Teaching Relationships through ThinkBlocks

Video Summary

Transcript of video: So the other thing you know, about these is they're magnetic and the reason they're magnetic is to teach kids that we need to make relationships between and among ideas, and the magnets remind you of that. So when you do this, you can say, okay, well, let me do a different one. So say we're talking about ... actually, that should be the ... so let's say this still says justice and she has to learn who is Rosa Parks because she's studying civil rights and I can say to her, okay, we have these two ideas that you're studying and you know that they're related somehow and what you're studying is how they're related. So we can stick them together and by doing that in her head, she's actually relating them, collocating them in her head. Well, I can say, well how are these related and she can say well, Rosa Parks struggled for justice or something like that, and we can say, okay, well that's interesting, so then you can take another block which will represent the relationship and you learn about polarity too by the way. So this block now represents the relationship between two ideas and what she's learned without realizing it is that it's equally important to study the relationship between two concepts as it is the concepts themselves. I don't know if Derek told you this but if you think about like graduate work, inevitably what we studied for six or seven years, took great pains is the relationship between two ideas, not the two ideas in and of themselves. So this is a good skill for kids to learn early on in their life is that relationships have the same structure of any other idea, a relationship is a distinct idea just as much as Rosa Parks or justice is, and the other thing that's kind of cool about the relationship part is you can also take two ideas that seem totally unrelated. So for example, if I write... I can't do this sideways... ocean, I did this with my daughter actually when we were making the video for the company and I said, okay, here are two ideas that seem totally unrelated, and what's the relationship between Rosa Parks and 'ocean' and without missing a beat, she looked at me and she said, that's easy, they're both made up of water. I said ... you're a genius, and I said, yeah, they are, 'cause I thought she would say Rosa Parks swims in the ocean or blah... blah... so you know, it helps them to relate ideas that they wouldn't otherwise relate or look for different relationships between ideas.

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