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!

-->

Read More

Greenhouses, Glue Guns, And Climbers

Most public park playgrounds are anchored by some sort of large climbing structure, and when children visit it's usually the first place they go. Having observed thousands of children at these playgrounds, I've noticed that most kids hit that climbing structure hard for the first 15-20 minutes or so, then they're on to other things. Families with climbers in their yards complain that their kids never use them except when briefly made new again by having friends come to visit. 

When we learned that Chinese New Year is traditionally considered to be, in part, a celebration of Spring, our 5's class decided to start a few seeds indoors. Of course, they're now the first plants in our new greenhouse.

This is one of the main reasons we've never had a permanently installed climbing apparatus at Woodland Park. Our outdoor classroom is a place children play day-after-day for a full year, usually at least two, often three, and sometimes even for four: we can't afford to give precious real estate to something that is going to lose its novelty after the first 15-20 minutes.

We have plenty of places for children to climb, including the concrete slope area with it's steep pitch, epoxied rock handholds and lilac branch hand grips. We also have several step ladders, a homemade ladder, long moveable planks, and an over-all terrain that includes precious few flat spots. We're always moving things around, creating new challenges, but mostly just playing our games in which climbing, often risky climbing is just part of the game.

We briefly gave the climber new life a few months ago by propping the homemade ladder against it, but after about a week, it had gone back to being forgotten.

That said, we have, for the past 18 months or so had a small climber situated at the top of the hill. Made of aluminum, designed to be lightweight and moveable, it was fairly well-used earlier during the school year, but really has been ignored since the early Fall. We installed it, frankly, because I couldn't bear to throw it away after our move to the Center of the Universe, and it fit a "dead" space out there along the fence, above the swings.

Recently, Luella and Giovanni's father, a professional gardener and regular granter of amnesty to unwanted plants and other garden-type things, came into possession of a very nice greenhouse that he was able to remove from a client's residence on the back of his pick-up, and which has as of this week become ours. 

A team of parents installed it over the weekend and as part of the process dismantled the climber, leaving its parts, along with some other random large "loose parts" in a clump where the unloved climber used to live. The idea is that we need to figure out what to do with that stuff.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from climbers in my experience are glue guns. We could have those out every day and I'm quite confident that kids would use them every day, just so long as we managed to have enough scraps and odds and ends for them to glue together. Our 5's class, in particular, are avid glue gunners, usually stopping by the work bench to create something to use in the game they're playing that day -- a weapon, a spaceship, a kitty house. Unlike with one of those immovable climbers, where once mastery is attained, they're sort of used up, glue guns and other tools, once mastered, open doors to endless possibilities.

It wasn't long ago that the kids struggled to get the glue to do what they wanted it to do, burning themselves, using too much or too little, but on Monday as they crowded around the workbench, eager to construct whatever it was they needed, there was a kind of casual expertise evident, a concentration that was focused on both creation as well as proper, safe tool use. And even as they jostled one another around the table, often having to share one glue gun between them, handing it back and forth while being careful to not burn one another, discussing their work, coaching their friends, explaining to the adults how to do things like replenish the glue sticks . . . Even as they did all that it was clear we were really just at the beginning of what we could do with them, while the climber stood in pieces at the other end of the space, already having outlived its useful life at Woodland Park.

At least that's what I was thinking, while also wondering into which category our new greenhouse would ultimately fall, when I realized what the kids were doing with their glue gun creations. 

They weren't just running inside to stick them into their cubbies in order to take them home at the end of the day, but rather carrying them up to the jumble of stuff where the climber no longer was, using them as a kind of house warming gift as they moved into the new climbing space they'd discovered, chattering away, creating, arguing, and settling arguments.

So the climber, in a way, is resurrected up there as part of a jumble of oddball stuff because we, by accident, found a way to make it new, something that simply can't be done with a traditional climber in a traditional space, like a public park or a backyard. For the time being, at least, I think we've figured out what to do with this collection of large loose parts. Everything must evolve or it dies.

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!

