Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Dino art and fossils


Today, we made some dino art, which was guided, yet flexible. My son has tended to shy away from completely open-ended projects and so, I try to get him interested by giving him a starting point. This time, I drew an outline of a T-Rex and wrote T-REX on the paper. RJ recognized all the letters (even the X, which he sometimes mistakes for K) and painted his T-Rex. What I found most exciting was that he really engaged in the activity, starting with painting the dinosaur's bones, then adding "skin" and an eye. I have observed that he tended to shy away from creating things. He has typically wanted an adult to draw something for him. I found this frustrating, because I have always focused on the process, rather than the product, and continually encouraged his creative work. However, his cognition has always been ahead of his motor development, so it's possible that he was frustrated by his inability to create the images that he wanted to. It appears that for him, having the realistic outline today was enough to get him engaged in the activity without sacrificing the open ended creation too much. He even painted a second dinosaur (brachiosaurus), without an outline and I was impressed that it actually resembled brachiosaurus with its long neck. Perhaps, his fine motor development has allowed him the control to feel like he's making what he wants to, which made the process more enjoyable for him.

We also talked about fossils today as we used the dinosaurs to make prints in clay. RJ loved this activity and when we were done with the self-hardening stone clay, he asked to bring out his play-doh to continue. Tomorrow, his fossils will be hardened and on Thursday, when his co-op buddies come over, we will excavate them from the sandbox with paintbrushes like paleontologists.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

A note on Sesame Street...

This morning while I was nursing the baby, my dear three-year-old figured out how to turn on the TV in the other room. This is problematic because a.) he has not figured out the TiVO yet and who knows what might be on the TV when he turns it on (although that TV is set to record mostly PBS kids shows, it would probably still be on that channel and appropriate for viewing) and b.) he's a couch potato wanna-be (we limit his viewing, but it's never enough for him), but this morning, it sort of worked out because there was a clip on Sesame Street about Dinosaurs.  Here are the points the clip in Elmo's World made as a little girl narrated a trip to the American Museum of Natural History:


  • Dinosaurs are not alive anymore
  • We can learn about them at museums like the American Museum of Natural History.
  • Paleontologists dig up the fossils and bones and put together skeletons to see how big dinosaurs are
  • Barosaurus has the longest neck in North America
  • Triceratops has three big horns and a big collar
  • Dinosaur eggs are small, even though dinosaurs get really big
  • Tyrannosaurus rex has tiny arms and big legs and sharp teeth to eat meat with
  • Stegosaurus has plates on its back
  • Apatosaurus is humongeous and made of 350 dinosaur bones


Then, Elmo spoke with a dinosaur muppet, who told him the following info:

  • Dinosaurs lived 150 million years ago 
  • During that time the dinosaurs saw asteroids, watched the sun rise and set, comets, trees with leaves, lakes, and both small and big dinosaurs
  • Elmo asked this Dinosaur muppet if he had birds in his neighborhood (you know, like Sesame Street has Big Bird) to which the Dinosaur replied that they had a pterasaur that flew in the sky (not a bird).  Then they did the ridiculous part where Dorothy (Elmo's fish) imagines Elmo morphed into a fuzzy red pterosaur while the dinosaur continues to tell Elmo that Dinosaurs lived alongside frogs, turtles, mice, and crocodiles.
  • He went on to tell Elmo that some dinosaurs ate leaves all day long while others ate meat, including other dinosaurs.  


This is all appropriate information, however, it was rattled off so quickly that I wonder how much of it really sank in. If I need to rewind twice just to type notes (not type verbatim) and I'm a decent typist, it's too fast for a 3 year old (Sesame Street's targeted age). While the quick pacing of Sesame Street's clips has been studied (Anderson, Levin & Pugzles Lorch, 1977), it is not implicated as a factor contributing to hyperactivity and/or poor attention spans in preschoolers in the short term. However, in 2004, Christakis found that each hour of television watched (on average) between the ages of one and three years old increased the probability (by 10%) of a reported attention problem by age 7. Sesame Street has actually slowed down and went from the non-sequitur educational clip show that it was when I was growing up to its more narrative format now. This change was to shift the target age down from 4 to 3, since younger kids were now watching tv. But even "slowed down" in Elmos's World (which was CREATED for toddlers), this seemed really fast. While Sesame Street has documented school readiness outcomes (largely the three R's, e.g., Wright et al., 2001), I think they fall short on creating organized thematic knowledge in science. It is perhaps a first exposure to an area, but not interactive nor well-organized in terms of its presentation. It is entirely passive. Watching this really made me miss Mister Rogers. His show left time for children's responses and he presented the theme of the day in an organized fashion, where knowledge was built up slowly for the children to digest.

The plus side, is that my son now wants to go to a Natural History Museum to learn more!

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Saturday Observations and Thoughts

While playing with my son, we touched on a few concepts, but I largely followed his lead and noticed som interesting trends.
Here's what happened:  T-rex and the T-rex baby (who is just popping out of its shell) kept chasing brachiosaurus and triceratops (both of whom I was responsible for) away from the trees and watering hole.  The T-rexes caught them and ate them no matter how well they hid. Then, they got covered in mud (a blanket) and turned to skeletons.  Then my son insisted that even though they were dead, they needed to play again.  Repeat ad nauseum.

What is interesting to me is that despite his t-rexes eating the herbivores, my son actually stated, while my herbivores were running away, that he wanted them all to be nice to each other. However, my dinos still died in an attack directly following that statement.  I was happy that he was playing fairly realistically despite his spoken desire for them getting along, but a piece of me was sad that he didn't break from dinosaur theory to make them play nice.

This brings up a constant struggle that I have about violence exposure.  I have VERY little tolerance for violence, and I have banned all weapons in our house.  I realized when talking about carnivores that nature is not a very kind place and that by learning about predators and prey that I was actually opening up a whole new world of potentially violent play. I do think that learning about what happens in nature (or in this case, what scientists believe dinosaur behavior to be like) is important, but we're cautiously approaching HOW to play out these scenarios appropriately so that no people get hurt.

I welcome comments about what you might have done with children to keep them playing realistically, yet kindly with others.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

And we're back...for now...with Dinosaurs

My son recently used a gift certificate from his birthday to buy a set of dinosaurs and we were delighted that his selection actually printed the names of the dinosaurs on their bottoms.  This led to me starting a very loose theme on dinosaurs.  With my younger son becoming mobile and very curious about everything, AND refusing to take a morning nap in his crib, it has been increasingly difficult to actually conduct any messy or involved projects with my preschooler without interruption.  (Don't get me started on the great finger painting incident which required a whole wardrobe change and a blue/green Technicolor mouth).  Even reading a whole book is difficult, which is frustrating for both of us.  I know this phase will pass soon, when mobility is less of a novelty, and when the little one is ready for a little more than eating art mediums and chewing on the Brachiosaurus' tail.  In the meantime, we try to play with the dinosaurs a lot (while my 10 month old is "pretending" to be a carnivore "eating" the herbivores) while I embed facts about them.  We also read books when we can (even if by the page as we did with "An Alphabet of Dinosaurs"), and try to utilize some weekend time to have one-on-one big kid projects.  Also, we have started allowing a little TV time on a regular basis, so PBS's "Dinosaur Train" is appropriate and fits the theme.  Although now I have to explain that Dinosaurs do not really travel by train, nor do Tyrannosaurus Rex babies EVER end up in a Pteranodon nest and make friends with them.

The assessment materials for this theme are available here.  I do hope that someday I will get some long stretches of uninterrupted time to transcribe and code all the assessments, but at least for now, I have them recorded.