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To my nieces.

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First, you all are beautiful and I miss you. I’ll be home to visit soon. But, I wanted to tell you all about what I’ve been learning about since I’ve started going back to school. You know that Tee Tee is trying to be a doctor, right? J

Well, I’m in a class called Human Learning, Cognition and Motivation. I know you all have probably heard of or used most of those words, but the word cognition may be a new one. Cognition is a fancy word that explains what our brain goes through when we’re learning something new. How we think, how we remember, how we know, how we understand. But, in this class I am learning about something called the science of learning. Did you all know that you can learn how to learn? You can gain new skills about what learning is and how to learn best. It’s pretty cool stuff.

Destini, Danae, Brooklyn and Kennedy, how do you all learn? If you have a test or quiz, how do you study? Are you trying to memorize the words or the lessons from your teachers? Are you just rereading your workbooks, trying to burn the knowledge in your brain? Well, in my class I learned that these aren’t always the best ways to remember and understand what your teacher is teaching you. Let me give you all a few new ways to learn and understand and always remember what you’re learning at school.

So, I know we don’t like tests. They sometimes make us nervous and anxious which makes it hard to focus, but did you know that if you quiz yourself a few times before the big tests it helps you remember what you learned way more. It's true! This method of quizzing yourself is called retrieval practice (Brown, Roediger & McDaniel, 2014, p. 201). Quizzing yourself helps you practice what you know and helps you figure out what you don’t know so you can focus a little more time on that. Yes, when you only reread or just practice to memorize something, it may help for a little while, but you won’t be able to remember those things later.

Another good way to practice remembering is to space it out. Studying and quizzing yourself for 5 hours in one day doesn’t really help you. There’s a chance you can get tired and sleepy and want to give up. But, instead, if you switch it up and practice for 1 hour a day for 5 days, it gives you time to let the new things you’re learning sit in your brain for a little bit. Then, the next day when you practice, you can see what you remember and what you don’t remember. You know how when your dad is getting ready to BBQ and he seasons the chicken the night before? The next day, the chicken tastes a lot better than if he would have seasoned it on the same day. There was time for the seasonings to seep deep into the chicken to make it more flavorful. That’s the same idea with spacing. Your memory gets better as time passes. Your memory of what you’re learning becomes stronger when you space things out (Brown, Roediger & McDaniel, 2014, p. 205). When I come home next, our DIY project can be creating your own personal calendars for your rooms to schedule your studying and quizzing times.

The last new skill I want you all to try is called interleaving. Interleaving is when you mix up the subjects you’re studying. During your study time at home, you can practice your vocabulary words, then move on to multiplication and fractions, and end with your language arts homework. Mixing up your studying and quizzing helps you remember special parts of what you’re learning and can help with remembering for a test later (Brown, Roediger & McDaniel, 2014, p. 206). Mixing up your subjects also helps with that idea of spacing that I mentioned earlier.  

So overall, quizzing yourself, spacing out your quizzing, and mixing things up can change how you learn and how you remember what you learn. Using all three of these new techniques will help you understand and remember and be confident when your teacher gives you a test or asks you to go up to the board. Don’t worry, if you forget any of this, I will help you remember and will remind you so that you can be the best student and learner in your class. I want you all to love school and love what you’re learning and always do your best and I promise I’ll do the same. Deal? Deal.


Love always,

Tee Tee <3

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