Making a (lesson plan) list and checking it twice

I know it's not Christmas yet.

I'm actually going over my son's school game plan. Every once in a while I assess where he is (in a very nonofficial way) and think about where he should be, by my standards, and where he wants to be by the time he's 18 and ready to go to college.

Nick wants to be a video game designer. I'm not a huge video game fan, but I do enjoy the hidden objects and match 3 games I get from Big Fish Games. However, I can see the potential for a solid, happy career for Nick in this field and I'm happy to help him along this path.

Becoming a believer

For the most part, when your child says, "When I grow up, I want to be (fill in the blank)," you smile, nod and say, "That's great honey." That's because the fill-in-the-blank part changes nonstop for most kids.

However, Nick has been saying he wants to be a video game designer (and nothing else) since he was 7 years old. Well, there was a short time when he wanted to be an actor on the side, but video games have always been his first love.

Here we are almost six years later, and I have finally decided I believe him. It took me long enough. I think my hesitation was that I was afraid he thought designing video games meant just dreaming up ideas and then playing the games after someone else made them. His fascination and adoration of them led me to believe that what he really wanted to do was play them. (You thought I was going to say "direct" didn't you?)

Well, the more he said he wanted to be a video game designer, the more I thought I should look into what it really is. If this is really what he wants to do (or thinks he wants to do) then we should both know what it is exactly.

Who knew?

As it turns out, being a video game designer is EXACTLY what Nick thought it was. You dream up the ideas and let the tech people and artists work on it. OK, well, it's not that simple. The video game designer takes the lead, creating the direction the game will go in, and works with all who are working on the game to make sure it stays true to his idea or vision of what the game should be. In a nutshell, the video game designer directs. (There, I said it.)

Doing my research

So how did I find this out? Lots of Internet research and a little bit of ingenuity.

I decided to look at the colleges that teach game design to see if I could get any information from them. I found Full Sail University and read some of the interviews they had done with graduates. At the end of an interview with game designer Jameson Durall was his blog site. I went to the blog and read what he was doing. (By the way, if you click on the link to his blog, please note it is NOT intended for younger viewers.)

I then contacted him and asked him what suggestions he had for teaching my son in order to prepare him for the world of video game design. To my astonishment, he responded to me and quickly. He was very nice and supportive, and gave me great advice and the name of a book to get that would tell us all about the reality of video game design. I looked at that book (The Art of Game Design) on Amazon and several others in the "Customers who bought this item also bought" section and actually learned a lot just by reading the descriptions.

So what does this have to do with the education game plan?

Now I am re-evaluating the education plan. I've been following an unschooling game plan, with a little traditional schooling thrown in for good measure. My thought was that Nick needs to have the basics in everything (literature, science, history, math, art, vocabulary, etc.) but he also needs to take the lead in what he really wants to do as a career. So along with doing the basics he's also been studying Flash animation and 3-D animation. He'll be studying PhotoShop, Unity, Blender and other animation and game design programs along the way too.

How will I cram it all in? It dawned on me the other day when I was talking to a co-worker. I was talking about the legend of the phoenix (because I had to draw one) and she didn't know anything about it really. She knew it was a bird that caught fire and came back to life, but that was it.

It occurred to me that it wasn't really necessary for her to know all about it. She's a very intelligent woman and one I turn to quite often for details on how to do my job (to make life easier for all the other workers). I did not think she was unintelligent at all for not knowing the story.

That's when I realized, it is NOT necessary to teach Nick EVERYTHING. The goal of unschooling is to expose him to as much as possible and let him decide what he needs to know in order to reach his goals. Nick does NOT need to know calculus to enter the world of game design. (Geometry would be good though. I use it all the time as an artist. And a video game designer does work with artists.)

He does NOT need to read every piece of classic literature out there. I can expose him to quite a bit through summaries and Cliffs Notes. If he decides he wants to hear more, we can read more. I pointed out a video game we played was based on a classic novel (Phantom of the Opera) and he liked the video game enough to want to hear the story. But for the most part, just knowing the basic story is enough.

I make a point to mention when a video game references certain classic tales, or legends or historic events. I have told him many times that learning about a lot of things will give him many ideas for video games. And it's true. Some stories, either fictional works of art or actual events, make great material for video games. We see it time and again on Big Fish Games.

So I am able to pare down the material I was going to teach him by realizing not all of it is absolutely necessary. If there is a time in history he is not really concerned about, we'll cut those lessons short. If he wants to learn more about a specific art style, we'll concentrate more time on it. We're just going to play it by ear for the most part, but have a list on the side for me (because I'm a list maker and it'll make me feel better).

Most important skill to teach

Most important for all of us to know, however, is that whatever you want to know or need to know is available to you if you just do your research. It starts with a simple library or Google search and goes from there. I think that is probably the most important skill Nick needs in life and he's already got that mastered (doing video game research wouldn't you know).

