I know we all want to provide the best education for our children. So, I offer a question: Should we enroll our children in the most expensive or prestigious school we can find? Or, should we put them in front of a video teaching letters and reading when they are babies? The answer to both of these questions is a definite no because learning is an active process.
Learning is an active process meaning that children learn best while doing. Watching a video is a passive activity that is not real learning. Active learning will have the children working with their hands on materials to learn math, science, or letter recognition.
A Good Preschool
A good preschool will have many materials for children to work with such as blocks, manipulatives, art supplies, books, puzzles and more.
Children learn math by doing things like counting bears or sorting them. If the child can manipulate the bears, he can put them in order by size or color. The bears can be put in a pile and added together or subtracted, As a preschool teacher, I give children the actual manipulative because they learn more using this active process. Using paper and crayons and looking at pictures of bears will not give the children as many ways to learn as actually holding the objects in their hands.
A child can watch a video about building a castle with blocks, but he will not know how to build it structurally sound until he does it himself. If he puts smaller blocks on the bottom, the castle will fall. By trial and error, the child will learn that a structure is not stable when small blocks are on the bottom, or when attempting to build a structure with a small base. As a result, the child will learn how to build the building structurally sound.
Active Learning
Active learning in literacy will improve the child’s understanding of how a story works. In class, a teacher will read a story to the children a few times. Then a teacher will encourage her students to draw the story or act out the story with props or puppets.
The teacher will ask open ended questions and help the children to achieve their retelling of the story. Children who are learning actively will learn things such as a story has a beginning, middle and an end. Also, that a story has characters, a problem and a solution.
The High Scope Curriculum has studied active learning for many years and believes that active learning is best practice. A link to their website is as follows. https://highscope.org/our-practice/our-approach/
