What happens when a child misses a small piece of information in school? It may not seem significant right away, but that small missing piece can cause more problems later in their education.
A missing brick is what happens when a child doesn’t totally grasp a concept, but doesn’t get to complete their understanding before they move on to the next topic. Learning anything afterwards is like trying to build a brick wall with some bricks missing at the bottom; It may work for a while, but that wall will still bend, and eventually break.
Missing one brick means that there are spots where other bricks will be missed. For example, children who don’t know their times tables won’t be able to factor numbers easily. That means they’ll struggle finding a least common multiple or greatest common denominator when they move on to fractions. That makes adding and subtracting fractions much more difficult. It all comes back to a simple overlooked concept: times tables and basic multiplication.
This isn’t just a math problem; simple concepts like spelling and phonics that aren’t learned can create problems with grammar, word definitions, reading comprehension, and overall literacy.
Finding these missing bricks is sometimes trickier than it seems. Online learning has made it much easier for students with missing bricks to slip through the cracks. With students able to get information from Google, YouTube videos, or their parents, it’s made it even harder to recognize. Lots of kids learn to compensate for their lack of knowledge with educated guesses, jokes, or extra effort. Unfortunately, these short term solutions are no replacement for real knowledge.
Even when public schools find these lost concepts, many teachers aren’t able to go back and teach a topic from the previous months, or even from previous grades. A quick review might refresh some concepts, but it still isn’t enough information for a child without an understanding of the topic to build a good foundational knowledge.
At Genie Academy, our assessments are designed to find these missing bricks. Once we’ve pinpointed the missing knowledge, we fill it in, before we add anything else on top of it.
Learning complicated concepts without knowing the basics is like building a house without a foundation underneath it: it just doesn’t make sense.
