One of the things we do
really well in the early childhood professional community is play well
with others. That must be why the hashtags of the early learning
communities: #ece #preschool and #prek help show active and engaged
communities. If you use HooteSuite or Tweet Deck to use Twitter, you
can follow all three of these tags. Under the #ece tag, you will find a
professional/practitioner angle of the field. There, teachers post
interesting articles, organizations like @NAEYC post useful resources
and many of the early childhood foundations post reports and advocacy
opportunities.
For
example @janetlansbury recently posted:
Interrupting play to teach babies letters & numbers is like painting
a house before the foundation is built.http://bit.ly/bXOnsH#ece
Under #preschool there
are a mix of child care providers and early childhood educators who
post great classroom activities and giveaways. It’s sort of like a
virtual version of the NAEYC conference with vendors, professionals and
parents. Sometimes home school posts crossover into this stream of
information. This community, largely untapped by school teachers and
professionals, provides new ideas and a new perspective within the
#preschool community.
Finally, there is the
#prek Twitter stream. There can be crossover with the other two streams,
but the #prek tag is primarily focused on public pre-k and policy,
thanks in part to efforts of education advocacy groups like @PreKNow.
If you follow popular culture, even a little bit, you probably know people listed below.
Will Smith: Twice nominated for academy award for best actor. Sir Richard Branson: Billionaire and founder of the company Virgin. Terry Bradshaw: Earned 4 Super Bowl rings for Super Bowls IX, X, XII, and XIII. Bruce Jenner: Winner of 1976 Olympic gold medal in the decathlon. Michael Phelps: Winner of 14 gold medals in 2004 Olympics in Athens and 8 gold medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
You
also probably know that they are all considered the best in their
respective fields. These famous people also have one more thing in
common. They have all been diagnosed with Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
If you have been reading our blog for a long time, you may remember that early education played an important factor in Michael Phelps’
life. Michael wouldn’t sit still, keep his hands to himself or be quiet
at circle times. His teacher said he wasn’t gifted, he just had “too
much energy.” His mother, a middle school principal, refused to
consider her son’s energy a curse. Eventually, that “too much energy”
turned out to be a gift.
As
preschool educators, we don’t always realize what a difference we make
in a child’s life until they are grown. It is just a part of working
with our youngest learners. How can we realize that every decision,
every response, can lead a child down another path?
One
way we can really make a difference in children’s lives is in how we
respond to their idiosyncrasies. I have taught more children than I can
count who might have been considered to have ADHD. Sometimes a parent
might bring a child to school the first day and say, “He’s hyper. He
can’t sit still.” But, I never let that kind of talk dissuade me from
trying to get the best out of a child. In my 12 years of teaching in
public pre-k, I never referred a student to the child study team
because of their behavior. I felt it was my job to educate every child
in my charge to the best of my ability, based on their needs.
Landon Donovan,
captain of the U.S. World Cup soccer team was one of those overactive
kids in preschool. Sports Illustrated reported it this way:
There was no way to see it coming. He was not raised in a soccer family. He did notgrow up in a soccer-driven community. "He was just a really hyper kid," his twin sister, Tristan, says. "He had a lot of energy—a lot of energy. He was a little bit aggressive withthe other students. ['I think I bit another kid's nose,' Landon says.] We had to leave a couple of preschools. And then we were at this great preschool, and a counselor suggested he play soccer. She said, 'There's a lot of running around in soccer.' "
Luckily
there are strong preschool educators like the one at Landon Donovan’s
third preschool, who believe that lots of energy can be a gift, in the
right context. On a soccer field, football field, business, or sound
stage, there is a place for over-activity. This tells me that
sometimes, it is not the child that is wrong for preschool; it is the
preschool that wasn’t right for the child. I wonder what might have
happened if Landon had continued to be put out of preschools. Would he
have given up on school completely?
One of my favorite
songs by Ani Difranco is one of her less popular works, Tamburitza Lingua. The final lyric goes
like this:
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and kerplooey you're done. you're done for. you're done for good. so tell me did you? did you do? did you do all you
could?
I want to dedicate
this song to Senator
Christopher Dodd, because he is going through that reflective process now. He
has decided not to run for a sixth term in Congress, but he wants to
make sure that he doesn’t leave unfinished business. In an effort to
reassert the importance of this type of child-centered policy making,
Dodd will hold four congressional hearings on “The State of the American
Child.”
Dodd has been a
champion for children for almost 20 years in congress. In 1983, as a
freshman senator he launched the Senate's Children Caucus. At the time,
leading a subcommittee devoted to a non-voting constituency was not
exactly a home run. But, despite the odds, the children’s caucus went on
to champion quality child care, early childhood education, and bring
about the law that supports worker’s unpaid time off to care for
newborns and sick family members. The Family and Medical Leave Act of
1993 made the United States a little more caring place to live.
In a climate where
most congressional hearings are held to figure out what went wrong, Dodd
is attempting to help America figure out what we can do right, for
children. The first hearing took place on Tuesday, June 8th, and the final will be held before the end of the senator’s term in January,
2011. The goal of the hearings is to consider the issues families and
children face in modern society so that congress can address these
issues proactively.
