PBS Kids

I've made no secret of my admiration for Mister Rogers. I assert that his long-running program, Mister Roger's Neighborhood, is the greatest thing the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) has ever produced. Indeed, in some ways it was one of the greatest television programs ever produced, period. This man, with simple, consistent, straight-forward sincerity and a deep love and understanding of young children demonstrated what good educational television can do; that it can reach very young viewers at their level. There were other children's programs, many of them very good, but none has ever been as child-focused or as concerned with educating the whole child as this program.

When I was first approached by PBS Kids to take part in their new "It All Adds Up" awareness program designed "to support the development of early math and literacy skills in children ages 2-8 from low income families," however, I hesitated. As I've written before, I'm not a fan of television for young children and, in general, am skeptical of the value of other types of screen time and this initiative includes over 100 games and apps that have been created by PBS Kids to help build math and literacy skills.

As you can imagine I spent several days in a kind of low-level anguish, weighing on the one hand Mister Rogers' legacy and on the other this collection of games and apps. I finally came down on the side of Mister Rogers, concluding as he did, that children and their parents are going to be looking at those screens whether I like it or not, so it behooves me to do what I can, if given the opportunity, to shape what little part on which they let me put my hands. I've agreed to take part as one of a group of five Math Mentors (you'll have to scroll down to the second post), "a team of early childhood educators and bloggers who will provide parents tips and ideas on how to help children ages 2-8 learn early math concepts and integrate math activities into their daily lives." We will write math-oriented posts and host monthly social media chats to engage directly with parents. And in the interest of full disclosure, I am receiving a small fee for this.

The two things that tipped the scales in PBS Kids' favor were the list of my fellow "Math Mentors," a couple of whom I already know and respect through my blogging endeavors, and the fact that funding comes from the US Department of Education, an entity I've long been at odds with over their approach to public education. Maybe someone there will hear me.

I'm assuming that the folks at PBS Kids have taken a look at this blog and know about our whole play-based approach to early years learning, math included. I'm assuming that I've been hired to represent this point of view on PBS Kids. And I'm quite excited to bring this perspective to a wider audience. I won't likely be writing about the games and apps, focusing instead on how young children are already "math ready," how when they're given the opportunity to play in a rich environment, they will be laying the foundation for a lifetime of exploration and experimentation.

I'll keep you informed about how it's going and hope to see many of you there!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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Watching Water Drip And Ice Melt

This is going to sound curmudgeonly, but when I was a boy we had to rely on conversation to entertain ourselves while riding in the back seat of the car, and when that failed, we gazed out the window. One of the things I remember looking at were raindrops and how they traced their tracks on the outside of the windows. 

Last week our Pre-3 class took a turn using spray bottles to shoot diluted liquid watercolor onto easels, and like I'd done with the raindrops, much of the process was about observing the drips run down the paper. Squit-squirt, pause to watch. Squirt-squirt pause to watch. 

It's taken me a long time to find the right squirt bottles to do this job. The ones they sell specifically for children's use are, frankly, crap, often jamming or otherwise ceasing to function within the first couple uses. I really like the Ace Hardware store brand squirt bottles: ours have held up for several years and the triggers aren't too stiff. Plus they have measurement marks up the sides, which allows us to "perfect" our mixture of water and paint, or anything else we may chose to put in there.

If you're after fantastic finished products, well, you don't dilute the paint, but this, like most of what we do is about the process: learning to make those squirt bottles work, trying them out from far away, trying them out from up close, switching to a different color, attempting to target a certain white area, and, of course, watching the drips run down the paper, following those tracks with our eyes until they're dripping onto the floor. I start all the bottles on a "mist" setting, but there are always a few kids who figure out how to switch it to a "stream" which is better for targeting, if that's one of the things you're bent upon exploring.

It's true many of the kids spent the rest of the day wearing gloves, or even a mask, of party-colored freckles, usually self-inflicted.

