and test scores (or grades), but it’s usually fairly small and it has a tendency to disappear when more sophisticated statistical controls are applied. Moreover, there’s no evidence that higher achievement is due to the homework even when an association does appear. It isn’t hard to think of other explanations for why successful students might be in classrooms where more homework is assigned – or why they might spend more time on it than their peers do.

The results of national and international exams raise further doubts. One of many examples is an analysis of 1994 and 1999 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data from 50 countries. Researchers David Baker and Gerald Letendre were scarcely able to conceal their surprise when they published their results last year: “Not only did we fail to find any positive relationships,” but “the overall correlations between national average student achievement and national averages in [amount of homework assigned] are all negative.”

Finally, there isn’t a shred of evidence to support the widely accepted assumption that homework yields nonacademic benefits for students of any age. The idea that homework teaches good work habits or develops positive character traits (such as self-discipline and independence) could be described as an urban myth except for the fact that it’s taken seriously in suburban and rural areas, too.

“the overwhelmingly majority of American schools…
require their students to work a second shift by
bringing academic assignments home.”

In short, regardless of one’s criteria, there is no reason to think that most students would be at any sort of disadvantage if homework were sharply reduced or even eliminated. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of American schools – elementary and secondary, public and private – continue to require their students to work a second shift by bringing academic assignments home. Not only is this requirement accepted uncritically, but the amount of homework is growing, particularly in the early grades. A large, long-term national survey found that the proportion of six- to-eight-year-old children who reported having homework on a given day had climbed from 34 percent in 1981 to 58 percent in 1997 – and the weekly time spent studying at home more than doubled.

Sandra Hofferth of the University of Maryland, one of the authors of that study, has just released an update based on 2002 data. Now the proportion of young children who had homework on a specific day jumped to 64 percent, and the amount of time they spent on it climbed by another third. The irony here is painful because with younger children the evidence to justify homework isn’t merely dubious – it’s nonexistent.

“our belief that homework ought to help is based on
some fundamental misunderstandings about learning.”

So why do we do something where the cons (stress, frustration, family conflict, loss of time for other activities, a possible diminution of interest in learning) so clearly outweigh the pros? Possible reasons include a lack of respect for research, a lack of respect for children (implicit in a determination to keep them busy after school), a reluctance to question existing practices, and the top-down pressures to teach more stuff faster in order to pump up test scores so we can chant “We’re number one!”

All these explanations are plausible, but I think there’s also something else responsible for our continuing to feed children this latter-day cod-liver oil. Because many of us believe it’s just common sense that homework would provide academic benefits, we tend to shrug off the failure to find any such benefits. In turn, our belief that homework ought to help is based on some fundamental misunderstandings about learning.

Consider the assumption that homework should be beneficial just because it gives students more time to master a topic or skill. (Plenty of pundits rely on this premise when they call for extending the school day or year. Indeed, homework can be seen as a way of prolonging the school day on the cheap.) Unfortunately, this reasoning turns out to be woefully simplistic. Back “when experimental psychologists mainly studied words and nonsense syllables, it was thought that learning inevitably depended upon time,” reading researcher Richard C. Anderson and his colleagues explain. But “subsequent research suggests that this belief is false.”

“more hours are least likely to produce better
outcomes when understanding or creativity is involved.”

The statement “People need time to learn things” is true, of course, but it doesn’t tell us much of practical value. On the other hand, the assertion “More time usually leads to better learning” is considerably more interesting. It’s also demonstrably untrue, however, because there are enough cases where more time doesn’t lead to better learning.

In fact, more hours are least likely to produce better outcomes when understanding or creativity is involved. Anderson and his associates found that when children are taught to read by focusing on the meaning of the text (rather than primarily on phonetic skills), their learning does “not depend on amount of instructional time.” In math, too, as another group of researchers discovered, time on task is directly correlated to achievement only if both the activity and the outcome measure are focused on rote recall as opposed to problem solving.

Carole Ames of Michigan State University points out that it isn’t “quantitative changes in behavior” – such as requiring students to spend more hours in front of books or worksheets – that help children learn better. Rather, it’s “qualitative changes in the ways students view themselves in relation to the task, engage in the process of learning, and then respond to the learning activities and situation.” In turn, these attitudes and responses emerge from the way teachers think about learning and, as a result, how they organize their classrooms. Assigning homework is unlikely to have a positive effect on any of these variables. We might say that education is less about how much the teacher covers than about what students can be helped to discover – and more time won’t help to bring about that shift.

Alongside an overemphasis on time is the widely held belief that homework “reinforces” the skills that students have learned – or, rather, have been taught — in class. But what exactly does this mean? It wouldn’t make sense to say “Keep practicing until you understand” because practicing doesn’t create understanding – just as giving kids a deadline doesn’t teach time-management skills. What might make sense is to say “Keep practicing until what you’re doing becomes automatic.” But what kinds of proficiencies lend themselves to this sort of improvement?

“Lots of practice can help some students get better
at remembering an answer, but not to get better at –
or even accustomed to — thinking.”

