Listen to me!

Too often adults get frustrated when they ask a child ‘Can you put away your toys please?’ and the child answers ‘No’. Then the child gets frustrated when they get in trouble for not listening. They did listen and they answered the question, you just didn’t like the answer.

Adults seemed to forget the difference between a question/request and an order/command. If the child doesn’t have a choice then don’t offer them one.

Using the above example, it would be much better to say ‘Jimmy, it’s time to put your toys away now, thank you.’ Notice how it is directed at the child (using their name), firm and to the point yet still polite. Make sure to use thank you instead of please at the end. Please infers a request, while thank you gives praise for an action that is going to be done.

If you’re still having trouble with the child, try giving extra praise right after the order. For example ‘Sara, it’s time to go to bed now thank you. You’ve been such a good listener today I’m so proud of you. I think you deserve a special story tonight!’ The more praise you give them before they follow out the order the more pressure they feel to complete that order to deserve the praise they have been given.

Which bits are the important ones?

Today, I was thinking more about why we are so afraid of making mistakes or being seen doing the wrong thing? Society today puts far too much importance on being right, on not making mistakes. A mistake can cost you a job. A mistake can lead to disgrace or humility. A mistake can imply you are stupid!

But in reality how does one be an innovator or learn by ones self without making mistakes? Far too often I have children come up to me in class and ask me to do something for them. Can you draw me a picture of a cat? Can you build me a tower out of blocks? This scares the shit out of me! Why? Because our teaching is killing their creativity! They have already learnt that mistakes are bad and that things that look different are bad within our society. They want their picture of a cat to look like what society tells them it should look like. They’ve already decided what they aren’t. They’ve already decided what they can’t do. Or is it us as teachers and us as a society who has decided that for them?

This is exactly the opposite of what we as teachers should be striving for. I want my kids (the ones in my class) to have the whole world open in front of them. For them to have the confidence to do want ever they want to. To be true to their dreams and believe that they can accomplish anything.

Happily it seems I’m not the only one that believes this. Below is an amazing talk I stumbled across while surfing today that covers exactly how I have been feeling. It’s about 18 minutes long and well worth a watch for all parents, educators and students.

Pick me! Pick me!

If you only praise students that answer correctly then no one learns anything. Why? Simple the students that can answer already know the answer, and the kids that can’t don’t want to answer because there is no motivation for them to. If they aren’t answering then you can bet your ass that they probably aren’t listening either. On the other hand, if someone answers and gets it wrong, then they naturally want to know what the right answer is, and so will others. You learn more from a wrong answer than you do from a right one. So instead, encourage participation over knowledge. Praise everyone that raises their hand or even shouts out! Count yourself lucky, if you have a classroom full of students so eager to participate that they can’t even wait to put up their hands.

So, how do you get them participating? I like to play games and award points for answering whether right or wrong. Make sure to make teams and have a rule that states each member must answer before another team mate can answer again. This will cause students to encourage each other to participate. Remember give verbal praise and points for all answers, if it happens to be wrong encourage other students to help come up with the answer and explain it. Once you’ve played a couple of times, students will just get use to participating, trying to answering questions and helping others who answer incorrectly. Your classroom will transform from a teacher lead Q&A session with only a few students joining in to a classroom full of students participating and discussing ideas and reasoning behind those ideas with each other.

If your students feel comfortable and safe enough to answer a question even if they are most likely going to get the answer wrong, then you my friend are in the top 10% of teachers. Once you have them participating, you’ve got them listening and thinking. With participation knowledge will follow, it’s inevitable! It really is that simple.

Airdmhor Montessori Front Door

Teacher’s College has started up again, so I’m back in to Uni on Wednesdays. We had our first day last week and were told we would be going on teaching practice (TP) this week. Not much notice for me to tell my pre-school that I would be away for the next two weeks on TP.

For those of you not in the know. I am in my final year of a Graduate Diploma in Early Childhood Education. I’m studying at Canterbury University in their College of Education via their Centre Based route. This allows me to work four days a week at a pre-school and come in to Uni one day a week to study. You are actually only required to do 16 hours of work a week, but I have bills to pay so I do the full 32 hours plus whatever shifts I’m needed at the liquor store.