We call it art and in the end there are even some rather attractive things for the children to take home, but it's really about the meditation on what happens to liquid on a flat, vertical surface.

Only a few steps away, in the sensory table, we were exploring water as it slowly transitioned from its solid form to its liquid form, using rock salt and yet more liquid water color to assist us. We didn't call this art, but it was every bit as beautiful as the stuff we made on the easels.

The rock salt, if you wait for it, will melt holes through the ice, into which it's fun to inject the liquid color with pipettes, another tool for us to learn about. This one is a bit more challenging than the squirt bottles and not all of the kids managed to figure them out, but that's okay for this day's meditation on liquid and gravity and color and cold and melting and tools.

I found it hard to talk on this day, instead just watching the children as they watched. I did reflect on the missed opportunity of children staring into screens in the backs of their cars, being distracted from the chance to watch raindrops track paths from top to bottom, or to angle across the window as the car moves through space, to practice the meditative patience required to do the most important things in life. I wrote a few days ago about my concerns about children and screens. Perhaps the thing I worry most about is how much these new technologies feed the plague of instant gratification. Certainly we lose a lot if we undermine our capacity for patience, for meditation, for just watching water drip and ice melt.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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Mud And Sticks And Real Paint

I've written a couple times here about young children and screens. The post about television remains one of my most read pieces here of all time, probably because I included links to things like research and data and other science-y stuff to support my assertion that TV use by young children should be strictly limited. Still, despite the support of nearly every pediatrician in the world, lots of people got mad at me. In fact, even though I wrote it over a year and a half ago, I still receive irate comments from people who really, really support putting their kids in front of the TV.

The more recent post was a visceral reaction to a currently running TV/web commercial that makes it almost seem like you'd be a bad parent to not hand your kid the latest screen-based technology. Fewer folks got mad at me, but of course it wasn't as widely read as the TV post, and didn't link to any research or data or other science-y stuff.

That's because there isn't really any research or data or other science-y stuff other than the statistic that "(t)hirty-nine percent of children ages 2- to 4-years-old and 52% of kids ages 5 to 8 have used an iPad, iPhone or similar touch-screen device to play games, watch videos or use other apps, according to a survey last year by Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group," a number that has likely increased dramatically in the intervening 12 months. Another study by a marketing agency called Kids Industries found that 77 percent of parents believe that using tablets is beneficial for children and the same number believe the gadgets help develop creativity.

And that's what makes me nervous: the iPad was only introduced in 2010 and there hasn't been time to study the effects on young children. There are some researchers out there warning that use of this technology will lead to developmental and social problems. Others are more sanguine. But no one really has anything other than dribs and drabs and anecdotes upon which to base their opinion. And parents are sort of in the same boat, comparing their previously held opinions and knowledge with their own child's experience. What we can all agree upon, however, is that a child's brain develops quickest during the first few years of life, forming thousands of synapses during those first 3 years. So this is not something to be taken lightly.

I hope we can also agree that whatever one's belief about these technologies, and that's what we have to go on right now, this generation of children is being used by the rest of society as guinea pigs because we just don't know what is happening to their brains, let alone their social skills or ability to function in a 3-dimentional world.

Almost every day a parent asks me about my opinion on this topic. Almost every day I receive a pitch asking Teacher Tom to support this or that new "educational" app. Almost every day I read something about how someone's child learned the alphabet or how to identify their colors or something from their touch-screen game.

Of course, every child who has ever come to Woodland Park over the past decade has arrived as a 2-year-old already knowing most of that stuff without the benefit of special technology, so it really doesn't follow, as some are advocating, that every child in America should have her own iPad. After all, these machines are still primarily limited to teaching tools of the worksheet and testing variety like correctly identifying numbers or mooing at a picture of a cow. I've not seen much that convinces me that these apps and games do anything by way of giving children the opportunity to learn how to learn, which, you know, is the essence of education. The "education" delivered looks a lot to me like a fancy version of flash cards.