-->

Read More

Angry Ship Builders

Charlotte said, "I'm going to build a ship," and got to work arranging the blocks.

Ships have been a popular way for the 3-5's class to use our large wooden blocks this year. It's a simple build which normally involves arranging the blocks into a deck, flat on the floor. Each time Charlotte would place a block, however, one of her classmates would step on it, which frustrated her. "Hey, I'm building a ship!"

There was a lot of action in the block area and it got so she was chasing someone off her ship every few seconds, to which she responded by upping the intensity of her objections.

It didn't seem like anyone was intentionally provoking Charlotte. The situation was more a function of attempting to work on a solo project in a crowded, active area. After having been reprimanded several times by Charlotte, Henry paused for a moment to survey this corner of the rug, and in doing so he seemed to suddenly see the world from Charlotte's perspective. "I'm going to help build the ship." And with that he began arranging blocks.

Without directly acknowledging Henry, Charlotte began to chase the other kids off, still angrily, "Hey, we're building a ship!"

And Henry took on the tone as well, "Hey, we're building a ship!" Now we had two intense ship builders. 

Soon Audrey joined them, pushing large blocks into place. She said nothing, but wore a fierce, tight-jawed expression as she worked.

"Hey, we're building a ship!" "Hey, that's our ship!"

As the three angry builders made their herky jerky progress, Lilyanna, who had been dancing about the block area to the beat of some internal rhythm, and therefore largely oblivious to the builders, had as a consequence been chased off the burgeoning ship more times than I could count. As she turned a sort of pirouette on the ship deck, the builders said once more, loudly, "Hey, we're building a ship!"

Lilyanna was offended, putting her hands on her hips defiantly, commanding, "Stop!" Saying "stop" forcefully is a technique we teach the children for when someone is hurting them, frightening them, or taking their things. Some kids, however, find it so powerful that they try it out in any circumstance in which they find themselves at odds with others.

This lead to a silent stand-off, with the three builders standing face-to-face with Lilyanna, angry faces all around. Finally, Charlotte said, as if castigating the world, "This is our ship! Mine, Henry's, Audrey's and Lilyanna's!"

Then the four angry ship builders got back to work.

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!

-->

Read More

Why Life Is Hard

"This life's hard, man, but it's harder if you're stupid!"  ~from the movie The Friends of Eddie Coyle

This is a line I think of a lot, usually addressed to myself in those moments of frustration, when I've done something stupid, and my life is now, naturally, harder. This is a universal truth. Ignorance is not bliss. Knowing stuff makes life good, and knowing how you best get to know the stuff you want to know makes it even better. For me, deep knowledge, the kind that shapes my life, usually comes from a process that involves those moments of stupidity, moments that are often accompanied by a sense of despair or futility, and then pushing just a little farther, sometimes in a kind of rage at just how stupid I am, and it's usually only then, just behind that moment, where I find Eureka! has been hiding.

I've known other adults who share this penchant, but very few preschoolers, although maybe it's just because they've not yet learned to label life as hard or themselves as stupid. I've certainly seen frustrated preschoolers, ones who are in tears over their inability to do whatever it is they're trying to do. And I've known many who, after a long struggle, will, once they've finally figured it out, say, "That's easy" and immediately set about demonstrating to the next kid who comes along just how easy it is, a sort of good natured way of acknowledging their own previous stupidity.

I've also known both adults and children who don't push a little farther, who stop at the frustration, who give up. I've done it before. I stopped taking math classes after my sophomore year in college, for instance, not because I'd decided I was too stupid or even because it was too hard, but rather because I'd lost interest in the actual knowledge and had come to recognize that I'd been sticking with it simply for the bragging rights that went with being enrolled in higher level math classes. No, if I was going to work my brain that hard, to deal with that frustration, it was going to be while learning the things I wanted and needed to know.

