Love Learning

Success through Visuals & Play

I read an article the other day that really tugged at my heart. The author mourned the fact that  kindergarten as it should be seems to be a thing of the past. Gone is the free play, the crayons and paint, the housekeeping center, the emphasis on learning social interactions and skills. She painted such a poignant picture of sunlit rooms and happy children thriving and creating. She decried today’s widespread, headlong dash towards increasing academics in kindergarten.

No matter how much I agree with the author’s viewpoint regarding the true work of kindergarten, I  am not sure there is much we can do to change that academic push for beginners. Because I am totally aware of the segment of our population that frowns horribly on teaching our young children anything smacking of school, I always squirm a bit when customers write me to say that their preschoolers are devouring our stylized SnapWords™. I think my guilty conscience is rooted in a book I read by David Elkind called Miseducation. The premise of the book is that we are going to create a whole generation of at risk children if we begin to push schooling in preschool. Elkind followers, including the head of the education department in my graduate school, apply a blanket rule towards teaching preschoolers. You cannot do it, apparently, without mistreating them. Elkind makes an impassioned point, my department head is far more educated than I and surely knows better, but still I raise a timid hand to ask, “Might this only be one part of the story?”

Most Issues Are Not Black and White

Have you ever found yourself listening to a well-delivered argument which you feel is so airtight as to be unanswerable…only to find yourself listening to an equally well argued point directly opposing the first viewpoint? I have many times! I think in such cases what this means is that there is no clear cut way to choose a course of action and make a blanket rule that could be applied across the board. Far from being black and white, there are myriad shades of meaning between polar extremes.

Do I believe kindergartners should play? YES. Yes I do. Do I also believe in teaching very young children? YES. Yes I do. But what I believe lies somewhere in the middle of the argument for and against teaching young children. I do not believe that you prevent learning problems by starting to teach children when they are younger. The problem No Child Left Behind tried to address is not going to be solved by starting to teach reading and math in preschool. Not unless the method used is drastically changed. Ironically, if we change the method by which we teach, we could wait and begin to teach in first grade – or even second grade!

Use a Barometer

Recently I’ve heard from several parents who called to say they were distressed because their kindergartners were beginning to move from loving books to hating them because of what was being required of the kids in school. The children were not responding to the drills and flashcards, and the result was that they were turning away from an earlier love of books and reading. In cases such as these, STOP what is being done. If a teacher insists you drill your child at home, find an alternative right away. I think the decision about whether or not to teach young children can be made by answering the following questions. Iis the child playing? Is he having fun? Is she engaged? Does he want to do this? If the answers are no, the only option we have is to stop what we are doing immediately because we will cause harm.

Change the Approach: Use Visuals and Play

What we can do is change how our children learn the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. If we can utilize visuals and play, kids will gain the knowledge they need, but will not feel the stress of “doing school” too early. Best of all, using visuals and play will have the effect of cutting “school time” greatly. When I taught kindergarten in my home, the children far surpassed grade level expectations, but we did all our learning through creative play and visuals, and all our learning was done in less than two hours a day including coloring and craft time. Those were the days! What we were doing was working inside a system (school), but not using the regular system’s methodology. I went where the kids went – to what drew them. And it worked so well!

Is It Possible That Neither Side is Totally Right?

I think in the debate about academics and kindergarten, the point might have been totally missed. The point is not should we teach the very young, but rather HOW shall we teach them? At Child1st, we believe that if you have an engaged child, that child will learn and will love learning and we work very hard to find ways to make learning effortless.

Just a Bit Out of Focus

I read a couple of articles this morning, one from Ed.magazine, the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the other from NPR. The central topics had to do with how to go about improving teaching in our schools. The Ed.magazine article focused on improving the quality of walk-throughs (visits to classrooms by supervisory people) by improving the definition of what they are looking for as they observe. The article from NPR focused on the quality of teaching college programs. Here is an excerpt from that article entitled What Should Go Into A Teaching Degree? by Claudio Sanchez:

 “Christenbury [professor at VA Commonwealth U] knows all too well that some education professors are clueless about kids and just about everything else that happens in classrooms these days. She once taught at a university in another state where students were baffled that some of their professors had never set foot in a school.

It's that disconnect that makes Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, want to blow up some colleges of education and start over. "Education schools have, in many cases, become irrelevant and often of very low quality," Levine says. Levine has spent the past five years studying what he calls the "crisis" in the preparation of classroom teachers.