But this is just one man's opinion, one formed from anecdote, incomplete experience, and guessing, just like everyone else does. I own an iPhone which I use for phone calls, texting, email, navigating around unfamiliar areas, taking pictures, and reading things on the internet. I like it, although I can't honestly say I've ever considered my experiences particularly educational. My wife owns both an iPad and an iPad Mini, both of which I've used a couple of times, but I don't currently have a desire to have one of my own. The most advanced "technology" we use in our classroom are things like hot plates, electric race cars, and, rarely, a CD player . . . Yes, a CD player.

Of course, I know that many of the kids I teach are swiping and drilling on their parent's devices because this is the technology hub of Seattle and they sometimes talk about them, or I overhear parents enthusing about some children's app or other. Like I wrote in my last post on technology, I'm sure the kids are learning something, but by no means are they learning everything, or even close to everything. In the meantime, my advice is to be conservative when it comes to this new technology. I like this article's suggestion that parents play these games with their children, instead of using it as a "shut up" toy. Remember that the most popular preschools in Silicon Valley, where these things are being made, are ones that focus on mud and sticks and real paint. Know that when you hand your baby your smartphone, you are taking part in a grand society-wide experiment, the findings of which are entirely unknown: you could be doing extreme good or extreme harm and anyone who tells you they know which are wrong. I know we won't stop this technology, nor do I even think we should try, so we all need to make some sort of peace with it because it will become an increasingly central part of our lives for the foreseeable future.

In the meantime, as long as I'm the teacher, Woodland Park will continue to be a touchscreen free oasis, because while the actual data on this new technology and children is still decades away from being in, the evidence is clear and irrefutable about what we do in our play-based, hands-on, child-directed preschool, and it has been for centuries. I will not judge what people chose to do with their own children in their own homes, but here we'll continue working with mud and sticks and real paint. The children will experiment, but they will not be experimented upon.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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Screen-Based Technology

There's a commercial I've been seeing recently starring a delightful girl "painting" a picture of her daddy on a screen of some kind while at the same time communicating with him via internet video phone. Oh, this happy girl creates this cute portrait in bold, energetic swoops and stokes of vibrant color by just dashing her fingers across the screen. She seems to be dancing as she does it, delighting in her mastery of this newest technological medium. Daddy, as well he should, looks thrilled. And Mommy, who is, I think, tidying up in the background while listening in, seems bemused.

Each time I see it, I'm drawn in, then left slightly nauseous, quite literally. I remarked on it to my wife the other night, "This ad always makes me feel a little sick." She answered, "I know what you mean, but why?"

I answered, "I don't know, but I keep envisioning young parents seeing this and telling themselves, See look how great screens are for kids. They can paint anything they want any time they want -- and no mess!"

I'm a technology skeptic, not because I don't believe that children can learn through screen-based technology -- Mister Rogers proved that to be possible-- but rather that I'm yet to be convinced that this is ever the best way for children to learn anything except how to interact with the latest screen-based technology, which is not nothing, but it's far from everything.

The real world is everything.

When I see that girl "painting," I imagine parents and teachers envying how effortlessly, and again, mess-lessly, she creates that picture; a picture that once printed out would look gorgeous on a wall, which, in fact, is where the little girl's picture winds up in the ad, there amidst another dozen likewise bold, energetic 18"X11" prints, all in full color. I know that all that full-color 18"X11" printing costs a pretty penny, so, you know, in the real world the kid's only going to see most of her work displayed on screens, although even the glossy prints will have that flat, screen-like quality to them.

The real world is everything and it is messy and it has texture. The real world drips and oozes and has grit and causes scrapes. The real world is full of preschool grey paintings that make no sense unless you were there for the whole process. The real world has fragrance and dampness and impure yellow that can't be edited back to a purer yellow. In the real world, paper and tempera paint are cheap media, narrowcasting in actual, not virtual 3-D.

