Do:

Do activities get the child interested and stimulate their curiosity.

• Making a craft,
• Playing a game
• Building a model

are all examples of Do activities. These types of activities can occur at the beginning of a unit to introduce it, during the unit to experience the new material or at the end of the unit to review what was learned.

Discovery:

Discovery activities build reasoning skills. As the child struggles to complete the task, s/he is learning to attack a problem, view it in a variety of ways and formulate a plan to accomplish it. Instead of telling the child what to learn, the Discovery activity allows the child to discover it on his own. Projects, dissections and experiments make greatDiscovery type activities suggested in the KONOS curriculum.

A few Discovery activities from the KONOS unit:

• Using a map, find their way home from an unknown place
• Read a article or book on a subject and tell us something you learned
• Sort items/put in order
• Make a baker's hat
• Make a lightbulb light using a battery and wire
• Dissect a crayfish
• Experiments
• Prepare a project for 'show and tell'

Dialogue:

Dialogue helps to reinforce all that is experienced and learned during the lessons. It also helps children to verbalize and 'work through' difficult concepts and make connections with other lessons learns. Jane Healy, author of "Endangered Minds," says,

Open-ended questions, such as "What do you think?" or "How could you do it differently?" are very effective and force the child to think, compare his knowledge of other topics and formulate opinions. Although there are many Dialogue suggestions in the curriculum that can be discussed as part of the formal lessons, often the most effective times of dialoguing happen during a familiy's daily activities as the child makes connections and finally truly understands a lesson learned in school.

Dramatize:

Dramatizing activities help the child to internalize, or truly learn, the material being studied. They give a concrete experience, a vivid imagery to words on a page. Dramatizing can be as simple as re-enacting the just-read story of Samuel hearing God call him or as elaborate as putting on a Medieval Feast or staging a play about the Solar System. When a group of children dramatize the events of the Continental Congress drafting the Declaration of Independence or hammering out the Constitution, they are going to remember much more information about those events than if they had merely read about them in a book.

Of course every lesson can't be taught through dramatization, doing or discovery, but those activities that are done provide a 'peg' or 'anchor' for more information to be added and retained in a child's memory.

Drill:

Drill activities aid in evaluating what a child has learned and helps to solidify his/her memory and understanding of the material. The most common drill activities, which are often used exclusively by textbook and workbook publishers, are worksheets and written tests. While these can be useful, there are much more effective ways of drilling material.

• Games
• "Which King Am I,"
• "Name My Species,"
• "Concentration"
• or an adaptation of "Trivial Pursuit" using the topic just studied
• Creating a newspaper
• Show and Tell nights
• Service projects

Drill also provides a 'wrap-up' opportunity that gives meaning and stucture to all the information the children experienced and learned. Without that structure and wrap-up, the experiences can be nothing more than a hodge-podge of learning. From the KONOS, Inc website:

When the 5 D's are used regularly and in balance, students develop new experiences and connections that crystallize their learning and lead to better understanding and greater retention of the material studied.