"The curriculum at schools of education has little to do with practice, what goes on in schools," says Levine. "There's a gap that's a mile wide. Senior professors don't participate in schools. There are universities around this country that place their students for student-teaching in failing schools with failing teachers. That's a major problem."

Camille Zombro, president of San Diego's teachers union, says she's surveyed teachers and found that it doesn't matter how good their training was. Many are still underprepared and overwhelmed. "I was stunned by the amount of paper-pushing, mind-numbing, meeting someone else's requirements," Zombro says. "That's what's pushing people out the door. It's not the kids — it's the frustration. Fifty percent of teachers are turning over within the first five years. I mean, yikes!"

Trying to make it better

We are all trying to make education better for our children. Funds are allocated for various special needs, new programs are launched, new approaches to teaching mandated and scripted for us, new textbooks to replace the ones that were the newest and best just two years ago, more and more paperwork and meetings required of teachers, SO much testing, so much required “planning” written and displayed for the frequent walk-throughs, and the list goes on and on. Announcements come on the classroom TV, intercoms buzz with questions from the office, special needs personnel tap on the door with questions, children are pulled out mid-lesson for sessions with other staff members…. Truly, when I taught in the classroom it was exceedingly difficult to have the presence of mind to do much more than get through the day.

Considering how interrupted my days became and how full of extraneous demands from above that were supposed to raise our failing school out of the ditch it had fallen into, the truth is that the “good stuff” with my children happened in small handfuls of minutes squeezed in here and there. I have had occasion to look back and really scrutinize all that went on, to honestly pinpoint exactly what helped my children learn.

Where should our focus be?

The critical question here is: “How are we going to determine where the problem lies?” In my opinion, the problem of poor education in our country is never going to get fixed no matter how much money is thrown at it, no matter how many new programs are initiated – unless we first stop to figure out exactly and in precise detail where the problem really lies. Where are we really failing? If we don’t identify this exact spot, nothing will improve.

In my opinion, the exact spot for focus was hinted at in the first paragraph I quoted above. “…some education professors are clueless about kids…” The article from Harvard also hinted at where focus should be but I had to really read between the lines. They were saying that supervisors are not in agreement about what they are looking for. Many focus on the performance of the teacher. They are warm but not hot; they have not hit the spot right on.

It is my belief, and the belief that fuels us at Child1st Publications, that the very specific target we should focus on is the child. If we do not look at the child first, we will not have the wisdom to know how to remedy education in America.

What is in a look?

There was a specific time in my life I can point to when my attention turned to the child and I see that time as pivotal in my life. I was sitting on the floor with some preschoolers and it suddenly struck me. Why are these particular children having trouble remembering what we are “learning?” I intuited that they were bright children, smart, capable, confident – but they were not learning.

From that moment on, everything I did, read, wrote, observed, and studied was motivated by my need to answer that question. I became a passionate observer of children and the more I tried to get inside their heads, the more clearly I could see what was working, what was NOT working, and what in my teaching was so much unnecessary clutter. Like any other skill we develop, the more we practice, the better we get at it. And so it was. Because I was convinced that children CAN learn and that even failing kids are smart, the onus passed from the failing kids to rest squarely on ME as their teacher. I realized that if any one of my kids failed, it was on me to find something that would jive with their brains.

It was not quick

The process of studying children was not quick. It was very long, laborious, intensive, but also thrilling, amazing, rewarding beyond belief, and life changing. It all comes down to what we focus on. PhD’s all too often spend their time exchanging brilliant deductions and studies within their rarified world. Studies are conducted, articles written, new initiatives launched. Papers are published, books written, and you know what? Kids are still failing. Nothing is getting better! Dare I suggest that maybe the focus is misplaced?

In my experience, my own best learning happened on the floor at eye level with kids I viewed as the fount of all my information. Instead of asking my profs all the questions, I asked the kids most of my questions. “How did you remember that?” was one of the most frequent questions I asked as I was learning. If I tried a little strategy with a child, I would ask him, “Did this help you understand?” My grades were assigned by the kids themselves in that when I saw the lights go on, I gave myself an A. I followed their lead. I did what worked for them, and stopped doing what seemed to yield little or no benefit.

