Genius vs Opportunity

The more I watch 18 month old daughter grow and advance with her language, spatial reasoning, and general understanding of the world around her, the angrier I get. If this is how quickly toddlers learn, then why did the think-tank have so many kindergartners coming to school so totally and utterly unprepared?

Before I had experienced being the mother of a toddler I had no idea how truly amazing early development is. I'd worked with toddlers, baby sat for toddlers, and had friends who were mothers of toddlers, but I hadn't witnessed for myself the true miracle of early learning. Instead I thought that perhaps my friends were just overly drilling their children with academic information, insufferably filling their poor children's heads with color flash cards or something of the sort. Or maybe my friends just all had genius children.

Now that I can watch my own daughter develop and know that I am not drilling her with flash cards, forcing her to rote count for the sake of counting, or making her use crayons to practice her fine motor at an early age, I am gaining a better understanding of how children develop. I don't think my daughter is a genius. I think she is an average child who happens to be in a home filled with books, toys that encourage interaction and imagination, and parents who talk to her.

So what about the five year olds children who enter the think-tank with nothing- unable to identify their own name, unable to differentiate between letters and numbers, not able to count to five, understand how to hold a book or how to even listen to a story? How does that happen?

I have met five year olds who have less academic skills than my daughter's two year old friends. Not because the five year olds didn't have the intelligence to learn, but because they hadn't had the opportunity.

Preschool is essential. There just isn't a debate. There is no excuse, none, for two year olds to know more than five year olds. It's not a matter of intelligence. It's not even a matter of English as a second language. It's a matter of opportunity and exposure. Regardless of whether or not we move towards a government sponsored preschool for all program, as a society we must look at how we can get our children who need the most into school environments  AND how we can work with their parents to understand what their child needs to develop successfully.

Parents need to be educated on how to talk to their child, how to read to their child, and what sort of games and toys to buy their child. If parents have never been given a model of how to interact with their toddler- never been told that it is important to read to their child- how would they know that they should?

I worked with a parent once who sent back all of the free books I'd been sending home. "We have so many books in our house," she said, "But my kids still don't know how to read so the books are worthless."
I don't think it had ever occurred to her that she could read the books to her children until they learned to read on their own.

I want to sit down and play with my daughter without getting angry. I wish I could enjoy her development without the sinking, heartbreaking realization that there are children out there who should be developing as quickly as she is and aren't.

And then... *gasp, turn page slowly*...

A few years ago my Partner in Crime and I found that we had a group of kindergarten students who absolutely had no idea how to listen to books. Most had never been read to so they had no concept of the fact that if they sat and listened books could be fun. They didn't understand that they could hear a story, or that the pictures would entertain them, or that they needed to listen quietly to hear the exciting parts. After working with our literacy coach we decided to take one giant step backwards, throw out our current lesson plans and teach how to listen to a book.

This involved many dramatic and involved read alouds. Lots of singing and jumping with the text, pointing to the words and laughing, acting out stories, asking the kids to turn the pages, and just general "read it with me" whenever we read repetitive texts. We read stories over and over again, with the same amount of enthusiasm and energy each time. We looked for books that would excite them- not our favorite books, not books with beautiful pictures or good lessons- books that would hold their attention and make them want to see what happened next.

My teaching has never been the same.

Ever since then my beginning of the year read alouds are the equivalent of a one woman play. They are dramatic and engaging and fully involve the audience. We build community and our literacy skills all together and really spend time celebrating these books. We practically sing and dance to each book. Although some of my children cannot write their names or identify the letters in their names they can pick up a book from our "read aloud" pile and "read" it to themselves. They get lost in the books just like we adult readers do. They start to build the reason why they are going to work so hard on learning to write their names and learning their letters.

Here's a few of my favorite interactive read alouds:

-Anything by Mo Willems (The Pigeon Wants a Puppy, Piggy and Gerald, Knuffle Bunny)
-Mrs. Wishy Washy
-Pete the Cat (any of the books, but especially Rocking in my School Shoes)
-The Recess Queen
-Purple, Green, and Yellow by Robert Munch
-Thomas' Snowsuit by Robert Munch (OK, I save this one for winter, but it's a great interactive read aloud)
-Rhyming Dust Bunnies by Jan Thomas
-PJ Funny Bunny


What are your favorite exciting read alouds?

Same and different

We've been working on identifying same and different with one of my students with an intellectual disability all year but the progress has been slow. It's a surprisingly hard concept to teach. It's not something you can necessarily break down into little steps- it is more of a concept that the brain grasps once it has been exposed to it enough times. We sorted and matched and sorted and matched and compared and discussed daily. 

Suddenly last week he began seeing how everything was the same. He was constantly driving his chair around the room telling me, "the same", and making the sign for same. He was comparing everything- words in our classroom, colors, pictures, smiles. All day long, all the time. And just like that, the connection was made. Once he was able to understand that the 'we' we read everyday in the morning message is the same two letter word on our word wall and the same word in other places in the room he began to be able to identify the word 'we' in other places. Before last week his progress in our reading program, Early Literacy Skills Builder, was very slow. We were repeating every lesson over and over again, aiming for 75% accuracy. Then suddenly he made the connection that things are the same- concepts in the story are the same as the questions I ask- the answers are the same as what is in the story. Words are the same on cards as they are in the book. Letters make the same sound each time- even if they are on the word wall, in some one's name, or in a book (OK, they don't, but we're not ready to get into that yet. /r/ is /r/ is /r/.  Leave it at that).  

I had never thought about what an important concept same and different is for building a foundation for general reasoning, literacy and math skills. Until our students understand same/different they are not ready to begin to read because they don't understand that letters are the same no matter where they are and that they hold the same meaning whenever they are. Otherwise they are just pictures that we float around the room as we give them arbitrary meaning. Of course in order to begin to understand same/different and how it works in literacy they need to be exposed to as much print and literature as possible, so learning this concept shouldn't hold anyone back from teaching reading. It should just remind us the importance of working on those foundational skills. 

It's been amazing to watch him begin to soak in the learning environment around him. I'm excited to see him continue to grow now that this foundation is in place.