Welcome to the Wizards of Ed

Helping Children to Understand Sequences

It’s good for children to know and understand that some things must be done first. Take the story of a child, a parent, and a fish tank.  The picture sequence tells the story of the child and adult with the empty tank, shows them adding water, then adding fish, and finally, shows them sitting to watch the fish swim around.  How do we help children to get the idea of the sequence?

It is tempting to show 4 pictures to a small group of children, or one child and ask “What happened first?”  If the child doesn’t get the idea, it’s tempting to walk the child through all of the steps until the child gets them in 1,2,3,4 order.

I suggest if a child doesn’t get the sequence idea, just tell the story and have 2 picture cards present.  Tell the story that they started with the empty tank, put the water into it, added the fish and sat down to watch the fish swim.  When the story is told a few times, the child can be asked to pick out the picture that shows the empty tank.  Then the child can be asked to find the picture of the child and parent watching the fish in the tank.  After a few more times, the child can be asked to put the starting picture in one place and the ending picture next to it.

Another day, a middle picture can be added, and when the child can do it easily, the fourth picture can be added.  When the child can set up these pictures alone, it helps to verbalize to the child that he/she has learned to put the pictures “in order” from start to end or from beginning to end by which comes first, then next.

After the child can do this a few times, another story can be introduced, and the child can be asked to put the pictures in order.  The goal is for the child to place the pictures in order without the adult “telling” the story.

Sequencing is a complex skill that can be taught in a way that the child learns to create a plausable story from the pictures.  Many children need to verbalize the story before they can figure out the order of the parts of the story.  This is an important process skill.

Telling Stories

Telling and Retelling Stories

Documentation abounds with the positive aspects of learning through storytelling.  Many education conferences have workshops on storytelling.  When children tell stories, they use words, remember sequences, and get to re-experience the event in their minds. 

You can help children get into the habit of remembering and retelling stories by reminding them about things that happened.  If the children are very young, you can make the story yourself.  It can be simple, like, “We went to Miss Mary’s class.  We saw children and teachers. We ate together.  When we were leaving, Miss Mary said, “See you soon.”

 Later that day, before dismissal, tell the story again, as close to the first time as you remember.  The next morning, tell it again.   Soon, the children will be telling you parts of it.  After a week, remind the children about the story again. 

When I was a little girl, my grandfather (Poppy) took me on a crowded bus to see a relative.  He had just put the money in the coin box when suddenly the bus lurched forward.  My grandfather fell, and quickly got up again.  But, to me, it was scary to see an adult fall down.  My grandfather was not hurt, and told me he was fine.  I told everyone the story of Poppy falling on the bus for a very long time.  I would ask, “Remember when Poppy fell on the bus?”  My story was short, but important to me.  “I went on a big bus with Poppy. Poppy fell down.  He didn’t get hurt.”  Where we were going, what we did the rest of the day, how we got home, never made it into the story.  This is fine.  A child’s story is a child’s story.

 After a while, children will need less and less help to make stories.  You can keep some index cards or a small notebook to write these stories.  Parents have been known to love these stories and cherish them.

 Children Making Stories (With Your Help)

You can ask some questions and have the children make the story.

Teacher: Where did we go today? 

Child: Miss Mary.

Teacher: What did we do there?

Child: Ate

Child: Sing

Teacher:  What did we eat?

Child: Cookies

Teacher: Did we drink?

Child: Yes.  Juice.

Teacher: Good. Then what happened?

Child: She said “See you soon.”

Child: We commed back.

Teacher:  Yes, we had a nice visit to Miss Mary’s class.  Let’s make it into a story.

            We went to Miss Mary’s room today.  We sang a song.  We all had juice and crackers. When we were leaving, Miss Mary said “See you soon”. We came back to our classroom.

 Note: It is perfectly appropriate to change some of the words to reflect use of standard English.  This is not an experience chart or a dictation where teachers write every word exactly as spoken. This is a summary of what happened, with contributions from some of the adults and children of the group.

If you like, you can write the story on chart paper and read it with the children.  And it’s also fine if you “just” tell it.  That’s what humans have done for thousands of years in all parts of the world.

Ruby Slippers – yes, another Oz reference

Lesson from “The Wizard of Oz”

All through the book and movie, Dorothy was afraid of the wicked witch. What she didn’t know was that the ruby slippers she wore had more powers than the witch.  When people don’t do things out of fear, it’s often because they don’t know that they have more power than they think they have.

You, dear reader, are wearing ruby slippers, cleverly disguised as ordinary shoes.  When you have that important meeting – with supervisors, co-workers, parents, family members planning some huge event, etc., try to remember that you are wearing those ruby slippers and that you have more powers than the witch.

When they say scary things, just stay calm, polite, focused, and repeat your point with the conviction and knowledge that you are wearing the ruby slippers.  Never let someone else’s position frighten you or make you think you are less important than they are.  You may have a lower level job, but you are not a less important person.  You may not always win your point, but you will always be proud of how you tried.

Go out today wearing your ruby slippers.  Who knows what you will accomplish!

And don’t forget to share those accomplishments here!