Anywho, twice a year I am required to go on TP at another centre. This is a great opportunity to observe and learn how other centres work and stimulate learning among their children. In other words a great time to steal others ideas to use in your own centre. The problem with this is you don’t get paid while on TP. So that leaves me out of pocket for two weeks now and three weeks at the end of the year.

Airdmhor Montessori Outside

So, I have been on TP for the last week at the Airmhor Montessori. This is the first time I have worked at a Montessori school and I am really enjoying it. This particular Montessori has moved with the times and adapted there policies to be more up to date with todays early childhood teaching strategies. This has made them less strict with the children allowing more self exploration learning through free play while still providing wonderful structured learning activities. Resulting in some truly magnificent children who respect their environment and others within it, are academically ahead of their peers. All the while having a fun time and enjoying their childhood.

Working in Kindergartens in Taiwan I was amazed at how much the children were academically learning, but also upset with the lack of social interaction that was taking place. Most kids enjoyed the classes while there attention could be held, but often got over tired or upset with not being able to focus more on what they personally enjoyed. Resulting in incredibly academically smart children who were happy at the beginning of the session but turned into robots with in an hour or so, only to spark back into life when a particular subject they were truly interested in would be discussed. This allowed the kids to learn great amounts of knowledge through rote learning, but quite often the children found it hard to adapt that knowledge to solve real life problems.

Airdmhor Montessori Classroom

After returning to New Zealand and working in pre-schools here I found the tables had been completely switched. Children were encouraged to learn through free play while the teachers were almost completely taken out of the picture and only used as observers and guidance. These kids have a fun time, but seem to be quite often under stimulated. They are still learning basic academic skills through play like maths through blocks and pattern matching games etc. But teachers seem almost scared to help push them to the next level. Afraid to use real academic strategies in fear that it won’t be fun for the children. I have noticed this almost unlimited freedom seems to result in a lot of behavioral problems with in the classrooms.

I could see the benefits of both cultures education systems, but believe neither were offering a balanced one. That is why my goal is to open my own centre and work towards offering children a balance learning opportunity. Thanks to Airdmhor Montessori my minds picture of how that center will operate is much clearer now.

Magic Coin

This morning when I come to work my co-worker tells me that one of the kids just about choked last night after I went home. “Really” I said “What happened?”. “That’s the strange thing, for some reason he was trying to eat some money. He’s old enough to know not to do that.” she said. Oh crap!

Things like this happen I guess, you’ve just got to learn from them. I learnt not to demonstrate to children how to eat small wind pipe blocking objects. So today I am on my best behaviour. I really don’t want a dead kid on my conscious.

While I was looking for a group of children that were showing an interest in language and literacy to observe, I noticed that on a whole the girls in the class seemed to be much more interested in the topic than the boys. Most girls were trying to write their names on art work by themselves while the boys would just take it to a teacher to name. Both the sexes were interested in stories that were read by the teacher but girls spent more time looking through story books by themselves. The boys did however enjoy looking through are space book but spent their time talking about the rockets rather than trying to put a story to the pictures. It is not surprising that in the end I observed three girls. From the three observations I took, I noticed that the older two girls were more interested in individual letters, how they compared with other letters and what sound they symbolised. While discussions with the youngest child G’s step-mother revealed she was more interested in small picture/symbols like stars and bows. The older children also took great pride in their writing, showing it to parents when they were picked up in the evening. The eldest C was also able to extend her interest without the help of a teacher by using the Letter Land program on the class computer.

Kei te whakaae/ Recognising

The first thing I noticed before starting my observations was that girls seemed to be more interested in language and literacy than boys. According to Dr Sax, boy’s and girl’s brains develop differently, “In girls, the language areas of the brain develop before the areas used for spatial relations and for geometry. In boys, it’s the other way around.” (http://www.whygendermatters.com/) This was clearly seen while I was looking for a group of children to observe as almost all girls were focused around activities that had connections to language and literacy.

