Help on Making Rules

Most children don't need any help making up rules. They see and hear them all the time they're growing up! The kind of rules we're talking about are similar, but different. They are similar in that all rules state how something should behave. The difference is that we're not talking about behaving like "being good," but more like predicting: "based on what we know something should behave in a way that we can predict."

People try to apply these kinds of rules to predicting:

• the weather
• economic changes
• who will win a sporting event
• who will come home from the Academy Awards with an Oscar

In other words,

"Because X, Y, and Z happen - and there seems to be a pattern here - then we expect this as an outcome.

A slightly different way to put it is:

"Because this happened and it's like something else we know about, then we expect that it came about because of..."

Example Rules

We don't want to do any thinking for you, so we won't give examples related to the Windows on the World, but it does help to understand something if you can see examples of it, so here a collection of rules:

example #1
You will get cavities if you spend a lot of time eating too many sweets and then don't brush your teeth.

example #2
Someone will get hurt or something will get broken if you keep wrestling so wildly in the living room.

example #3
To become really good at something takes practice, determination and a sense of enjoying what you're doing.

example #4
Watching too much television can distort your sense of reality because it's excessively violent and shows people in mostly peak experiences.

Introduction   ·   The Big Question   ·   Windows on the World
Group Work   ·   Conclusion    ·   Scoring Rubric   ·   Teacher's Guide