Dodd said recently of his legacy of work for
children:
"That's where I've
enjoyed my work the most — working on the children's issues, child care,
family leave ... after-school [programs], Head Start. Those issues have
given me the greatest sense of satisfaction from a public policy
standpoint."
I’d
have to say, he might tell Ani, “Yes, I did all I could.”
The other day I found a
funny article on the lively and funny group blog Parent Dish. In this particular
entry, Lenore Skenazy details how she found a gourmet mud pie baking set
for the reasonable price of $40. It features a hand-crank mud mixer
and a working sink. Manipulating mud -- it turns out -- is not as simple
as it used to be.
“What
made you think you could possibly make mud pies on your own?” Skenazy
says sarcastically. “Are you a baby Martha Stewart of something?”
Skenazy goes on to
describe how, in the past, a child could play with a stick and turn it
into almost anything they needed. Now, you can go to a store and
purchase a separate toy for every use a child could have come up with
for a stick -- swords, wands, light sabers, etc.
“We live in a
wonderful era when adults can give their kids almost everything
imaginable, so the kids don’t have to imagine anything,” Skenazy points
out.
Now imagine if you
dropped your child off for pre-k in a five acre forest. There are no
computers, no “educational toys,” no desks, and no letter match BINGO
games. Instead there are buckets, rakes, and shovels, nature trails, and
a fern-covered hut.
At Cedarsong Nature School there are only
three buildings: one storage, one library, and one composting potty. At
snack time children snack on “forest candy”, edible buds they collect
from trees. They play music, climb trees, and run.
Erin Kenny, founder of
the outdoor pre-k program, was a lawyer before she read Richard Louv's
book "Last Child in the Woods." Now she spends
every day playing in the woods and helping children learn “basic
environmental science” in the natural environment. There is a counter movement to the
assessment-heavy academic preschool underway in America that is offering
just that -- an open-ended, play-based learning. What kind of education
would your child get in a school like this?
Are there certain toys
or gadgets a child must have to enhance learning or can they get just
as much from the great outdoors?
Analysis and reasoning
may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a pre-k
classroom, but they’re actually crucial teaching components largely
missing from early childhood curricula in our country.
The Classroom Assessment Scoring
System
(CLASS) is an observation tool developed at the University of Virginia
by Bob Pianta. In the 2007 Improving Head
Start for School Readiness Act, the instrument was suggested as a valid and
reliable research based tool for evaluating Head Start teacher’s
overall classroom quality and interactions with their students.
Nationally, pre-k teachers typically score low in the dimension of Concept
Development., which focuses on teaching children to use analysis and
reasoning along with how they can connect the classroom activities to
their everyday lives. Traditional teacher-directed pre-k classrooms have
focused more on cognitive development related to the knowledge and
comprehension levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Yet an increasing
body of research that
supports
the importance of early language
development
shows a need to emphasize Concept Development. The CLASS is one way to
consider these types of interactions and rate them on a scale.
When pre-k teachers do
apply analysis and reasoning, it’s typically problem-solving in the
classroom. When two kids want the same toy, you have a problem. Solving
scenarios like this student-to-student develops the critical thinking
skills of all involved and teaches manners, deferred gratification and
coping mechanisms. Another way to accomplish this feat would be for
teachers to cater their academic curriculum to what is happening with
their student’s home. Picking themes common to a pre-k student’s
experience will enable all to participate while offering the opportunity
for each child to speak from their own unique experiences.
I would love to hear
what you do with your students to practice analyzing and encourage
reasoning in the classroom. Also, how do you connect school learning to
home experiences and vice versa?
Kids love to be LOUD! One
universal truth about the pre-k classroom is that no matter how loud a
teacher can tolerate sound, children can get louder. During this time of
year, pre-k kids tend to pump the volume even more, whether it’s in
class or at home. Maybe it is the new blooms or the nice weather, but
for some reason, in locales across the country, students seem to forget
the “inside” rules. And these rules, for example using your “inside
voice” or your inside feet, seem to disappear entirely when you pull out
instruments.
And,
that is my point. No one − teachers or students − can be heard in a
class full of children with instruments you shake, bang, and clang.
Maybe we should throw those instruments out the window and let them bang
on pots, pans, buckets, and trash cans outside. Recently, a blog titled
“Let the Children
Play,”
by a pre-k teacher in rural Australia caught my attention. In her
recent post, Jenny highlighted several
outdoor music projects created in pre-k classrooms. I especially enjoyed
the pictures of the music tree from the Filth Wizardry blog and the sound garden from Teacher Tom’s blog. Teacher Tom
offers a great example of play-based learning through his regular posts.
His reflection on his practice is really enlightening to read.
So teachers, spend
your well-deserved summer vacation thinking this: When is it okay for
kids to get loud? How can I raise the volume in their learning? What
might happen if the opportunity to get loud became incorporated with a
garden, a science project, or an outdoor gross motor play space? Please
let us know what you are doing in your classrooms. We would love to hear
from you.
Pre-K Now is a public
education and advocacy organization that advances high-quality, voluntary
pre-kindergarten for all three and four year olds.
Visit Pre-K Now >