Those that want screen-based technology to take a more central place in eduction have a long way to go to persuade me. I do love that that little girl gets to spend all that good time "with" her daddy while he's away on business -- that's an awesome advance over those brief, expensive long distance telephone calls we used to have with my dad when he was away. But as great as it is, it can't replace the two of them actually being together, just as it can't come close to replacing paint on paper, shovels in sand, or hands plunged in up to the elbow.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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This Commitment To "Normalcy"

In a comment on Facebook about yesterday's post, reader Donna shared that her son is on medication that could make even a run-of-the-mill childhood injury into a life-threatening one. 

I have a 4-year-old boy who has been on blood thinners since he was 2. Fortunately, we have a good cardiologist who told me to let him be a boy! How would he ever learn to be careful if I completely took away all risk of physical harm? He has learned to be careful, but still climbs trees, rides a scooter, still plays out in the backyard with sticks, rocks, and all sorts of things. You can't just keep them in a protective bubble, it is not good for them and they don't learn anything.

What a challenge that would be for a parent. What a temptation it would be to attempt to enclose your child in a "protective bubble." And what bravery it must take, every day, for parents like Donna to let their children freely engage the world.

Many years ago, I taught a boy with hemophilia, a condition that prevents blood from clotting properly. I can tell you that I spent my first several months in the classroom with him on the edge of panic lest he encounter even the mildest bump or bruise, so I can imagine what it must have been like to be his parents. Like Donna, however, they arrived on day one wanting me to be aware of the situation, but urging me to not coddle him, to allow him to run, jump, and otherwise play with his classmates. He was not a daredevil by nature, thank God, but he was a typically bright, inquisitive boy who could throw his body around with the best of them.

His father Joe told me that the greatest danger wasn't the blood we could see, but rather the blood we couldn't see: internal bleeding, which might result from even apparently insignificant impacts, something that is always a minute-to-minute possibility in a preschool classroom. Joe said, "If he seems woozy or dizzy, that's a sign, but he'll probably let you know if he's having a bleed. He knows what it feels like." This at an age when many kids aren't even self-aware enough to know when they're hungry, tired, or need to go potty.

Cooperatives are a natural choice, I think, for parents in these circumstances. I can imagine it would be awfully hard to simply turn over the care of a child in Conail's situation for the first time to a traditional school. In the beginning, his parents chose not to leave him alone at school, which is a choice many parents make during the first few months at Woodland Park, especially in our Pre-3's class. I put them to work as I would any other parent-teacher. This gave us all -- myself and the other parent-teachers -- the opportunity to observe how they interacted with him, how they reacted to his occasional mishaps, how much they hovered or didn't hover. This period of role-modeling was a valuable education for all of us, especially on the day when this 2-year-old boy told his dad Joe, "I'm having a bleed." No amount of abstract "training" could have better prepared me for being on the "front lines" than to be there as Joe calmly and lovingly took Conail into his care and got him off to the doctor, two "men" (and Conail was truly his father's peer in this) dealing with a problem without hysteria.

By Conail's Pre-K year, most of us didn't really think about his hemophilia on a day-to-day basis, although we were reminded each Tuesday afternoon, when Joe would arrive to administer his "factor," a clotting agent that needed to be administered on a schedule. At first it was something for which they left the room, but at some point, not wanting to miss a moment of school, Conail started just removing his shirt right there where we sat together on our circle time rug, showing us the shunt a doctor had installed in his chest, puffing out his chest while Joe injected the factor. By the end of the year, this process was a regular part of our circle time routine: sing a song, talk about our science experiment, give Conail his factor, read a book . . . That's just how we rolled with our super hero friend.

This is Alex, a girl who lost an eye to cancer, wearing her super hero cape in the hospital.

Over the years, I and our parent community have learned all kinds of "medical" skills, from administering Epi-pens and insulin injections to replacing a glass eye. In every case, we were dealing with children who are at one level wise beyond their years, with advanced self-awareness and self-care abilities, kids who had in their own ways learned to "be careful," but who were otherwise just "normal" kids with very brave parents, who must every day fight that urge to inflate a "protective bubble" around their babies. 

