Not long ago, I watched a video on-line of an entire lecture illustrated on a dry erase board.  The idea of sketching entire concepts for the listener was both intriguing and entertaining.  Unlike a movie clip, the drawing held open the relationship from one idea to the next and allowed the listener to be drawn back to a previous idea with a simple arrow or an additional image constructed adjacent to another.  It provided visuals for the core principles and truths of the talk, but also the development of theories and conclusions.  At the close of this post you will find the clip of which I speak, but the purpose of this post is share with you how we’ve taken this presentation style and gave it opportunity in our home school studies.

The schooling stage is set thus:  kitchen table cleared, we tape down the white back side of a large flip-chart page no longer in use from our business (L.I.F.E).  The page is meant for dry-erase markers, and so each of the girls grabs a couple colors and some paper towel with cleaner on it. Next to the page is our laptop computer with google maps open and ready for zooming in. T

his signals the start of our geography, history, sociology, human relations and leadership educations.

Our first topic:  The Age of Discovery and the story of Christopher Columbus. We dug into a great account of his life and work by Tim McNeese.

As I read, the girls mapped out the various routes and cities, drew ships as were described, portraits, and settings.  The dream-struggle-victory theme unraveled itself and the girls charted Columbus’s many requests to sponsor his first voyage of exploration west, indicating which magistrate and country he asked, how long he waited for an answer, what the answer was and even how many times he asked.  That chart alone led to many incredible conversations, one of which led us to a talk by Orrin Woodward on the subject of Passion, Potential, Profit and finding your purpose which we also mapped out to explore.  That led to discovering that some of Christopher Columbus’s circumstances were solely from the hand of God.  In turn that led to a talk about obedience and the gospel!  And on and on it went, all drawn out by their own hands, inspiring new ideas and concepts to be connected.

I marvel at the potential this learning technique has so much.   In school as a child, I learned from a few things drawn for me on a black board, some short texts and photos in a book, and outline designed by the textbook authors, perhaps a workbook.  All the data was spelled out for me and kept in a single category for the purposes of measuring my comprehension of that specific topic.  Had I been able to draw the ideas out from myself and been given the opportunity to make relationships between someone else’s life and education and my own, I certainly would have been able to grow in wisdom and appreciation far beyond what I did.  The very question of “Who is writing on the board?” becomes significant in who continues to grow in connecting the lesson to the mind, heart and soul.  In a future posting, I will share with you the fruit of this labor, publishing their various reflections on what the discoveries of Columbus REALLY mean to them.

On to Marco Polo, now.  The page is taped down to the table, google maps and maps of the Silk Road opened, new Expo markers laid out, The Travels of Marco Polo written in the 14th century along with Tim McNeese’s Marco Polo and the Realm of Khan have been checked out from the library for our next four weeks.  Off we go from blank slate to new wisdom!