Raising the bar

The most exciting outcome of these years spent with my eyes three feet off the ground is that I have seen scores of children go from failing to way above grade level expectation. That is what happens when we get it right. When we teach in a way that we have learned from our kids, miracles happen. Rather than cutting the spelling list in half for failing kids, teach spelling a new way and increase the list by 50%. Then raise the expectation to 100% accuracy. Does this sound outrageous? It truly is not. In my little Title 1 room, I saw upwards of 70 kids every week, 2-3 times a week, grades K through 7. This approach worked across the board. Reading scores soared.

Best of all is that the cure is not rocket science. The remedy does not lie in intricate, carefully scripted new programs. As a teacher in schools, I became incredibly stressed each time administration announced a new program we had to train for. It seemed so sad to me that we had yet another program to spend time learning. I just wanted someone to say to the staff, “Take the time to study your children first.”

More information is available at www.child-1st.com.

It's a Knotty Question

“Over the last few years, a new buzz phrase has emerged among scholars and scientists who study early-childhood development, a phrase that sounds more as if it belongs in the boardroom than the classroom: executive function. Originally a neuroscience term, it refers to the ability to think straight: to order your thoughts, to process information in a coherent way, to hold relevant details in your short-term memory, to avoid distractions and mental traps and focus on the task in front of you. And recently, cognitive psychologists have come to believe that executive function, and specifically the skill of self-regulation, might hold the answers to some of the most vexing questions in education today.”

[September 27, 2009, New York Times Magazine, Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?  By PAUL TOUGH]

Mixed emotions

Seems lately I’ve been getting my brain fizzes from reading what others are saying in the newspaper. This article stopped me in my tracks. I had such mixed emotions as I read. Part of me was silently yelling HUZZAH and the other part was sad and horrified.

Recently, I have been hearing people talk a lot about executive function, and to tell the truth, several months ago I had to ask to what they referred. When I heard the answer, I was speechless. That’s all it is? Self-regulation? Years ago, we said “self-control” in reference to something quite similar. Both require the ability to go beyond what our emotions dictate at that moment, pause to think through the situation, visualize outcomes of either this choice or that one, and then to delay gratification long enough to see a desired outcome materialize. While all these skills make for a socially adept person, those same skills take a child far in the classroom as well.

That notion’s been around for a while

A decade ago I read and thoroughly enjoyed Daniel Goleman’s (1995) book Emotional Intelligence. Read the following book review from Amazon:

“There was a time when IQ was considered the leading determinant of success. In this fascinating book, based on brain and behavioral research, Daniel Goleman argues that our IQ-idolizing view of intelligence is far too narrow. Instead, Goleman makes the case for "emotional intelligence" being the strongest indicator of human success. He defines emotional intelligence in terms of self-awareness, altruism, personal motivation, empathy, and the ability to love and be loved by friends, partners, and family members. People who possess high emotional intelligence are the people who truly succeed in work as well as play, building flourishing careers and lasting, meaningful relationships. Because emotional intelligence isn't fixed at birth, Goleman outlines how adults as well as parents of young children can sow the seeds.”

It doesn’t come prepackaged

The book resonated with me because of my beliefs on rearing children. While I was shaped from birth by my parents and other adults in my life, another factor that contributes to my point of view is my age. My views were already pretty formed before it got to be really popular to let the child take the lead in her own upbringing. By the time my own children were grown, I found myself working with parents and children where frequently the child was clearly calling the shots. It was not a happy time for anyone--not me, not the parents, not the children in question. No one was having fun; the system was not working. Why? Because a child does not come with emotional intelligence prepackaged inside her like a little seed just waiting for the appropriate time to begin to germinate and grow. Young children quite simply act out of their emotions. If they want something, they will take it, or cry until they get it. Their world is very narrowly about them in the here and now. They have to be guided into thinking about things outside of themselves, such as other people, consequences to choices, etc. As frightening as it may be, it falls to us as parents to model and guide and shape them into competent, confident people.

Contrary to popular opinion

In grad school we were taught to never say no - about how damaging it is to the child to hear a negative word like that one. Bad for the self esteem, they said. At the time, I was 10-20 years older than my classmates, and had reared two children. For me, the topic under discussion was not theoretical; it was couched in absolute reality. I had struggled countless times with the question, “What should I do now?” when faced with a question on how to guide a child of mine. One particular day I raised my hand in class and expressed the opinion that if a child never hears no, he likely will never truly understand yes – both fundamental, real life concepts. The class fell silent as every eye was trained on me in disapproval.

