I think an underrated aspect of Anki is the convenience of having it available on your phone. That way you can do it whenever you have a spare moment with your kids. What it loses in romance and gravitas from a physical memory box, it makes up in ease of use and habit formation. The other thing I like is that if you as a parent are the one reading the cards to the kids, you can vary the questions slightly to ensure that the kids have a conceptual understanding rather than just rote prompt completion. It does take time and it's not something my kids savor but they really hold onto knowledge and hopefully will be able to build on top of that in the future.
Yeah, I would be curious to hear from anyone who has made a physical memory box or deep practice book a long term practice with kids! We always cast Anki to our large screen, in part because we do ASL and geography cards that can't just be read aloud and in part because they are creatures of routine but I could see asking the questions aloud and varying the wording being a great strategy for text cards.
I think an underappreciated aspect of spaced repetition is that it can be used to create a daily dose of intellectual stimulation that is not dependent on adult planning and preparation. It can help establish the norm that learning is a joyful part of every day, not a dreaded part of the unpleasant kind of day, and that learning is an experience we can create for ourselves, not just an experience others create for us. But it's a hard thing to make joyful! Homeschoolers have an advantage that we generally have more favorable adult/kid ratios, and without that I struggle to imagine it working well. Perhaps that was part of Egan's hesitation?
Our Anki ritual lately has been to behavior chain it after casting a picture book from Libby to the large screen for the kids to dramatically read aloud and analyze. The end of the picture book creates a natural Anki starting point with us already gathered together so I'm not interrupting their projects, and it's easy and playful so it puts us all in a good space for some hard work. They also really like noticing how long it will be until they see a card again. But now I'm thinking about other ways we can make it more ritualized...
Solstice is for food and games and taking a rare day off from Anki here though, they don't love spaced repetition quite enough to want a bunch of it as a holiday activity. If we did the paper version we'd have to save that for Newton-mass.
I think an underrated aspect of Anki is the convenience of having it available on your phone. That way you can do it whenever you have a spare moment with your kids. What it loses in romance and gravitas from a physical memory box, it makes up in ease of use and habit formation. The other thing I like is that if you as a parent are the one reading the cards to the kids, you can vary the questions slightly to ensure that the kids have a conceptual understanding rather than just rote prompt completion. It does take time and it's not something my kids savor but they really hold onto knowledge and hopefully will be able to build on top of that in the future.
Yeah, I would be curious to hear from anyone who has made a physical memory box or deep practice book a long term practice with kids! We always cast Anki to our large screen, in part because we do ASL and geography cards that can't just be read aloud and in part because they are creatures of routine but I could see asking the questions aloud and varying the wording being a great strategy for text cards.
I think an underappreciated aspect of spaced repetition is that it can be used to create a daily dose of intellectual stimulation that is not dependent on adult planning and preparation. It can help establish the norm that learning is a joyful part of every day, not a dreaded part of the unpleasant kind of day, and that learning is an experience we can create for ourselves, not just an experience others create for us. But it's a hard thing to make joyful! Homeschoolers have an advantage that we generally have more favorable adult/kid ratios, and without that I struggle to imagine it working well. Perhaps that was part of Egan's hesitation?
Our Anki ritual lately has been to behavior chain it after casting a picture book from Libby to the large screen for the kids to dramatically read aloud and analyze. The end of the picture book creates a natural Anki starting point with us already gathered together so I'm not interrupting their projects, and it's easy and playful so it puts us all in a good space for some hard work. They also really like noticing how long it will be until they see a card again. But now I'm thinking about other ways we can make it more ritualized...
Solstice is for food and games and taking a rare day off from Anki here though, they don't love spaced repetition quite enough to want a bunch of it as a holiday activity. If we did the paper version we'd have to save that for Newton-mass.
banger piece, the eccentric fellow dad who took their son out of schools as they were depending on these posts feels VERY relatable :D
thank you brandon
Heh, heh, heh...