The answer is behavioral responses. Expertise in tennis requires lots of practice; it’s hard to improve your swing without spending a lot of time on the court. But to cite an example like that to justify homework is an example of what philosophers call begging the question. It assumes precisely what has to be proved, which is that intellectual pursuits are like tennis.

The assumption that they are analogous derives from behaviorism, which is the source of the verb “reinforce” as well as the basis of an attenuated view of learning. In the 1920s and ‘30s, when John B. Watson was formulating his theory that would come to dominate education, a much less famous researcher named William Brownell was challenging the drill-and-practice approach to mathematics that had already taken root. “If one is to be successful in quantitative thinking, one needs a fund of meanings, not a myriad of ‘automatic responses,’” he wrote. “Drill does not develop meanings. Repetition does not lead to understandings.” In fact, if “arithmetic becomes meaningful, it becomes so in spite of drill.”

Brownell’s insights have been enriched by a long line of research demonstrating that the behaviorist model is, if you’ll excuse the expression, deeply superficial. People spend their lives actively constructing theories about how the world works, and then reconstructing them in light of new evidence. Lots of practice can help some students get better at remembering an answer, but not to get better at – or even accustomed to — thinking. And even when they do acquire an academic skill through practice, the way they acquire it should give us pause. As psychologist Ellen Langer has shown, “When we drill ourselves in a certain skill so that it becomes second nature,” we may come to perform that skill “mindlessly,” locking us into patterns and procedures that are less than ideal.

But even if practice is sometimes useful, we’re not entitled to conclude that homework of this type works for most students. It isn’t of any use for those who don’t understand what they’re doing. Such homework makes them feel stupid; gets them accustomed to doing things the wrong way (because what’s really “reinforced” are mistaken assumptions); and teaches them to conceal what they don’t know. At the same time, other students in the same class already have the skill down cold, so further practice for them is a waste of time. You’ve got some kids, then, who don’t need the practice and others who can’t use it.

Some teachers prefer to have their “students read, write,
or do math…during class where it [is] possible
to observe, guide and discuss.”

Furthermore, even if practice was helpful for most students, that doesn’t mean they need to do it at home. In my research I found a number of superb teachers (at different grade levels and with diverse instructional styles) who rarely, if ever, found it necessary to assign homework. Some not only didn’t feel a need to make students read, write, or do math at home; they preferred to have students do these things during class where it was possible to observe, guide, and discuss.

Finally, any theoretical benefit of practice homework must be weighed against the effect it has on students’ interest in learning. If slogging through worksheets dampens one’s desire to read or think, surely that wouldn’t be worth an incremental improvement in skills. And when an activity feels like drudgery, the quality of learning tends to suffer, too. That so many children regard homework as something to finish as quickly as possible – or even as a significant source of stress — helps to explain why it appears not to offer any academic advantage even for those who obediently sit down and complete the tasks they’ve been assigned. All that research showing little value to homework may not be so surprising after all.

Supporters of homework rarely look at things from the student’s point of view, though; instead, kids are regarded as inert objects to be acted on: Make them practice and they’ll get better. My argument isn’t just that this viewpoint is disrespectful, or that it’s a residue of an outdated stimulus-response psychology. I’m also suggesting it’s counterproductive. Children cannot be made to acquire skills. They aren’t vending machines such that we put in more homework and get out more learning.

“Supporters of homework rarely look at things
from the student’s point of view…”

But just such misconceptions are pervasive in all sorts of neighborhoods, and they’re held by parents, teachers, and researchers alike. It’s these beliefs that make it so hard even to question the policy of assigning regular homework. We can be shown the paucity of supporting evidence and it won’t have any impact if we’re wedded to folk wisdom (“practice makes perfect”; more time equals better results).

On the other hand, the more we learn about learning, the more willing we may be to challenge the idea that homework has to be part of schooling.

Copyright © 2006 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author’s name).

Education Week, Sept. 6, 2006, Alfie Kohn

www.alfiekohn.org — © Alfie Kohn

…Miller’s School Supplies in Orlando, FL.

Congratulations to Erin Norris, Magan Branch, and Jackie Matheson who created the winning display, “Where in the World?”

Thank you for sharing your creative display idea with us!

Click on the picture below to start the slideshow.

Hi Everyone,

It’s time to Shape up for back-to-school with Shapes Etc!

At Shapes our goal is to help you sell through our products and inspire your customers to make learning fun! Creative displays make your store a destination for teachers and parents. We want to help you!

BACK TO SCHOOL DISPLAY RULES & PRIZES!