This commitment to "normalcy" is an inspiration. In a very real sense these brave children with hemophilia or severe allergies or diabetes or cancer, and their brave parents, are reality-checks to the rest of us and our media-inflamed fears of boogy men, eyes getting poked out, and heads being split open. It is through them that we can appreciate what a gift the bumps and bruises of a normal childhood truly are.

 I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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You Can't Teach A Baby To Read

It's not unheard of for preschoolers to teach themselves how to read. In fact, our little school probably sends 2-3 kids off to kindergarten each year who are full-on reading. I wrote before about a boy who taught himself to both read and write so that he would not be breaking the letter of one of our school rules. A couple years ago one of our 2-year-olds began sounding out words he saw around the classroom. Another child entered kindergarten last year having tested out at an 8th grade reading level, a year above the national average for adults. That said, we have never attempted to teach a preschooler to read.

So, it's true that preschoolers can read, the common element in every case being that they've done it on their own, all part of satisfying their curiosity about the world the way other kids might excel at athletics or social skills or working puzzles. And every time we have an early reader at Woodland Park her parents insist they've done nothing special: "She was just born that way."

Some preschoolers learn to read, but the vast majority do not. And no one has ever taught a preschooler to read who wasn't already teaching himself.

That, of course, doesn't stop charlatans from making false claims, playing on the insecurities of new parents, and particularly on those with disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, to convince them to purchase expensive video-based programs that purport to teach babies to read. Recently, one of the biggest pushers of this nonsense, a company called Your Baby Can, producers of the Your Baby Can Read! video series, shut its doors due to the costs of fighting a Federal Trade Commission investigation initiated by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood for falsely claiming their product taught babies to read. The nail in the coffin was this Today Show piece in which every child development expert they asked agreed: No, these babies are not reading. They are memorizing. 

According to the CCFC:

This is an important victory for families. Research links infant screen time to sleep disturbances, attention problems, and delayed language acquisition, as well as problems in later childhood such as poor school performance and childhood obesity. The American Academy of Pediatrics, and other public health organizations, recommend no screen time for infants and toddlers. But if parents followed Your Baby Can Read!’s viewing instructions, their baby would have watched more than 200 hours by the age of nine months.  

To this I will add that there is absolutely no credible evidence that learning to read early has any bearing on a child's future academic life, which is also true for early walking, early talking, or early anything. Early is not better when it comes to education: it's just "early." We can take joy in it as parents, of course, as the Woodland Park community does, but it's no cause to start filling out the Harvard admissions forms. 

(If you like CCFC’s campaign to stop the deceptive marketing of baby media as educational, please consider a contribution to their Action Fund. Your gift will support efforts to keep companies honest and babyhood screen-free.)

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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Greatest Hits

There was a time when I could have told you the exact anniversary, but it was sometime during the early summer of 2009 when I started blogging. I fretted so much over those first few posts, striving to keep them rather bland and non-controversial, worrying about being attacked from all sides by those angry people on the internet, dreaming about being feted as the next great thing by the mysterious internet image-makers. Then, heart in my throat, I'd click the "publish" button and . . . Then what?

It didn't take me long to discover analytics, the tools out there for variously measuring the crude demographics of your readership: what they read, how long they read, where they live, and so on. If you're a blogger yourself, you likely know all about these statistics and their strange allure, these numbers that come to represent the people who come by your little corner of the web. Before long I was obsessively spying on my readers via those numbers several times a day, often just leaving the window open on my computer to track every nuance. I distinctly remember the first day I surpassed 200 readers in a day, driven by a post about health care reform, my first toe in the pool of water outside the straight early childhood eddy. I must say I was giddy and a little afraid. (This post did attract the attention of angry internet people, even though looking at it now it's was a rather mild post compared to some of the things I write now.)