Many uses for guided reading lessons

At first I was using guided reading lessons to help my son gain more reading practice and improve his comprehension skills. For the most part, fiction stories were the main focus. But I have found it works really well with the rest of our lessons, especially history (a subject my son seems to hate).

I have been using the new skills I've developed to help him grasp new terms, make sense of the new information he's getting, and come away from the lesson with much more knowledge.

Planning is important to a guided reading lesson

I have my son read the history section we are working on during the day while I'm at work (as sort of a primer). But before he's even read it, I go over it and look for new vocabulary words or other terms he may not know. I make sure I know the location of the part of the world we're discussing on the map beforehand, and I locate any videos or websites that will help add a little to the lesson. I plan a hands-on project ahead of time too.

An example using an upcoming history lesson

Right now in history we are going over the rise of civilizations, and the next lesson is about Egypt.

I know where Egypt is on the map so I don't have to worry about finding that ahead of time. The lesson also mentions the Mediterranean Sea and the Nile, and it mentions that Palestine and Syria were once under Egypt rule, so I'll make sure I know where all these are.

**By the way, if you have kids who love to color, Knowledge Quest Maps has great historical maps that will help a history lesson be much more interesting and memorable. There are literally hundreds to choose from and you are sure to find one to match your lesson. They are perfect for the project part of a guided reading lesson.**

Looking through the lesson I see the words pharaoh, chariot, fertile, shaduf, irrigation, surveying, hieroglyphics, hieratic, and scribes that may need some explanation. I'll create a vocabulary list that we can work on together. This is project number one. Because the word hieroglyphics is in there, we may try our hand at writing in this form later.

Of course the big project after reading the lesson will be to build our own pyramids because it's Egypt! I will locate some videos on the History Channel website about the pyramids and maybe look up something on the seven ancient wonders, of which the pyramids are the only ones left standing. I just found the Culture focus website that has lots of pictures that will be interesting to my son.

And that is the planning part.

The actual guided reading history lesson

When I get home from work (after he's read it once) we will go over the vocabulary words. Sometimes he surprises me and already knows what some of the terms mean (one of his video games is set in early civilization times and helps me out more than I would have thought). Then I'll have him read the lesson out loud to me. I'll stop him at times to look at the map or discuss certain events or the artwork on the page that goes with a certain passage.

In traditional guided reading lessons you are supposed to get kids to look at the clues in a book and predict the outcome of the story (for fiction) or tell you what they expect to learn (for nonfiction), but because I have Nick read the text once to himself before we begin the lesson it's not necessary for us to do that. Sometimes we do look at the next lesson (right after we've finished one) and discuss it a little and I let that be the prediction part of the lesson.

The reason I have Nick read the lesson to himself ahead of time is to help him practice his reading skill. In the book Overcoming Dyslexia author Sally Shaywitz wrote that having a dyslexic child read the same passage a few times will help cement some of the words they read in their long-term memory. So I am making his history lesson dyslexia friendly.

After we've gone over the text, pictures (and their captions) and sidebars and seen some videos or did our research on the websites I locate ahead of time, then we will do our project. This is the fun part. This is what brings the lesson home and helps it all sink in. For the pyramids, I imagine we'll make them out of LEGOs because Nick loves building with LEGOs. But we could try modeling clay or the magnet toys we have. I can imagine that we'll try to build tunnels through our pyramids to replicate the real pyramids and talk about what they are for. I know that my son has a mummy LEGO character that he may want to put inside of his.

Other ideas for projects

As I mentioned before, we might try our hand at hieroglyphics or we might get a blackline map of Egypt and color in where the major pyramids are (after doing some research), the Nile and other important features of Egypt. Because I'm teaching him graphics programs right now, I could have him practice his skills on drawing a mummy, one of the many gods ancient Egyptians worshipped, the sphinx, or any number of Egyptian icons. Of course, in order to do that, we have to research them and this is where more learning comes in.

I'm only mentioning these ideas to give you examples of the possibilities. If you were to choose guided reading as a way to teach history or other subjects that are troubling your child, you should know that there are many possibilities to the project part to make the lessons fun and, therefore, more memorable (and less troubling).

Visit my other blog for in-depth details and information on creating outstanding guided reading lesson plans.

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The book I use for my son's history lessons is The Complete Book of World History. I love this series of workbooks because it makes teaching a lot of subjects fun for the kids. The World History book has each lesson on a two-page spread so the lessons are like bite-sized little chunks. The U.S. History book from the same series wasn't quite so bite-sized but did have the projects already planned out for you in the "Show What You Know" sections. For the most part, planning a lesson and the project is easier on us teachers.