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Touring Children’s Museum with PlaySpace Creator

Posted in Developmentally appropriate practice, Early Learning Challenge on March 19, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Jeri Robinson (Photo: Lok Wah Li, Boston Children's Museum)

The Boston Children’s Museum on Fort Point Channel is teeming with children and parents during school vacation week. So it’s a good time for Jeri Robinson, vice president for education and family learning, to lead me on a guided tour of some of the museum’s early learning spaces. On the way, we pass children scrambling up and down the multi-story climbing maze. We pass children and parents sitting on colorful “musical” chairs that each emit a different sound and together can create a symphony. We pass children checking out the blocks and Bobcat in the Construction Zone, all in what is essentially a giant indoor playground for children of all ages. Prompts on the walls and parent tip sheets provide ideas for adults to engage children.

“Our critical message is there’s a lot of learning in play,” Robinson says. “In everything we do, we have a hidden or overt learning activity. Play has gotten a bad rap that it’s a waste of time. It’s not.”

In fact, research tells us that play is how young children learn. Science tells us that the kind of language-rich, playful adult-child interactions that the museum encourages enhance the actual wiring of the young brain.

In 1978, when the museum was housed in a Jamaica Plain mansion, Robinson established the nation’s first play space for infants and toddlers in a children’s museum. In 1998, she co-founded Countdown to Kindergarten, a partnership with the Boston Public Schools. Originally conceived to help parents navigate the logistics of entering the public school system, today it focuses on the early learning that will help children enter kindergarten ready to succeed. (more…)

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In Quotes

Posted in Developmentally appropriate practice, Quotes on March 16, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

“As digital technology has expanded in scope beyond linear, non-interactive media to include interactive options, it is evident that each unique screen demands its own criteria for best usage. The challenge for early childhood educators is to make informed choices that maximize learning opportunities for children while managing screen time and mediating the potential for misuse and overuse of screen media, even as these devices offer new interfaces that increase their appeal and use to young children.”

National Association for the Education of Young Children and Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media, Position Statement, January 2012

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Guidance Offered on Technology in Early Education

Posted in Developmentally appropriate practice on March 12, 2012 | 1 Comment »

Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

Over the course of the next several days, I’ll be writing about technology and young children. First up is a look at the newly released position statement – “Technology and Interactive Media as Tools in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8” – from the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College.

The statement takes a balanced approach that focuses on the uses of technology rather than technology in and of itself. “With guidance, these various technology tools can be harnessed for learning and development; without guidance, usage can be inappropriate and/or interfere with learning and development,” the statement says. “The impact of technology is mediated by teachers’ use of the same developmentally appropriate principles and practices that guide the use of print materials and all other learning tools and content for young children.”

Among the conclusions of NAEYC and the Rogers Center are these: (more…)

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Use Talk to Help Children Learn through Play

Posted in Developmentally appropriate practice, Language development, Play on March 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Doreen Anzalone in her pre-k classroom (Photo: Michele McDonald for Strategies for Children)

A recent column from Education Week — “5 Tips for Talking to Children at Play” – has me thinking about a story that Doreen Anzalone, the early educator who stars in our “Back to School” YouTube production, told me.

She and the children in her pre-kindergarten class were playing with a pile of snow at the water table when one child asked what would happen to the snow. Instead of saying, “It will melt,” as she would have before she studied early childhood, Anzalone asked the children for their predictions. They returned a few hours later to check their hypotheses and saw that the snow had melted. In the process, they learned an important science concept and practiced higher order thinking skills. They improved their background knowledge and increased their vocabulary, which will help them learn to read with comprehension. All because Anzalone knew how to talk to children to promote their learning while they play.

The Ed Week column nicely summarizes how early educators can intentionally embed curriculum in play:

(1) Use words that children do not know. Oral language development and vocabulary is the foundation of literacy. So, author Marissa Rasavong suggests, “Rather than observing, ‘It’s cold today,’ we can talk about how ‘blustery’ or ‘frigid’ the weather is.”

(2) Ask good questions. Closed-ended questions close pathways to learning. Open-ended questions open them. “When students are excited to tell us about the structures they have built,” Rasavong writes, “we can extend their thinking by asking, ‘What would happen if we moved this block?’”

(3) Encourage problem solving. “It is easy to offer shortcut answers when difficulties arise,” Rasavong writes. “But what’s best for students in the long run is to encourage them to solve their own problems.”

(4) Respond thoughtfully to student behavior. “We can help young learners understand why and how to follow rules—teaching them how to behave rather than just telling them to behave.”

(5) Plan ahead to facilitate purposeful play.

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“Sidewalk” Field Trips Boost Children’s Early Literacy

Posted in Developmentally appropriate practice, Language development, Play, Pre-K to 3, Reading proficiency on February 27, 2012 | 1 Comment »

When Dao Krings, a second-grade teacher at P.S. 145 in New York City, asked how many students had never been inside a car, Tyler Rodriguez was one of several students who raised their hands. “I’ve been inside a bus,” the boy said. “Does that count?”

The anecdote illustrates why teachers at the Brooklyn school regularly take the children in their classrooms on “field trips to the sidewalk,” according to a terrific story in The New York Times that shows how teachers in a high-poverty school increase the background knowledge, vocabulary and comprehension skills of their young students. In the process, the field trips prepare the children to become strong readers.