Values and Curriculum Choices

I speak on the topic of Values. I have identified five core values that are common to all major societies and belief systems in various degrees:

• Honesty and trustworthiness
• Respect for self
• Respect for others
• Respect for the environment
• Responsible citizenship

There are many values curriculum materials for purchase. In my humble opinion, a specific values curriculum is not necessary and having it may do more harm than good.

Why? Because when there’s a values curriculum in place, many teachers think that values should be taught in neat little lessons, and that’s all they need to do about the subject. The rest of the time, they go back to “same ole same ole”.

Teaching values should be part of every activity, every day. The choice of curriculum activities should be a careful process, and only those activities which promote positive values should be selected.

If you visit a program where the literature and the director speak of the value of each individual child and you walk into the building and see displays of “art” that look the same or very similar, you know they value the project over the child’s learning process and self-respect. 

If the curriculum doesn’t support the stated mission of the program, either change the curriculum or change your involvement with the program.

Babies and classroom walls

I am giving a presentation at the 5th Annual Citywide Infant Toddler Conference in Manhattan in the morning. It’s called “The Learning Environment: What do Classroom Walls Say to Infants, Toddlers and Families?” 

 Of course, I’ve done lots of thinking on the subject.  But, I didn’t go to take pictures at centers where I know that they have interesting and appropriate wall displays.  I should have, but I didn’t.  And when I realized it, I couldn’t since I have a broken bone in my foot and I’m suposed to stay off of it most of the time and let it heal.

So, I went to “Google Images” and thought it would be an easy job to find some appropriate pictures for my Power Point.

NOT!  I found hundreds of pictures of infant classrooms, most of them on ECE programs’ websites. You would think that programs whose websites tell people what a fabulous job they do would put up pictures that show wonderful and approproate things happening.  The overwhelming majority of what I found were examples of what not to put on the walls of infant rooms.  Extremes abounded – from totally full of clutter to stark and empty, from “cute, cute, cute” to downright scary.  Very expensive murals amazed me.  Enormous pictures of Sesame and/or Disney characters, imense jungle animals, lots of commercial stuff.  My head is reeling!  

What do YOU think is appropriate for the walls of infant classrooms?

Writing proposals – who reads them?

A few years ago, I worked with an agency that had programs at several sites.  The request for proposal (RFP) required a separate proposal for funding for each site.  The program description was exactly the same for each of the sites.  The facilities descriptions, of course, were different.  After the results were posted, the agency wanted to know why one proposal was fully funded, one was partially funded, one was wait-listed, and one got nothing.  I suggested that they ask the funding agency for the rating scores. 

The differences were due to ratings given to the program description.  How can that be?  All four descriptions were exactly the same - it was written once and copied and pasted into the different proposals

There were four different scores for the exact same narrative.  The one with the funding got nearly a perfect score, the one without any funds got a horrid score and the other were in between.  What happened?  The scores were assigned by whoever read the proposals.

Since we cannot know who will read proposals, we just have to give it a good try and hope for the best outcome.  We hope for a reader without serious psychological problems, who hasn’t had a flat tire on the way to work, whose family is not falling apart, who is not facing life-threatening illness, etc. 

When I write proposals, I do my best to put the client’s case in the best light and hope that a reasonable, unbiased, person with an understanding of the type of program seeking funds and a decent command of the language reads it and gives it high marks. 

But, as I say to every client – there are no guarantees with proposal writing.

Writing proposals – the need and the client

Writing proposals in answer to a request is a tricky task.   With a long term, established client with a history of service provision, it’s sort of a tightrope walk.  First, you want the agency to look great – see what they’ve done, and see why they should either continue to get funds or get funds for a new project or service.

 Second, but sometimes first, you want to show how badly the community needs this service from this provider.  Well, if the agency has been there a long time and the community still needs services, why hasn’t this agency fixed the problem already in all these years, or at least made significant inroads?  Why is the community still so needy?

Somehow, it’s got to meld together – the good stuff the agency has already done, the good community vibes, and the idea that despite how great this agency is, the problem is greater than one agency can solve.  It’s not an easy task. Going too far to either side weakens the cause.  Where is the center?  It’s unknown.  How does it read to a stranger?  Who’s the stranger who’s going to read it?

This is one aspect of proposal writing.

Behavior and Curriculum

We all know that children’s behavior improves when they are meaningfully engaged.  Here’s a story that took place a few years ago in New York City.  At that time, I was a member of Teaching Strategies’ (publisher of Creative Curriculum) Staff Development Network and also working as an ongoing consultant to a preschool for learning disabled children.  The staff wanted help with children with challenging behaviors and the administration wanted help in implementing The Creative Curriculum for Preschool.  I combined both during half of a school year.  The idea was to create faculty teams to investigate one classroom area at a time using The Creative Curriculm book, make whatever changes they felt appropriate and make a brief presentation of their work at an upcoming monthly staff meeting. Each team would be composed of all of the staff of two classrooms and would have about six weeks for the project.  The director suggested the classrooms for the teams.

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Concepts and Activities

Planning When planning curriculum for a week, teachers tend to have a few-word theme, such as summer fun or beach, and plan activities associated with that theme. Then they think of related learning that might be tied to the activities they’ve planned.

I ask teachers to plan educational concepts (what they want the children to learn stated in words the children in that class can understand) first, and then plan associated activities.

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