Observation 1 saw three girls decorating giant W’s. Although an interest in language and literacy had brought the girls to this activity one of the main skill development that was taking place was for fine motor skills, as the girls manipulated Popsicle sticks and foam animal cut outs. They girls also had to communicate and work together deciding what they were going to decorate the W’s with. Throughout the activity a teacher was also with the girls at all times. She demonstrated the sound the letter W makes a number of times but repeating “W w wa wa wa”. She then asked the girls about what words start with the letter W. This helped the girls to recognise that the picture they were working on actually represented a sound in their language and that words are made up of sounds and therefore letters. C and J seemed to already have a good grasp of this concept providing words straight away while G required a little more help from the teacher to get her correctly answering the question. The teacher showed good scaffolding techniques but not just providing an answer for G, but by providing encouragement and hints that were within her proximnal zone of development.

In observation 2 C is by herself at the computer. Without assistance from the teachers she finds the letter W in the Letter Land program. This shows that she was able to recall what she had learnt early that day during observation 1 and was able to actively seek out new information that was of interest to her without the aid of a teacher. This is a wonderful skill allowing her to take more responsibility of her own learning. She listened to the W song five times until she was confidently singing along with the computer. C must have had a great feeling of empowerment after setting herself the goal of learning the W song and achieving it. As suggested in Kei tua o te Pae “The principle of empowerment emphasises children’s rights and their need to pursue their own goals and interests as a base for developing working theories.” (2004, book 6, p. 5).

During observation 3, we find C and J playing together with peg boards. Once again the girls developing their fine motor and spacial awareness skills by placing the pegs into the board. C starts creating a W on a peg board while J watches. The two girls talk about the picture as it takes form, discussing how it looks like a V when it’s half complete. The girls are starting to recognise patterns within the alphabet which will later help them with their reading and writing. After C has completed the letter W she shows J who thinks it is a letter M since she is viewing it upside down. Showing some great problem solving skills C realises why J thinks it is an M and turns the peg board around for her to view it the apporpriate way. Both girls find this quite funny and laugh together having found another pattern within the alphabet. This is a great example of how these girls are strengthening their grasp of the alphabet in a fun and playful manner. Barbara Wasik believes that learning the alphabet through play is develpmentally appropriate for children in early childhood education “For children who do have numerous literacy experiences, alphabet activities reinforce letter learning in playful, developmentally appropriate ways.” (Wasik, 2001, p. 36) as stated in her article Teaching the Alphabet to Young Children.

While discussing C interest with her mother I found that C, who I would consider as being the most confident in both writing and reading the alphabet, is encouraged at home to practice the alphabet using writing sheets and reading books from ABC. This provides backing to the importance of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological-contexual model as stated in Kei tua o te Pae. Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological-contextual model is founded on the idea that all the social worlds of children and their families are intimately connected in a number of ways. Learning is enhanced when there are connections and relationships between early childhood settings away from home and other places and spaces in the children’s lives. (Book 2, 2004, p.4) Cs mother also mentioned that she enjoyed reading (retelling in her own words) books at home. This will be helping C to develop her mastery of words and improving her vocabulary.

My co-teacher told me that C and J are both signing all their own art work in class. G, being younger than both C and J spends more time practicing to draw stars, hearts and other symbols but has started to take an interest in letters especially letters contained within her name. This is probably due to scaffolding that is taking place within her relationship with the older girls.

Kei te anga/Responding

To help encourage G’s interest in writing I set up an activity in the sandpit outside. I emptied the sandpit of all toys and replaced them with flax. I called the girls over and asked if anyone could use the flax to write their name into the sand. C was the first to try and she did an excellent job of writing her name. J tried next and did an equally impressive job as C. When it was G’s turn she managed the first letter of her name, but had some trouble remembering the order of the other letters. I wrote her name coreectly in the sand and asked C and J to help her copy it a number of times. With the help of her friends G managed to write out her full name in the sand. She was so proud of herself that she asked me to take a photo of it so that she could show her parents. This experience links to Te Whariki’s principle Relationships by G’s development being influenced by the relationship she has with teachers and friends.

