These days, I am spending every evening sitting outdoors on blankets with children where we gather to play math games. The youngest are between the ages of 3 and 5. (The 2 year olds come around, but we often have to take them back to their campsites when they start grabbing and throwing.) The goal with these little ones is simply to have them settle down and practice learning in a semi structured situation. I say "semi structured" because how structured can you be outdoors on a red blanket?. The first “lessons” are all about sorting, patterns, systematically looking at and using materials, and especially working as part of a small group with an adult. As usual the adult does much talking and avoids questions. We speak in two languages.
It’s been exciting to see children suddenly make small leaps in attention and understanding, even in this short period of time. The other day I worked with three 3 and 4 year olds who had been giving a tutor a hard time, throwing chips around and being normal pre schoolers. We started by giving everyone “Circle Sheets”, pieces of paper with rows of drawn circles the size of poker chips. Then I took a big bag of chips and instead of pouring them out, I had each child take a turn picking a chip out of the bag, one at a time, as we discussed color. All children I have ever worked with, just love to place the chips on the circles, and these were no exception. Slowly their sheets filled with chips. I took each child's fingers and we touched each chip saying the color. (This is an exercise not so much in color recognition, as a preliminary to the counting skill called “one to one correspondence”. In other words learning to coordinate what you say and what you see and what you touch.) Suddenly I heard a muttering on my right, and I looked at Francisco ,the wildest of the 3 year olds. He had covered his page, and was slowly and intently touching each chip, and muttering the color (sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in English). He worked his way systematically through all 25 chips, completely engrossed. As far as I was concerned the lesson was a success and over.
Last night I went to another orchard where a tutor was working with a two year old and a four year old. They had been sorting and building towers. I sat down with the older child, and began to show her how to arrange the plastic dowels side by side instead of in a tower. At first I handed her each one, saying the color. Then just for fun, I began to alternate, orange, purple, orange, purple. She never said a word, but just got it immediately. She began to systematically choose her colors, orange, purple, orange, purple, trying to fill the whole board. In the end, we touched each one naming the colors. Again the lesson was over.
The three and four year olds do not do much with numbers, but the five year olds, especially those who have been in “school” all know how to count. This does not mean, however that they really understand about numbers as quantity, so we do lots of looking at small arrangements of chips, toys, and fingers and talking about them. I don’t know why, but children love to count touching their noses, so this is always part of the game. (This, like the fascination with the Circle Sheets, seems to be a universal joy. I have successfully counted touching noses with children from three continents now.) Here are a few pictures from the last week. Next time, I will talk about working with teens, the other group that really challenges the tutors. More counting, a little boy and his grandmother working with blocks.
Comments