1. Simply use your creativity to make the display as fun and exciting as you can! Take lots of pictures and send them in! FREE idea sheets are available on our website to spark some ideas.
2. The judges will base the winner on creativity and knowledge of the Shapes products used. We will reimburse up to $20.00 of merchandise used from your inventory for display purposes. You can create a wall, end cap or spinner rack.
3. The contest runs from June 15^th to July 31^st.
   All photos must be received by email at info@shapesetc.com or mail to:

   Shapes Etc.-Display Contest
   PO Box 400
   Dansville, NY 14437

4. Please include the following information with your photo:
   • Store name and location
   • Name(s) of people responsible for display

ALL WINNERS RECEIVE THE FOLLOWING:

• $25.00 gift cards to a store of your choice for 3 of your staff members (ex. Starbucks, Bath & Body Works, etc.)
• Shapes tote bags full of Shapes Etc. goodies!
• Exposure on our website celebrating your creativity
• Most Creative winner will be displayed at the NSSEA tradeshow in Orlando, Florida in 2008.

If you have any questions call 1-800-888-6580 or email: sara@shapesetc.com

Thanks!
Katie, Ryan & Sara

Keep the “Fun” in Teaching the Fundamentals!

By: Susan DeMuth

In the age of “teaching to the test,” we have to remind ourselves it’s student “learning” we want to achieve. Tests are simply a measurement tool. Brain research is telling us that active learning allows children to use both sides of their brain. So, sing, dance, create some shaped books, write stories, write a script, make puppets, produce a play, or make shaped flash cards and create learning games…(Whew! I know that was a run-on sentence, but I want to give YOU lots of ideas!) Tie these activities to the content you want students to “LEARN.” There is an old Chinese proverb that says it best:

“Tell me, I hear. Show me, I see. Involve me, I understand.”

I am the artist and also the owner of Shapes Etc. I learned to read with “Dick, Jane and Sally.” Well, that was the plan. I was in 3rd grade before I truly learned to read (spelling still eludes me). I was the dyslexic A.D.D. kid, daydreaming in your class. “Earth to Susan…She is smart, but she isn’t applying herself!” A.D.D. was often called “lazy” back then, and as long as a child was not disruptive, they often just drifted. Luckily, today we recognize different learning styles. In the 1960s, it was straight rows, SRAs and anxiety ridden days for those of us who didn’t fit the mold. I cringe when I hear very creative teachers say “I can’t do the fun stuff anymore. I have to teach to the test.” Now more than ever, you HAVE to do the “fun stuff.” Hands-on projects will engage kids with different learning styles…It’s a great way to reach the “daydreamers!”

Creative projects encourage creative
and divergent thinking.

Write Tall Tales in a TALL book. Write short stories in a short book. Be silly sometimes. Laugh. Invent things. Celebrate success by showcasing student work and invite friends and families. Creative projects promote creative problem solving. Twenty First Century survival skills require kids to be active, lifelong, creative thinkers. This is the generation who will retire from jobs that haven’t even been invented yet. Ironically, we are at an age where Public Education is slashing the arts out of our budgets with one hand, and the other hand is pointing at us saying, “students need to be divergent, creative thinkers!” Teachers are caught in the crossfire! Remember, tests just measure learning. Involved active learners will retain more information, and better yet, they will want to know more. Problem solving and digging out new knowledge REQUIRE higher level thinking skills.

You CAN teach creatively and still tie it in to the content you are testing. Let Shapes Etc. help you. We want to be the catalyst for YOUR creativity! We have been making time-saving pre-cut “shapes” since 1984.

Here are quick and easy ideas:

Shaped flash cards
Math game parts
Shaped books
Learning games
Diorama starters

Tie in fun projects that reinforce the concepts from the content area you’re teaching. For example, when studying frogs, give the students a sheet of a frog notepad and create a diorama of a pond biome. Make shaped books of frog facts. Hop into poetry and write “Ooey Gooey Pond Poems.” Write vocabulary words for a “word bank” on frogs. Laminate frog-shaped flash cards for spelling words, vocabulary words or task cards. Sing your favorite frog songs. Make frog craft projects. Decorate frog bookmarks or a frog pencil holder. Write “It Isn’t Easy Being Green” essays on frog computer paper. Track success with frog-shaped personal incentive charts. Reinforce good behavior with frog incentive stickers. Read about the adventures of “Frog and Toad,” then make frog and toad puppets with craft sticks and wiggle eyes. Use a brown marker to color spots on the toad. Compare and contrast frogs and toads…Oh yeah, you have the idea! Now do it with apples, alligators, whales, zebras, etc.

As the designer of Shapes Etc. products,
I rely on feedback from the field.

“What do teachers want?”; “What new ways can we think of to use our products?” I spend most of my days in front of my computer designing things, writing “how-to” idea sheets, planning mailings and working on day-to-day operational issues. Nothing brightens my day more than getting feedback and new creative ideas from people like you!

We are in an age where the economy is in a state of flux, the “Standards” seem to dominate and even intimidate perfectly good educators. Dollars are being reallocated away from education, No Child Left Behind “stuff” is causing us to reassess how we teach. What’s that old saying? “The more things change the more they stay the same.” So we are going back to the basal readers and back to the basics with certified viable curriculum. Together, we can put the FUN back in teaching “fundamentals,” and also offer some creative alternative activities for kids. Activities that will help prepare their creative minds for 21st Century challenges.

The only constant is change!