Most of our classroom day is spent in free play. There are a dozen or so planned activities to go along with the everyday stuff like play dough, stuffed animals, and the sand pit, but children are not expected to engage with them. Most rotate from activity to activity as their interests dictate, plunging their hands in when it looks like something they want or need to know, or edging past when something seems, say, too messy or challenging or tedious. Some kids only want to be where the action is, never picking up a paint brush unless there's a friend at the adjacent easel. Others want the field cleared for themselves as they explore, preferring to wait until the initial wave of excitement has receded before stepping up to the plate. This is why it's important to let certain activities run for a day or so beyond their "hey day."

I often say that my business is not to decide what a child learns, but rather that they learn, but that's actually taking more credit than is due. In a play-based curriculum it really is all up to the child because what they are ultimately doing is figuring out something they can only figure out for themselves. By playing in an environment in which exploration and experimentation are the highest values they are teaching themselves not just how to learn, but how they learn. And as frightening as that is to the control freaks out there, this isn't something you can do to or for someone else. It's something you can't judge or measure or test because it's a process that you are simply too stupid to understand. The only expert is the one doing the learning.

As Albert Einstein famously said, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." That is why life is hard.

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!

-->

Read More

"Let's . . ."

When I was a boy the word "please" was said to be the magic word, and I suppose it was when we were performing for adults in order to get something we wanted, but "let's" is the word with real magic in it. "Let's" is, of course, really two words that we speak as one, meaning "let us." It's not a command nor a question, but rather an invitation and in the mouths of children it's most often used as an invitation to play.

"Let's play trains."

"Let's be princesses."

"Let's pretend we're pirates and I fall off the boat into the water and you have to rescue me." Without the word "let's" cooperative dramatic play would hardly be possible.

It's not so common in our Pre-3 class, but by the time the children are 4 and 5 you hear it a lot as they play together, often at the beginning of every sentence.

And that would be enough, if this magic word could do only this, but listen, it's a real magic word. You can use it for almost anything you need to do with the other people.

"Let's take turns."

"Let's make a rule."

"Let's try using a rock to open it."

Of course, there's always a dark side to every kind of magic, a way to misuse it.

"Let's take all the balls."

"Let's keep the girls out."

"Let's pretend we're pirates who push everybody else into the water."

But even so, even when we use it to experiment with the misuse of our collective power, there's no denying it's a magic word, one that brings us together, that creates room for other people, that makes our play better and our lives bigger. "Let's" is always an invitation, one that contains all of the open-ended possibilities of human beings together.

I don't worry about children who've learned the power of "Let's . . ."

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!

-->

Read More

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!

-->

Read More

Turning On Our Own Light

You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in. ~Arlo Guthrie 

Before we've even convened our Pre-3 class for the first time each year, our parent educator Dawn and I have already told the parents during our fall orientation meeting to expect that children will hit, kick, push, scratch, and bite, and that their child is likely to be involved one way or another. Then, after the first month of school, at our first parent meeting, with parents abuzz about all the hitting, kicking, pushing, scratching, and biting they've witnessed in class, Dawn's parent ed topic is "normal" development, including the inevitable experiments in hitting, kicking, pushing, scratching, and biting, and what we can do about it.

For the purposes of this post, I'm also going to add such behaviors as taking, spitting, screaming, destroying the work of others, bossing, hoarding, and just about anything else that can fall into the category of "socially unacceptable."

Dawn goes through the research, pointing out that all of this is well within the range of normal, and that we should strive to seize these obvious teaching moments. (For further discussion about how we try to do this at Woodland Park, you might want to click here and here.)

But it does raise for me the deeper question: why is this typical behavior?

Some of it is mere oblivion. Children this age are notoriously suns around which the universe revolves and one of the reasons we bring them together in the first place, is to give them the chance to experience bumping up against all those other suns and figuring out how to live in a constellation with them. It's not uncommon at all, for instance, for a child to run right through another on their way somewhere else or to simply push someone when they're in their way. It's not rudeness: they are really just so absorbed in their pursuits that they don't notice the other people. Experience and development will bring them around in time.

Another part of the answer is that young children are essentially mad scientists running around this laboratory of life poking at buttons, throwing switches, and tugging on levers, sometimes over and over, driven to understand what they do. This is why, for instance, you don't want to have your nuclear launch button in the same room as a 2-year-old. 

