The Power of Knowledge: How a Great Education Can Change Your Life

Knowledge is one of the most powerful things that you can ever develop, and the only way to effectively develop it is through education. In fact, the right education can truly change your life, and this article aims to outline how you can engage with that kind of education. Fantastic Ways to Learn Learning is

Prodigy Math – RPG that Helps Kids Learn Math

There is a misconception pervasive in our understanding of Math. I’ve often heard it said, “I’m not a numbers person” or “Math is just no my subject”. It becomes that subject to get through and be discarded at first opportunity. Math is like anything else in life that we do. Everyone starts at different levels

Figur8 in Review

I have been lazy, I know. I haven’t written a blog post since 2018 and I apologise for the lack of updates. It isn’t that I haven’t had anything to write about. In fact, there is so much I want to share but I’ve not had the time for it. I used to stay up

Parent Cheat Sheet: Metacognitive Questions

At the end of every enquiry unit, parents are invited to school to observe what our children have done. We are also encouraged to ask the kids questions about their work. This is something I’ve always struggled with because I never know what to ask to make it meaningful. How can you make it meaningful?

Learner Skills for Kids in the 21st Century

For our children be successful when they get out into the real world, they will need more than a report card with good grades. They will need a number of intangible skills that we often refer to as “soft skills” or “21st century skills”. At our school, we call them “learner skills”. To help us

Adventure Learning – How Experiential Learning Empowers Your Child

Adventure Learning is an approach used to design online and hybrid education that provides students with opportunities to investigate and experience authentic topics within collaborative learning environments. – Veletsianos, G. (2012) Adventure learning is a form of education that takes place outdoors in the form of an adventure. It is usualy set in a location that

Resolutions and a Year in Review

Another year is over and a new one begins but before we press on to our resolutions for 2018, we will bid 2017 a proper farewell. Top Posts from 2017 In 2017, we wrote 61 blog posts on Figur8 and the following were the 12 most popular posts: How to Help Children Develop Spatial Reasoning

Enquiry Learning – Raising the Next Generation of Problem Solvers

There is a subject at school that the kids do which is called “enquiry learning”. It’s another term I’ve heard floating around but never deeply understood what it meant in the context of learning at school. Sure, I understand what “enquiry” means – it’s asking questions. It conjures the image of a science class where

I Think, I Thought, I Thunk

I learned a new word today – “thunk”. It is but not really related to the past tense for the word “think”. I’ve seen it floating around our school news letters but I didn’t really dig into the significance of it until today. So what’s a “thunk”? Define: Thunk A thunk is an unusual question

How to Help Children Develop Spatial Reasoning Skills

Spatial reasoning skills are important. Sure. We know that. They also help children do better in maths. In a recent study, researchers found that babies’ spatial reasoning predicts later math skills: Spatial reasoning measured in infancy predicts how children do at math at four years of age, finds a new study. It provides the earliest documented