Reading, as outlined in “Turning the Page: Refocusing Massachusetts for Reading Success,” is a complex process that is as much about comprehension as it is about decoding words on the page. The background knowledge and vocabulary a reader brings to a text are critical ingredients of comprehension. Consider, the Times notes, that “by age 4, the average child in an upper-middle-class family has heard 35 million more words than a poor child.” And one-third of kindergartners from the bottom fifth of the income distribution are read to every day, compared with two-thirds of kindergartners in the wealthiest 20% of households.

“When a new shipment of books arrives, Rhonda Levy, the principal, frets,” the Times reports. “Reading with comprehension assumes a shared prior knowledge, and cars are not the only gap at P.S. 142. (more…)

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Toy Building Blocks Enjoy a Comeback

Posted in Developmentally appropriate practice, Play on February 9, 2012 | 3 Comments »

Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

Good old-fashioned blocks, those smooth rectangles and squares that become fanciful structures in children’s hands, are enjoying a resurgence. The New York Times, citing a growing realization that something valuable is lost when there’s no time for play time, finds a renewed interest in blocks is “sweeping through some elite swaths of New York’s education universe.”

“While many progressive private and public schools have long sworn by blocks, more traditional institutions are now refocusing on block centers amid worries that academic pressure and technology are squeezing play out of young children’s lives,” the Times reports.

“Studies dating to the 1940s indicate that blocks help children absorb basic math concepts. One published in 2001 tracked 37 preschoolers and found that those who had more sophisticated block play got better math grades and standardized test scores in high school. And a 2007 study by Dimitri Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Hospital, found that those with block experience scored significantly better on language acquisition tests.”

National school supply companies, the Times notes, are adding to their block-related products. And a block workshop at a recent early education conference at the 92^nd Street Y filled so quickly, conference organizers added a second session.

“Ms. [Fretta] Reitzes, who runs the youth center at the 92nd Street Y, said many educators were embracing blocks as an antidote to fine-motor-skill deficits and difficulty with unstructured activity, problems that they blame on too much time in front of screens and overly academic preschools,” the Times reports. “Sara Wilford, director of the “Art of Teaching” graduate program at Sarah Lawrence College, sees it as an obvious backlash. ‘There are so many schools where children are seeing less and less play,’ she said. ‘And I think parents are getting that that is not going to help them.”

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Play is the Work of Young Children

Posted in Developmentally appropriate practice, Play, Research on February 1, 2012 | 3 Comments »

Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

At a time when direct, teacher-centered instruction in preschool and kindergarten classrooms is increasing, Scientific American offers a strong reminder of the importance of play for young learners.

“‘Just playing’ is in fact what nearly all developmental psychologists, neuroscientists and education experts recommend for children up to age seven as the best way to nurture kids’ development and ready them for academic success later in life,” the article states. (1 2 3 4 Next >)

“Decades of research have demonstrated that their innate curiosity leads them to develop their social, emotional and physical skills independently, through exploration—that is, through play. Even animals as diverse as squirrels, horses and bears engage in, and cognitively benefit from, play.”

Writer Paul Tullis summarizes some of the research. Children instructed in how a toy works, one study finds, are less apt to discover its various attributes than children who explore it without direct instruction. And the landmark Hart & Risley study on children’s language development found that children with the widest, richest vocabularies acquired their trove of words through conversation and playful interactions, not direct instruction. “Storytelling, singing, playing, telling jokes—those are the building blocks of extensive vocabularies.” Peter L. Mangione, co-director of the Center for Child and Family Studies at WestEd in San Francisco, tells Scientific American.

A dearth of play, the article notes, could have negative consequences. It cites research from the Perry Preschool Project in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which found that half of children who attended a preschool that emphasized direct instruction had emotional problems by age 23, compared with 6% in a high-quality play-based preschool. “Emphasizing the acquisition of skills such as early reading and geography,” the article states, “comes with a trade-off—less time spent on social and emotional development, which are themselves important to a child’s ability to learn.”

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Studies Shed Light on Minds of Young Children

Posted in Developmentally appropriate practice, Research on March 28, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

Young children learn best through play. This mantra of early childhood experts is supported anew in research by MIT scientists at the Boston Children’s Museum and Museum of Science.

“Researchers, with clever experiments at these museums and elsewhere, are finding that young children have a surprisingly sophisticated intuitive grasp of probabilities, which they use to make inferences. When a toy does not work, or a squeeze ball squeaks, even babies weigh data and make informed bets about why,” The Boston Globe reports today (Studies find clues to babies’ minds). “The results are forming the basis for a new understanding of one of the most distinctive traits of the human mind — the ability to make, test, and continually adjust ideas about how one thing causes another. Such insights could help classroom teachers.”

The more playful the prompt from an adult, the more engaged the children and the more likely they were to explore how a toy works. (more…)

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Archive for the ‘Developmentally appropriate practice’ Category

Touring Children’s Museum with PlaySpace Creator

In Quotes

Guidance Offered on Technology in Early Education

Use Talk to Help Children Learn through Play

“Sidewalk” Field Trips Boost Children’s Early Literacy

Toy Building Blocks Enjoy a Comeback

Play is the Work of Young Children

Studies Shed Light on Minds of Young Children

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