Characters for the Preschoolers

Many people ask why we have a strict no character policy at school, or why I don't allow my own children to have items with characters on them. The reason is found in child development.

Dr. Montessori found four planes of development:

The first plane is the Absorbent Mind, which occurs from birth through age 6. This is when children are taking in everything through their senses and integrating that into their knowledge-base.

The second plane is the Reasoning Mind, and this occurs ages 6 through 12. Children are able to start sorting through concepts and ideas using logic, they begin seeking out knowledge.

The third plane is the Social Mind, and this occurs ages 12 through 18. Children are developing moral and social values and working on creating the adult they will be.

The fourth plane is the Spiritual Mind, and this occurs ages 18-24. Young adults are making conscious choices about morality and spirituality, finding their place in the world.

Because the preschool aged child is not yet a reasoning child, their environment should be reality based. This lays the foundation for the second plane of development.

Our jobs as educators are almost as much about educating the parents as it is the child. With so much marketing and commercialization around, people just think it is "normal" to do characters. And I think people think, "Well, I had characters and I turned out just fine."

What people forget is the we played Barbies, GI Joe, Transformers, etc when we were in the SECOND plane of development, not the first (I'm sure most people actually have very few memories of the first plane).

Characters in the first plane are not developmentally appropriate, as children cannot decipher fantasy from reality. In fact, my 7 year old sometimes still has trouble with it. I know anecdotally that I see a huge difference in the work a child does in the classroom and behaviorally between children that do characters at home and those that do not.

Hopefully policies at school can translate into how people are parenting at home, or least have people stop to think about it, and make a conscious decision, rather than just mindlessly doing what the marketers want us to.

The hardest part is often times our families have difficulty even finding non character items. Thank goodness for the new Skip Hop backpack/lunchbox line!‎ And bonus, they are small enough that preschoolers can carry with ease.

If you want to join the fight against marketing to children, please visit Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood at http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/

Book Review of Parenting, Inc.

Here is a book review of the book Parenting, Inc by Pamela Paul. I have not read the book, but it is on my reading list. I do agree with the author of the review about the direction our society has gone with media and toys, and I think this is a good refutation of marketing ploys by companies.

http://montessorimatters.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/book-review-parenting-inc-part-ii/

Technology and Media in the 3-6 classroom and Home

In our society, we hear so much about media and its evils or overuse. Some think the solution is to never expose a child to media. Some use media as a virtual babysitter. And then there is everything in between. This is just how we use media in our school, and we do, and how I personally use media at home.

We do not use television daily, weekly, or even monthly, but we do use it if a documentary or a staged production fits in with a particular theme the students are working with. For example when studying poetry we were led to TS Eliot's Book of Practical Cats and then those interested watched the London production of Cats. I have a student who is now in 6th grade and he still talks about this musical with his parents and he remembers watching it in class. We at this point do not use TV shows or movies in school. However, I would not be opposed to a fitting Sid, the Science Kid show (PBS) or another carefully screened show if it met the schools values and what we are studying at that time. And we would certainly do experiments or investigations along with it, it would just be one piece of exposure in our web of experiences.

We use computers in the classroom for research resources, for example, we are having an international fair and one class chose China so they watched the Dragon Dance on YouTube and then made a dragon and tried the dance. Ideally we would rather have live performers in, but most times that is impossible (cost, time, space, impromptuness of what they want to learn about). I would like to find computer programming to actually teach students computer/typing skills, because in our society it is important for them to learn and it is something they are interested in. However, I have not yet found software I would like to be in the classroom. Therefore, we do not have computers in the classroom for student use. The Montessori software available that I have found is just our apparatus in computer form and I personally do not feel like that is as beneficial at this age as actually manipulating the apparatus.

We use recorded music at all age levels. Sometimes as sing alongs, sometimes nap music, sometimes fun dance music, and definitely to introduce composers, instruments, and their work. Sometimes the whole class can hear the music being played, sometimes a student uses headphones to listen to Vivaldi's Four Seasons privately.

I feel that there are good points to media, used properly. A thing cannot be fundamentally evil, all is dependent on use.