See What Children Know
Parents across the country are enrolling their children in the Kumon Junior program for 3- to 5-year-old children. The Kumon Junior program emphasizes observable achievements in math and reading. Even parents who are not completely convinced that 3-year-olds should read and calculate still report their satisfaction with Kumon Junior because their children can recognize their own success, and this increases their self esteem and achievement motivation. Play-based programs have difficulty creating this same level of parent satisfaction, somewhat because the achievements of successful play episodes have no formal symbol system, such as print or numbers, to make explicit what is being learned.
Despite decades of research that supports the value of play for learning, creativity, and development, the school discourse about play is not closely mapped to observable achievements. Here is an example of school discourse about play that is mostly unpersuasive: “Children are learning physics when they build a tower with blocks.” This tweet is too grand. Or: “Children learn hand-eye coordination when they build a tower of blocks.” This tweet is too banal. Could video documentation improve the discourse about play? What if we watched a two-minute video of a child actually building with blocks and then created a printed notation to represent the complexity of the child’s strategies, abortive moves, substitutions, adjustments, and exchanges to create, for example, a wall with a window. Or what if we watched a two-minute video of three children negotiating roles in a pretend drama and again, created a printed notation that revealed the complexity and competence of their negotiation strategies. I am afraid that if we do not, structured reading/math skills-based programs will draw children away from spontaneous play-based programs. Play based-programs need new symbol systems that represent achievement as clearly as 1 + 1 = 2.
At Videatives, we work hard to improve the visual representation of children’s complex thinking during play. We do this by hyperlinking short video clips to key phrases in the explanatory text. This format forces one to represent what the child is thinking, since the video itself shows what the child is doing. We also create computer animations to highlight a sequence of learning during play or add a sound track that speaks the children’s thoughts (click here to see these 3 examples). We might also represent children’s achievements in play by making notations that show how they have changed a game from win-lose to win-win. Such notations might be revisited by the children, and would certainly help parents to see what children know. We hope you agree with our thoughts on this issue and will join our efforts to improve the symbol systems we use in our discourse about play. Once done, perhaps junior Kumon can be replaced with senior Play..
