ExchangeEveryDay Past Issues

I can't let the week end without responding to the NY Times article, Studying Young Minds... "...teaching basic academic skills, now largely the realm of tradition and guesswork," "In a typical preschool class, children do very little math." and other observations of the author are insulting to early childhood educators who have been teaching and trusting young children to learn math, physics, geometry, science, architecture, etc. for many, many years. The work of Caroline Pratt who developed the unit block principle in the early 1900s; Mary Baratta-Lorton's Mathematics Their Way, written in the 1970s; and Constance Kamii's Young Children Reinvent Arithmetic, are just three examples of early childhood educators who knew that children's brains can grasp and act on sophisticated concepts when the environment is geared to their way of thinking. It's encouraging that cognitive neuroscience is supporting what many early childhood educators have known for decades. Children love learning and our jobs is to avoid putting unnecessary obstacles in their way.

I am looking for my former Training Specialist Ms. Susan Speroff. We met in Vogelweh, Germany back in 2000. Your email address was ....elmendorf.af.mil, not working anymore. Last I heard from you, you were in Alaska. I would like to hear from you again.

EOrtiz

I think that there is a lot of misinformation fueling the debate surrounding academic and play preschool programs. The author of the article reveals what all of us play based promoters have known all along: Young children can learn amazing levels of math, science, or any subject for that matter as long as it is put into a meaningful context for them. Describing the child's understanding of division by distributing candy to play animals is a prefect example. Had this same concept been presented in flashcard format or in a worksheet or other 'structured academic' format it would most likely have been lost on a young child. Those of us who advocate for children and play understand how to promote active learning by listening to children play and providing a meaningful context for understanding and learning.

I spent 20+ years in a Montessori classroom - studying the philospohy and methodology of Dr. Maria Montessori, as well as observing the children's learning in the Prepared Environment. Children can most definitely grasp all four math operations during their preschool years. The key to success is presenting the concept when the child is ready for it, in a manner suited to the individual's learning style.

I think the "fear of academics" is not at all a desire to avoid teaching math, science, or reading to young children. On the contrary, the tests, the expectations of this push-down appear strongly related to innappropriate conceptualization of how to succeed in teaching the subject matter appropriately to the age group, and how to assure that children's curiosity and eagerness to figure out the meaning of what they observe turns into a continuing motivation to achieve.

The Times article referenced above was full of categorical statements about young children that are patently false. For example: "In math, there is no faking it. Children either know that five is more than three, or they do not. Either they can put number symbols in exactly the right order, or they cannot."

On the contrary, young children who are just developing a basic grasp of concepts like numerical quantity and sequence typically appear to "know" things one day and not know the very same things the next day. That's one reason why standardized test results for young children are so unreliable.

Another statement from the Times: "In a typical preschool class, children do very little math. They may practice counting, and occasionally look at books about numbers, but that is about it." The mindset behind this reporting is the same one that looks at children's play and assumes that nothing of importance is going on. In fact, research by Herbert Ginsburg and others shows that children's socio-dramatic play is often filled with mathematical thinking and problem-solving.

I am not sure this really contradicts basic developmentally appropriate practice (before the latest edition!) Piaget called preoperational children "little scientists" and dividing candies into three groups would seem to be a form of one-to-one correspondence. The information about letter-sound correspondence is consistent with Piaget's concrete operations stage.

Regarding early division: Distributing candles among three toy animals is not necessarily dividing. If the child gives one candle to each animal in turn until all (say nine) of the candles are gone, the child does not have to divide nine into three equal subsets. As David Elkind was known to say, "You don't make the child smarter by making the task easier." But young children do have great knowledge of qualitative comparisons such as more, a little more, and a lot more. And young children do understand the implications of a trend. Perhaps we should emphasize continous variables in early math more than the discrete variations of counting. Perhaps we digitize the world of flow too early for young children.