Impromtu Activity that Worked: Menus for Daddy

In addition to our theme activities, I've also tried to encourage more writing and literacy, both through modeling, creating a literacy rich environment, and promoting organic writing experiences.

In addition to labeling all of our bins containing toys, and signing his name to Valentines, this past week, when singing "pasta starts with p, pasta starts with p, puh puh puh puh puh puh puh, pasta starts with p" during dinner. It dawned on me that we could be writing too. And since my husband has a long commute and doesn't get home until the kids' bedtime, RJ was excited to write him a menu so he knew what to reheat for dinner.

Pictured is our second menu for Daddy. I plan on keeping this in our routine as long as RJ is engaged with it, because it's great writing/phonics practice and it actually keeps him eating bites between letters (since we actually write at the dinner table). While doing this we also sing the "___ starts with __" song for each food, which keeps the baby happy (and learning words for his food) too.

Theoretical Thursday: My Philosophy Statement

I've meant to write this for a while and as I am back on the job market, I wanted to have a comprehensive written document that describes my personal philosophy of Early Childhood Education. So here it is:

When I look at young children I see inordinate amounts of potential. I enjoy watching children think and believe that they are capable of forming complex ideas, testing out those ideas, and reflecting on them. It is our responsibility as educators and parents to nurture children’s learning in all domains; or “teaching to the whole child” using the current vernacular for Developmentally Appropriate Practice. As a contemporary educator, using developmentally appropriate practices promoted by the NAEYC such as hands-on, meaningful activities, play-based learning, positive guidance, providing routines that give children the opportunity to make choices, recognizing individual differences, promoting each child’s diverse background, and basing early educational experiences within a model of relationship-based care should be second nature, as they are commonalities between most of the existing approaches and frameworks for Early Childhood Education. 

Early Childhood Education has several goals that can be summarized simply; to promote optimal development of the whole child, cognitively, socially, and physically, and to instill a love for learning that will serve the child through the elementary years and beyond. These early experiences are important.
While there are many approaches to choose from, an eclectic approach focusing on the creation of thematic units has the most promise for exceeding the goals of Early Childhood Education by not only promoting optimal general development and instilling a love for learning, but also growing the knowledge base of children so that they can have even greater knowledge gains later on and recognize that multiple domains and skills are important for learning concepts, regardless of the theme. A multitude of evidence from research on cognitive development indicates that children (and adults) learn more about a particular topic when they have more existing knowledge to build on (Siegler, 2004). Carver (2001) believes that there are five meta-principles from cognitive psychology which influence learning such content knowledge; building on prior knowledge, making thinking explicit, emphasizing links, providing practice opportunities, and expecting individual variability. These meta-principles reflect principles from sociocultural, constructivist, and multiple intelligences theory. When teachers use thematic units, constructivist practices embedded within, such as providing authentic materials to promote active engagement, allow for individual variability, allow children to build on their own prior knowledge, as well as providing practice opportunities. Furthermore, when children are working in such hands-on ways, the teachers have created opportunities to facilitate children’s questioning, testing, exploring, and reflecting. Teachers can scaffold children toward making connections to prior experiences, set up the environment to pique curiosity, and engage children in active reflection about the experience, thus making thinking explicit. While teachers are ultimately responsible for planning a balance of child-initiated authentic experiences and teacher-directed activities, it is important for the themes themselves to stem from the children’s interests (even if a teacher piques that interest) and inquiries in the classroom. When they do, the children are engaged in their learning and also feel like they are empowered in making contributions (based on their existing knowledge) as well as having some control over what they are learning. I consider thematic units to be semi-emergent since the children’s interest drives the themes, but teachers guide the progression of the theme along with the children. I believe that children must feel connected to the theme and want to learn about it, but that teachers should play a role in gently guiding their exploration toward a logical progression of concepts that build on each other.

I like using thematic units because they create an excellent framework for engaging children in multidisciplinary activities that allow for collaborative, extended, projects from day to day that not only engage learning in a number of different ways, but also contribute to an organized body of knowledge.

Thematic units are rooted in the Project Approach, where children’s experiences progress through a structured system where, over time, they assess what they know and plan their project, and lastly, determine how to share what they learned. Teachers utilizing thematic units also use ample concept webbing, and might use the know-want-how-what charting to determine the course of the theme, adding their own elements to round out the theme as well. Using themes leads to children building a knowledge base as well as asking more questions, thus furthering the theme investigation. In this way, children truly develop a love of learning from an engaging thematic unit. When teaching using thematic units, teachers can also use the plan-do-review method popularized by the High/Scope method to promote the children’s autonomy and purposefulness in choosing, implementing, and reflecting on the activities, thus making their thinking explicit.
When themes are based on children’s world, they also lend themselves perfectly to open discourse about all children’s experiences, mediating a sense of openness and acceptance for all children and their families, who are often engaged and involved with the interesting themes.

In sum, I believe that thematic units create the perfect framework for children to learn important skills within a play-based model while increasing their knowledge of the world around them, and develop curiosity and love for learning.

Dino Day with the Co-op

**Old Post that I thought I published, but didn't**

Today was my day for co-op (my kids and two others - age 2.5 and 3), which I always enjoy because it's more fun to do some activities with a group of kids. For example, the kids played paleontologist in the sand/water table, digging for the previously made fossils and bones that I cleaned and bleached from a recent chicken and our Thanksgiving turkey. I think this was more fun for the group because they could talk about what they were finding and the pretend play was richer.

To set up the dig site, I dragged our sand/water table from the back yard to our kitchen. I did this to facilitate my adding (and later retrieving) the bones easier and because it was a little cold for outdoor water play. Each child got a shovel and a paintbrush to excavate for the dinosaur bones. I was careful not to include any bones that had sharp edges or that were too small (my 10 month old was playing in the sand table too). The bones themselves were cleaned off after I made chicken broth and turkey broth from the previously roasted carcasses. After rinsing and rubbing all the meat remnants off, I put the bones in a bowl full of bleach for 30 minutes or so and then rinsed before laying them out to dry on rags. I normally don't like using bleach as a disinfectant because I favor natural disinfectants made from thymol, but since these were real animal bones, I wanted to make sure that they were relatively free from bacteria before introducing them into the children's environment.

We talked about how fossilized bones and fossils themselves are very fragile, so paleontologists us special tools that move dust and dirt away from the findings, but are gentle to the piece itself, like paint brushes. The children really enjoyed this activity and went around calling themselves paleontologists discovering dinosaurs.

We also baked and decorated Gingerbread stegosauruses and t-rexes, made pteranodon hats from newspaper (Ross, 1997), and played with the dinosaurs, amongst other toys. It was a very successful co-op day. Admitedly, these activities (with the exception of the dig) are not heavy on the content, but as today was (I believe) a relatively new foray into dinosaur knowledge for the other kids, I think it sparked the interest and gave them a few basics to start with.

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.

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!

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.

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.