My response to the theory of never saying no is that the only way a child will really understand what yes means is if you also teach her what no means. If you never say no, yes has no meaning. By the time a child gets to kindergarten, if she’s had no training in self-regulation, if she’s never heard “no” as a word that helps steer her in a wise direction, brace for a rough year. Some of the scariest people on earth are out-of-control kindergartners.

It starts shortly after birth

Reality is, if we want our children to self regulate, it is up to us to guide them into knowing how to do that. It means we have to think about what our role should be with our kids, what we desire their life to be like, and then view ourselves as responsible for getting them there. When faced with behaviors we are not keen on, we could ask the question: “What will this behavior of my two-year-old look like on a teenager?” Asking that question can bring clarity into many situations.

When a child is two and wants a sticky candy bar and it is getting close to meal time, he might not take  kindly to hearing “not now.” His reaction might be anything from asking again, to whining, to crying, to an out-and-out tantrum. We pretty much expect a toddler to behave this way. If he is never taught or guided into a more mature form of reacting, it is likely that as a teenager, tantrums will be the order of the day, only then the stakes will be much higher. Think “driver’s license” and “tantrum” for a really scary picture. Teaching a tiny child how to self-regulate is far easier than trying to begin when the child is already half-grown and his ability to do a lot of harm to himself and others is much greater.

Nip it in the bud

That term pretty much sums it up for me. We can far more easily nip naughty behaviors in the bud when the child is very young than we can when she is on the brink of adulthood and still choosing out of her emotions. When the child is two, nipping looks like guidance: no harm done and a lot of good instilled.

Overall, it's a knotty question. How do we find the balance between helping our children develop executive function so they can grow into highly successful adults, without completely stifling who they are?

 

Child1st Publications, LLC

More information is available at: www.child-1st.com

The Plastic Brain

One afternoon at a high school where I was teaching, I saw a student speed out of the parking lot going much too fast. Just blocks away, she lost control of her car. It flipped and crashed, and she was terribly injured. For many weeks we waited to hear that she had emerged from the coma, and one day that news came. But like often happens in similar accidents, the girl faced a life that was changed forever. She had sustained serious brain injuries, and we were told she would be in therapy for years.

One tiny ray of hope in tragic situations like these is that while a brain injury can result in loss of movement or capacity, our brains can often find alternate ways of functioning when one area is damaged.

The Brain and Plasticity

I came across an article the other day entitled “Scientists Study the Way the Brain Can Heal Itself.” (http://www.journalstar.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/article_2ae1fa36-dbcd-5831-8bec-f46778086c67.html) The author speaks about the plasticity of the brain: “Plasticity means an injured brain can reroute signals through existing pathways and grow new connections between cells. It means the mind in some cases, and given the right prompting can begin to heal itself.”  

"For years what we have taught people is if you had right-sided weakness, just learn to write with your left hand," says Dr. Ross Zafonte, director of rehabilitation at the University of Pittsburgh. "This was probably the wrong thing to be teaching, because the brain is plastic [so] use facilitates recovery."

In a technique pioneered in stroke victims, patients struggle to use hands rendered nearly useless by brain damage. Many of the stroke patients show marked improvement after just a few weeks, and scans show increased activity in brain regions surrounding areas affected by the stroke.

Researchers believe the physical act of trying to use the weakened limbs can create new connections between existing cells. The training also may prompt the brain to recruit previously unused cells and pathways, a process neuroscientists call "unmasking."

"They're there already!" Bach-y-Rita [Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, a University of Wisconsin rehabilitation specialist] says of the pathways. "The brain is incredibly plastic, but it doesn't happen unless you demand it."

Plasticity and Learning Disabilities

Having taught in schools for several years, I have become very sensitive about the topic of learning disability, about how frequently children are given a label that implies that their brains are not functioning properly.  I’ve worked mostly with children who have been identified as struggling with learning in some way, and while I am passionate about not labeling children, I also understand that there can be serious blocks to learning and functioning for which there are no easy answers. The last thing I would want to do is yell “try harder!” to a parent who already feels that they have knocked on every door and asked every question and tried every known remedy.

On the other hand, I have personally seen too many cases in which children have labels heaped on them – multiple labels – and yet we discovered ways to facilitate learning for them. In those cases, I do  yell, “Try Harder!” And it is children like these that concern me right now.