The next experience I set up was a story telling corner where I placed one chair, a bunch of pillows and a pile of picture books the children had not seen before. I asked the children to take turns being the teacher and to tell a story to the other children. I got this idea from the conversation I had with C’s mother about C retelling stories in her own words. The creative stories that the children made up while looking at the pictures of the new books was increadible. I was very surprised to see a number of boys take great interest in the experience by telling stories of space travel and pirates. I believe this helped spark and interest in words and their ability to portray thoughts and ideas amongst each other. This experience links to Te Whariki’s principle Empowerment allowing the children to become empowered by their confidence to talk and share ideas with their classmates.

Kei te hurihuri/Revisiting

The experiences I provided the children gave them more confidence in expressing themselves both verbally and in written form. G is constantly looking for new ways and materials to write her name, even using cotton balls to create letters. The children seemed to respond very positively to the story telling corner, so I will continue to offer it. I also plan on allowing the children to dramatically act out the stories for their classmates.

Observation 1

Date: 9:05 am 10/06/08

Children: C, J, G
Sex of children: Female
Age of children: 3.9 to 4.6 years
Place setting: ABC all day care. In this class room, there are 13 3.6 to 5 year old children and two teachers.
Area of Development: Language and Literacy
Area setting: All 13 children are inside having just come into the classroom from the Toddlers room at 9:00 am.

This morning my co-teacher set out three giant W’s, made from A3 sheets of paper, on the art table. Three girls quickly came over to the table and asked the teacher what they were for? “We are learning Ww in Letter Land this week and I wanted to decorate these W’s to put on the wall.” replied the teacher. “Can we help you?” asked C. “Of Course! Why don’t you girls grab some stuff from the collage shelf and I’ll get some glue.” the teacher replied. Once both parties had returned the girls quickly started gluing coloured Popsicle sticks and foam animal cut outs to the W’s, while the teacher repeated “W w wa wa wa” a number of times. The teacher then asked if the girls knew any words that started with W. “Walter Walrus” said C. “Great! Any others?” the teacher said. “Um… watermelon?” asks J. “Yes, that’s right!” “How about a colour?” says the teacher. “Red!” says G. “No, that starts with R r ra ra ra, remember we want W w wa wa wa” says the teacher. “Oh um…. white?” says G nervously. “Excellent!” says the teacher “You girls are very smart.”

Observation 2

Date: 10:45 am 10/06/08

Child: C
Sex of child: Female
Age of child: 4.6 years
Place setting: ABC all day care.  In this class room, there are 18 3.6 to 5 year old children and two teachers.
Area of Development: Language and Literacy
Area setting: 11 children are outside and 7 inside; 2 children on the computers and the 5 children at the art table.

C is playing on the computer. She starts up Letter Land and goes straight to Ww. C loves to sing songs and will quite often be seen singing while playing outside in the playground. So, it is no surprise when I see her play the W song in Letter Land 5 times in a row until she is confidently singing along with the computer. She potters around on the computer for an other minute or so before going outside to play on the jungle gym.

Observation 3

Date: 3:25 pm 10/06/08

Children: C, J
Sex of children: Female
Age of children: 4.2 to 4.6 years
Place setting: ABC all day care.  In this class room, there are 12 3.6 to 5 year old children and two teachers.
Area of Development: Language and Literacy
Area setting: 8 children are outside and 4 inside; 2 playing in  the family corner and 2 playing on the mat.

It is free play time, C and J are sitting on the mat playing with the peg boards. They start by making rainbows, comparing and complimenting each others efforts. After they have finished, C says she is going to make Walter Walrus. What she actually makes is a W. She starts and says “Hey look! It looks like a V”. J says “Yeah”. Once C has finished she shows J who is sitting facing her on the mat. J says it looks like an M. C turns the board around and they both laugh.

Discussion with Co-teacher

I discussed the three girls and their interest in language and literacy with my co-teacher. She mentioned that C and J are both signing all their own art work in class while G has only just started to sign her initials. She also mentioned that all three girls really enjoy singing, books and board stories. Especially C who will often pretend to be a teacher and read (retell in her own words) books to other kids.

I also talked with C’s mother and G’s step-mother after class about their daughters interest in Language and Literacy. C’s mother said that C’s favourite things to do at home right now are looking at books and practicing the writing sheets she brings home from ABC. G’s step-mother said that G wasn’t to interested in writing letters at home but has been practicing stars, bows and other little symbols.