Does hands-on activities and or crafts improve academic levels and scores. Here is a piece from this article that was published.
“Students who spent a greater proportion of their classroom learning time engaged in hands-on projects scored significantly higher on
writing and drawing knowledge application tasks. In classes that spent almost half of instructional
time on hands-on projects (48%), students scored an average of 83 out of a possible 100 on the
knowledge application task. Comparatively, students whose classes devoted a low
percentage of class time to craft projects (11.8%) scored an average of 75. The creativity and level
of detail students demonstrated on the application tasks also indicated that the hands-on projects
left many students with vivid and lasting understanding of both facts and concepts.
Teachers said that hands-on projects help students understand basic ideas (90%) as well as
broader concepts (86%), and 82% of teachers said that handcrafted projects help their students
apply information in new or different situations. Eighty-five percent (85%) of the teachers surveyed
also agreed that long-term hands-on projects give students a greater depth of understanding than
more conventional instructional methods.”
[urlhttp://www.home-school.com/news/summ.pdf][/url] View the link to read the enire booklet, and let me know what you think? Do you perform crafts and hands on projects such as lapbooks in your homeschool curricula?
Yes I do. I think craft projects help more because it gives a 3rd dimension to learning and I think when you have all 3 you really grasp the concept, just like sign language gives a hands on feel to spoken language. I believe a craft project gets kids thinking about what they have learned. I have not read the article yet but I feel intuitivly to understand something you need to learn it in 3 ways.
Kimba
I haven’t read the whole article yet. But absolutely. Especially if you have a hands on learner.
My oldest learns best doing things like Lapbooking, crafts, cooking(math) ,etc.
When she attended school this year they did an assignment making a poster board with facts about the United States flag. You could tell her poster from the whole bunch. She created small books with information and glued them to the board. Making it look like an open lapbook. I had no knowledge of it until we went to the teacher conference that she even made it and she did it herself. Her teacher was so impressed she got the highest grade out of her class for it.
My 2nd daughter isn’t quite a hands on learner but when we’ve done lapbooks for certain topics it actually helps her remember. We did our first lapbook about 4 yrs ago. It was on Greek mythology. She had a tough time remembering who was who in the stories so our 1st lapbook was this. Just this year, 4 yrs later at school they studied the stars and their teacher was talking about the constellations and the stories of the Greek mythology. I saw her teacher that day and she stopped me and told me how impressed she was at K’s knowledge of it she was curious as to how I got her to remember. So I shared with her our lapbook we made. She was really impressed for sure. But just by making something it helped my daughter tremendously to remember a difficult or, to some kids, boring topic.