One student whom I will never forget had the dubious distinction of having the most labels of any child in our school. To put this into perspective, our school was in a very depressed area, and we had multiple classrooms for each grade level. We also had a high number of failing students. So for Rob to have the highest number of labels was quite a distinction indeed. There were some things I did to help Rob, one being keeping him right under my nose when we had instructional time so I could track how he was doing. Another strategy that proved powerful for Rob was using finger-mapping as we studied the structure of words. This simple strategy apparently provided the missing piece in Rob’s understanding because by November, when he was tested (DIBELS), Rob was on grade level for reading. The next student study meeting in which Rob was discussed proved very interesting. Consternation abounded over the fact that while his IEP had recently been updated to reflect his myriad disabilities, he was now testing normal--it  threw a huge spanner into the works.

This experience with Rob and many others like it strengthens my resolve to keep getting the message out by any means possible: we simply must not give up on our children. While we cannot be guaranteed perfect restoration and healing, children do have an amazing capacity to learn and grow, many times far beyond what we would have believed possible. It makes it easier to hold on to hope and to move forward, knowing that we have such an amazing ally in the plastic brain which loves to learn and improve as it is used.

I do feel hopeful. When I read that scientists and doctors are beginning to strive for increased function in cases that seemed hopeless, it energizes me to keep on looking for more ways to stimulate the brain to learn. One thing we just can’t afford to do is stick to the status quo.

Research

    Phonics Reading Program for Visual Learners- Philosophy & Field Test Data

HELP FOR STRUGGLING READERS

 When I  began teaching preschool in my own center in 1991, I noted that some children picked up the concepts of letters, sounds, and numbers very easily, while others seemed to have learning issues and could not seem to retain what we taught them.

     It became my goal to find ways to help these children learn and remember. Subsequently, it became my passion to create materials that could be used by any teacher with any collection of children, regardless of background, preparation, or ability. What resulted at first was our visual alphabet and our stylized sight word collection.

     I spent the ensuing years working with students who "cannot learn," painstakingly creating visual and kinesthetic bridges for them. I focused on discovering where the gaps in understanding were, and then on creating "bridges" that allowed those children to learn and recall as well as other children did. Each visual in our Dolch sight word cards collection came as a result of asking children questions such as, "What does this look like to you?" "What does this remind you of?" And then, "How did you remember that?"

MULTISENSORY AND VISUAL PHONICS - HOW IT WORKS

The Child1st phonics reading program for visual & kinesthetic learners harnesses two powerful regions of the brain in which learning is unconscious, and recall is instant. No other parts of the brain are quite as powerful in the learning process as are the visual cortex and the cerebellum. Pictures of patterns and maps are "snapped" instantly in the visual cortex and are recalled intact when the information stored in them is needed. For struggling readers, motions learned are stored in the cerebellum and are also powerful means of recalling information that was attached to the motion during the learning process.

READING ASSESSMENTS - FIELD TEST DATA

Eight kindergarten teachers, and a handful of special education teachers have tested and used this approach from 2000 to 2005. The kindergarten classes are regular ed classrooms with 17-24 students. I supervised the progress of these teachers in order to continue to refine lessons with an eye to meeting the needs of all students.

     I have used this material with small groups of children just beginning to master basic skills (ages 4-6) and small groups in a Title 1 setting (grades K-7). I have also used the visual alphabet and Dolch sight word cards with ELL students, and in whole group inclusion classrooms (grades 1-2).

     My first formal group consisted of preschool and kindergarten children ages 4-6 that were learning to read. Most of the children were not "traditional learners," and they were my impetus for creating this approach to teaching of reading and math (Kid Friendly math series). I later realized that the children were not struggling learners apart from the fact that I had approached teaching them from a very left-brain stance. I was the one that had to adjust my approach with them, and what a difference it made!

     We began our school year in September. I began administering assessments in March. Assessments I gave included Phonics Master Inventory (Blends & Digraphs, Number of Syllables, Base Words & Affixes, Plurals, Vowel Teams, and Two Consonant Endings), Features Spelling, and John's Basic Reading Inventory with Graded Word Lists-Form A and Oral Reading Passages-Form A. Testing revealed a range of reading levels from 2nd-4th grades.

 

Learn more about multisensory phonics at www.child-1st.com