But that's not entirely fair. It's certainly more complex than either of these summations suggest. From an evolutionary perspective, children are born with only one tool for survival: crying. The species produces a next generation only because enough adults instinctively respond to crying. For adults that cry is something that pierces our hearts, calling us to action, pumping our blood, making us feel as if something is wrong, while for the baby that cry is merely the tool for connecting with the world outside herself, with none of the emotional baggage we bring to it.

We've evolved into an animal with great big brains and relatively fragile bodies, with so much to learn before it can survive on its own that we must go through years, even decades of dependency on others, if we are ever truly able to be independent. From the moment we are born, however, we begin to play, reaching out first with our crying voices, then ears and eyes. As we combine natural development with experience, our hands and feet come into play, until our whole bodies are engaged in the playful process of learning about our world. And it's the other people who engage us the most intensely.

(T)he children who "take" the most are invariably the ones who give the most. ~Janet Lansbury

Development might dictate when we are ready for things, but it's play that determines what and how we actually learn. If you watch babies play, as parent educator Janet Lansbury spends her days doing, you'll see how, when allowed to freely explore, they manipulate objects, turning them over and over, studying them from all sides, banging them on the floor, sticking them in their mouths, and generally putting them through their paces as they teach themselves the important things to know about these objects. And when that "object" is another person with whom they are allowed to freely explore, they seek to manipulate him, turn him over and over, study him from all sides, bang him on the floor, stick him in their mouths, and generally put him through his paces. This is done, of course, without malice or intention other than that urge to engage and learn through play.

As Janet points out, we grown-ups are inclined to intervene, and we should when someone is getting hurt, but too often in our efforts to somehow manage the interaction, we try to teach them things rather than allow them the freedom to actually learn the way humans are designed to learn, thereby discouraging play. "Our interruptions put the brakes on valuable social exchanges and leave toddlers with the message that they're incapable of interacting with their peers."

An example she uses is the concept of "sharing" or "ownership," ideas that are simply beyond the developmental abilities of babies. When one baby takes something from another and we jump in by insisting, no matter how gently, that it must be returned, we are attempting to "teach" an idea that they are incapable of understanding, thus putting an end to a playful, social interaction. In other words, we prevent them from manipulating the world before them, as is their natural inclination, not letting them, in fact study this situation from all sides, bang it on the floor, stick it their mouth, or generally put it through its paces. It's no wonder that Janet has found that the babies in her classes, where they are given this opportunity, who are most likely to "take" are also the ones most likely to give: they've been allowed to learn about the entire interaction, understand it, and understand the light.

I will love the light because it shows me the way. Yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars. ~Og Mandino

How can one understand light without exploring dark? How can one understand up without exploring down? How can one understand gentleness without exploring roughness?

As children get older and begin to find their way to people like me who work with them, it's no less important that we give them the opportunity to freely explore their social world. Of course, as with Janet's babies, we intervene when someone is getting hurt or scared, but that doesn't mean that even these behaviors aren't an important part of their learning. I've seen Janet's take-give phenomenon at work in our own school over the years. The 2-year-old child with the larger, stronger body who so often runs right through his peers will invariably become the 4-year-old skilled in the art of gentleness. The toddler who is most likely to destroy another's block tower will invariably be the first to understand the importance of helping rebuild it. The child who blunders by attempting to show affection for another by biting, will invariably be the one who later touches us with his ability to show his friends how much he loves them.

Again, I must emphasize that I do not want children to be pushed, hit or bitten, but I am a realist and know that short of simply keeping young children apart from one another, these things are a part of how humans learn. We must study the dark before we can understand the light.

It's not always easy and I fail often, but ideally we adults seek to remain calm, to intervene when necessary without judgement, to role model compassion and gentleness toward the injured, and to help children think their way through to alternatives, knowing all the while that as long as we are there loving them with consistency and compassion, experience and development will bring them around in time, invariably to a fuller understanding of the light.

We all walk in the dark and each of us must learn to turn on his or her own light. ~Earl Nightingale

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!

-->

Read More