I'm happy to report that my obsession with you as a statistic has faded. It's exhausting living on that kind of they-love-me-they-hate-me roller coaster. For the past year or so, I've been checking the numbers, maybe, once a month and then only when something strikes me as particularly odd, like it did a couple days ago when my volume of email suddenly began to overwhelm me. It seems the post Seven Things To Say Instead Of "Good Job!" struck a cord with many of you, causing it to make the rounds in a wider circle than my writing normally does. Yay!  Thank you for sharing!

While I was there, I got curious about my "greatest hits," so to speak, and found that this post has already risen to number 2 on the all-time charts. And while I have a few end-of-the-school-year type posts I'd like to get to, I also know from my years looking at the statistics that weekend readership tends to fall off, while depth of readership rises. So instead of "fresh" material, I thought I'd put together a reading list based on Teacher Tom's all-time most popular posts.

1)     "Spoiled Brats"   I'm quite proud of this post and it remains at the top of the charts. It was nominated for Most Influential Post in the 2011 Edublog Awards and lost out by a single vote. It's a sort of treatise on how to treat your child like a fully-formed human being without resorting to the command-and-control awfulness of what is  often referred to as "tough love."

2)     Seven Things To Say Instead Of "Good Job!"   I wrote this post around a collection of photos that got me reflecting on the interactions I'd had with kids who had been eager to include me in their accomplishments. Many readers seemed to think that the objection to the phrase "Good job!" is that it's simply overused, thus rendering it meaningless. That's part of it, but the real reason I try to avoid it (along with such pronouncements as "That's beautiful!" "You're so smart!" and "I love it!") is that it puts the focus on external validation (i.e., adult approval). Making informative statements instead of praise is how I acknowledge a child's effort, their internal drive, rather just "rewarding" them with my opinion.

3)     Hitting   In this post I offer practical tips for what to do about 2-year-olds who hit, including an 8-step plan for learning through conflict. I'm a little embarrassed to see that the entire post is in some odd typeface. I don't know how that happened, but I'm too lazy to dig through the html code to figure it out.

4)     Watching Television Is Relaxing   This post exploded for a few days and brought me many new readers, largely because some nice folks with much larger audiences than mine linked to it.  In it, I use science and research to show how TV is no different than any other narcotic, at least in how it affects the brain. I received a lot of praise for this piece, but it was tempered by some very, very angry responses as well, mostly from people who either felt they had no other choice (for their own sanity) than to put their kids in front of what my mom called "the boob tube," or who were exasperated with me for giving them yet another reason to feel inadequate as a parent.

5)     Our "Tall Paintings"   I'm soooo happy that one of my preschool art project posts is in the top 5. I'm particularly happy that it's this one. Although there was a great surge of readers during the first few days it was up, this post has picked up "hits" almost every day for over a year.

6)     If You Really Want A Smart And Happy Kid  This post, in only a few words, really does say everything I know about being a good parent.

7)     The Language Of Command   This post, in which I forcefully advocate speaking informatively with young children, preceded the "Spoiled Brats" post by a day. It was reader response to this post, especially from those who worried about "spoiling" children, that prompted me to expand upon and clarify my thoughts the following day. I'm quite proud of this post as well. This, along with "Spoiled Brats," forms the basis of not only how I try to work with young children, but with people of all ages.

8)     I Have This   This post is about the limits of "direct instruction" (the method of teaching being used in most schools in America) and the expansive nature of play-based or inquiry-based teaching. 

  

9)     This Is What We Are Up Against    I've written, to date, 70 posts in which I discuss my opposition to corporate education reform and my thoughts on what real, positive, research and data based education reform might look like. This is the one that readers seem to like the most. Warning: I pull no punches.  People with Libertarian tendencies really don't like this post.

10)    This Is What Math Learning Looks Like   People who are not entirely sold on a play-based curriculum often ask how children, if left to pursue their own learning in their own ways, ever learn math. In this post I show you what math learning looks like in pictures and in words.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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