mini scaffolds

This morning the teacher and I sat both next to my youngest son. He had to finish a snake of beads on nails. He was reluctant to finish it, because it was a little bit difficult. Just to observe him, you could see how difficult it was for him to continue this work that was not too difficult, but that frustrated him just a little bit. The mini scaffolds allowed were that the teacher would show which row was the right one, that we picked the colours for him in advance to narrow the choice down to two colours, and that we asked how many beads he had to skip in between the patches. In the beginning, he sighed a lot - sighing cools a overheated brain - for us a signal that he works at thinking. In the beginning there were a lot of stops and distraction rate was high, then, he seemed to grasp the idea and speed went up.

Puzzle Sunday (21)

Today on puzzle sunday Burr's. I've created another blog where I want to collect links that I discuss here. Why Burr's? They are cut out (of wood) to practise scaffolding techniques. Remember scaffolding? In this case it's the building of problem solving. What steps will lead to a solution? Can you write down what you tried?
And what I like is that there is a description of a selfmade Burr that costs 1$.
I can visualize Burr making workshops around the world.

better education; icerocket trends

Icerocket statistics look a bit like scaffolds, don't they? According to icerocket trend, there were about 4600 - 4900 posts on education and learning every day in the past three months, against only 20 on scaffolding. I'm guessing this means scaffolding is not yet very known to many who write about education. That's a real pitty, because it is a method that builds children, adolescents and adults and we know already, that there is a relationship between the development of skills and frustration. If we want to do things better, more scaffolding techniques is one of the ways.