A different child
The lively preschool class of teacher Peter and Babette has 3, 4, and 5 years old. They were talking, reading and doing several activities that concerned the human body. That morning, I saw them tape big sheets of newsprint , enough to have a child lie flat on the sheet. The teacher would trace the outline of the child’s body while everyone watched with great interest, following the hand that held the crayon, tracing from he head down to the foot.
As each kid waited for his or her turn to be ” traced”, teacher posed a question, ” What would you body look like?” Outgoing Julia drew curly locks on the head of her sketched body outline. She also drew the eye nose and mouth. ” That’s me” she excitedly told me. Many of the other drawings had the same eye, nose, mouth and hair drawing. What caught my attention was the drawing of Mar. He had a heart drawn right on the spot where it should be. I asked him if this was his t-shirt with a heart on it. ” Oh no! that is inside my body.” he said proudly. ” You see, the food enters my mouth and then goes down and around (drawing a linfe from the mouth to the intestines) and then out of my body.” Talk about a future doctor here1 Considering that he was one of the younger ones in class, I thought that his drwing was different and one that made a lot of sense.
Mar, I thought, must have a lot of learning experience at home. He could see ” inside” his body. He could explain how food goes through th mouth, down the esophagus, through the stomach ( short and long intestines) and out through the anus. He did know the scientific terms, but he knew how the food traveled inside his body. Where did he get all this information? He may have been exposed to this at home, or he might have been listening intently to the classroon discussions of teacher Peter and Babette.
Very soon, it was time to fold the big pieces of paper. The kids would bring these home to show to their parents. As I helped them fold their work. I noticed that Mar folded his paper much smaller than the others. Again this boy was doing something different from the rest. So, I played along with him and said,” Hey, Mart is that a piece of soap and scrubbing his face with it. ” or maybe a napkin?” I asked. Again he reacted quickly and pretended to wipe his mouth. This started him thinking, coming up with several ideas of his own; “a gun, a horn, a hat” and so forth. We were having a fun making up things from this folded paper, forgettingthat his classmates had long left the room.
Children need multiple experiences to be able to go beyond what is merely seen. The simple exercise of seeing things from different perspectives is considered to be a more complex stage or form of thinking. Unfortunately, many of our learning systems in our primary schools discourage such expansive thinking. Children who are encourage to speak their thoughts or listen to stories and even pretend to know how to read to make up sentences and stories, and taken to various places that would stimulate them to ask quesions, turn out to be better learners and more wholesome persons. They seem to be more interested in what they do and they do things that interest them in a better way than others do.
Parent’s and child caregivers must be sensitive to these better than average children. They have a lot of energy to learn, move, talk,and be curious about. At the same time it is sometimes difficult to limit their boundless energies. When everyone seems to be taking their time to finish their work, this child might rush through his works, because he does it with great excitement. he work may look messy, but the explanation is what counts ( such as the digestive system explained in his own way).
I would guess that teacher Peter and Babette must hae multiple antennae to be able to pick up signals on each child’s needs. In similar situations, it may be difficult for the parents who has preschooled aged kids, all clamoring for attentions, to respond positively to each of their immediate needs.
The cue here is to give your child good learning experiences or opportnities to speak their minds Allow them to think. Provide them with ample activities that suit their interest and level of development. All these can make young children turns out to be interested learners for life.