Why We Constantly Practice

Basketball is a great example of a sport where constant practice adds to your ability to play and compete. Take for instance, the simple act of dribbling the basketball. When you are first learning the skill of hitting the ball to the ground and repeating that drill until you stop, at that point you are not thinking of how to use your dribbling skill (or lack of) to get you past your opponent and to the basket to score. No, your only thought is to bounce it up and down, over and over trying to master the skill. You try walking, and then running with the ball bouncing it as you go. After a while dribbling becomes an asset to your ability to score, helping you move to the basket around your opponent.

Your focus at the start of your dribbling practice was on just getting the ball to your hand. After a while the dribbling becomes more automatic so you can spend more time on your fancy moves to the basket.

Reading, math, and writing benefit greatly from using the basic idea of practice as in the basketball example. The more practice in each of these subjects, the opportunities to expand your knowledge.

The following example from Why Don’t Students Like School? By cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham illustrates this point. “When students are first introduced to arithmetic, they often solve problems by using counting strategies. For example, they solve 5+4 by beginning with 5 and counting up four more numbers to yield the answer 9. This strategy suffices to solve simple problems, but you can see what happens as problems become more complex. For example, in a multidigit problem like 97+98, a counting strategy becomes less effective. The problem is that this more complex problem demands that more processes be carried out in working memory. The student might add 7 and 8 by counting and get 15 as the result. Now the student must remember to write down the 5, then solve 9+9 by counting, while remembering to add the carried 1 to the result. The problem is much simpler if the student has memorized the fact that 7+8=15.”

The above example is just as true in reading, writing, and learning a foreign language. Composition, for example involves the rudiments of such diverse skills as forming individual letters proficiently, spelling, sentence structure, word knowledge, and life experiences to name a few. More practice means more of an automatic response so the student’s efforts are spent on creativity and not on how to form the letter “T” or figuring out if a sentence is a sentence without containing a verb.

Here at Bios, our teachers work diligently with each student to practice, practice, and practice more basic skills which enable them to learn more advanced skills and knowledge. For math, math facts, basic geometry rules, and how to show their work are daily learned and reviewed. In writing, three to seven writing assignments a quarter provide a quantity of practice in neatness and writing skills. Students are held accountable to improve their reading by reading two to seven books a quarter, reading textbooks daily (history, science, and math) and reading from the Bible.

Practicing basic skills so our students are able to learn more advanced ideas is one more reason our students make such constant progress in their subjects.

Congratulations

We had a great showing in another national writing contest, the Book Review Writing Contest sponsored by author Rachel Starr Thomson. Not one, but two winners came from our group of high school writers for this contest. Raynie earned second and Bethany first in this contest which the students wrote a review of a book and submitted it to the contest. Most of our junior high and high school entries are posted on her site with comments from Rachel at www.rachelstarrthomson.com/inkling/. Both winners have a choice of books to pick as their awards.