Saturday 27 July 2013

School readiness and retention

I've been feeling a bit inadequate when faced with questions about children's readiness to transition to various age-groups or to school.

Studies have shown that retaining children once they have started school is detrimental to their wellbeing and has no positive benefit for their learning. This makes the decision of whether or not to retain children before school age all the more important. As most early childhood teachers working in pre-school settings have not worked in the early years of primary school I wonder how they can be qualified to advise parents in this regard.

The general consensus seems to be that children must be confident communicators and able to follow more than one instruction at a time. They must have the desire to learn, the ability to focus on a task and the ability to regulate their behaviour while doing so. They must have the emotional regulation to be able to separate from their parents and to conform to the expectations of the setting, and the social development to be able to fit in with their peers. They must also have the physical and emotional stamina to cope with five full days in an educational setting.

I have seen children in early primary school who have difficulty focussing on learning, but more typically I have seen five year olds in pre-school settings who have outgrown the informal learning environment and are therefore under-stimulated and disruptive. Recent studies are showing that quality teaching has more impact on children's successful learning than previously thought, so it's possible that children might receive benefit in either situation if quality teaching is occurring and learning is tailored to meet children's needs.

What concerns me is that some teachers seem overly zealous in diagnosing deficiencies in normal, healthy children of pre-school age and suggesting the need to retain them in three or four year old kindergarten. It seems that they feel more valid as educators if they can be seen to discover problems and fix them. The concern is that this may be particularly hurtful to parents who begin to see their children as less than perfect and start to blame themselves or their parenting.

Children vary in the temperaments that they're born with, and in their personalities that develop over time due to external experiences. Children will draw on a variety of skills in order to succeed in school depending on these innate abilities. I'd suggest looking at children's ages and cognitive abilities, encouraging a love of learning and children's positive identities as learners, and building their confidence in knowing that they can take care of their physical, social and emotional needs independently. Also, if you don't feel like an expert, refrain from passing yourself off as an expert. Encourage parents to get a second opinion. They will appreciate your honesty.

Saturday 13 July 2013

'I thought you did it for me, Mamma'

Are we allowing children enough space for their interests to unfold naturally?

Wow, wow, wow! Beg, borrow or buy a ticket to see Caroline O'Connor as Mamma Rose in Gypsy because she is incredible! (and I've seen Patti Lupone on Broadway. She was fabulous too). The whole show is incredible. I didn't realize row EE was the front row, so I had the view of a lifetime. I saw sweat, tears, and other unmentionable body parts in g-strings. Amazing! The message in Gypsy, however, is loud and clear. If you choose your children's paths in life there's a high likelihood that they will resent you or even leave you in their struggle to find who they really are.

I think children should have the opportunity to experience as much as your time and money affords. I think they should also be expected to develop a certain discipline, the ability to delay gratification, to experience success and failure, and to set and achieve goals. We need to be aware, however, that there's a difference between teaching children to develop these skills and enforcing them from outside. Internal motivation, self-belief and self-regulation are the tools that will help children to become highly-functioning adults. Internal motivation comes from love, from passion, from joy in the process of whatever it is that we're doing, building, crafting or creating. Self-belief comes from knowing that we are building on the talents and abilities that come most naturally to us, that we feel we were born to do. When we tap into these abilities we become focussed, as we feel a sense of purpose and see our skills improve in concrete ways.

Most hobbies that we encourage children to explore have positive benefits for their physical wellbeing, social skills or self-expression. Encouraging children to develop skills at a high level is okay. I had a piano exam every year for eight years. It didn't hurt me and I'm really grateful for it, but I was never forced and I can't think of any long-term negative effects that come from playing the piano. I'm more concerned when parents push children too hard in areas such as ballet, beauty pagents or modelling from a young age. Now not many people love ballet more than I do. For years I read every book I could get my hands on. I'd sit by myself watching videos of Margot Fonteyn dancing Swan Lake or Ondine, and who knows how many times I read Anna Pavlova's biography. Despite this I always knew that ballet and piano lessons were for fun. My level of natural ability in either was never going to be at a professional level.

This is where we need to be realistic with ourselves and with our children. There are natural, physical attributes required for ballet and for modelling that belong to a tiny few. Maintaining a painfully thin body without seriously compromising physical and emotional health is impossible for almost everyone. Fulltime dancing on feet that are not born for it leads to a lifetime of hobbling around in pain. Let's not project our own unrealised dreams onto our children. Let's give them every experience that we can. I can't think of anything more exciting than standing back a little, and seeing children's true selves emerge and unfold before our eyes. This is the surprise, the wonder, the magic of it. Let's enjoy it (and not forget to live out our own dreams. There's still time).

Saturday 6 July 2013

Warhol? Well I said create creativity.

A couple of weeks ago I went to an Andy Warhol exhibition in Wellington. There were kindergarten children there with their teachers. Now for me Andy Warhol brings to mind Bianca Jagger riding a horse into Studio 54 and people openly snorting cocaine off tables (and this is from someone who has never had the slightest desire to set foot inside a club). I wouldn't have considered taking 5 year olds to an Andy Warhol exhibition, but New Zealand is cutting edge when it comes to early childhood education. A lot of what's in our framework comes from there. I pretended not to eavesdrop and prepared to learn.

This is what I heard:

Teacher:
This is called screen printing. We could do this when we get back to work.
5 year old:
You mean kindy?
Teacher:
It's my work. It's your kindy.

5 year old:
Look. The queen.
Teacher:
It's our queen. Look at the colours. Do you like the pink and yellow one? How do those colours make you feel? Do they make you feel happy?

Not sure what I think about this one. I don't think the benefits would outweigh the cost involved. There was quite explicit nudity in one painting and the self portraits are pretty terrifying. The rest of the museum was fantastic for children though and all free. There were heaps of dead, stuffed animals, the only giant squid in the world that's in a museum, and Phar Lap's skeleton (and you thought he was in Melbourne didn't you? Some of him is).