A Guide to Early Years Practice

Sandra Smidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134117987
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is a practical, accessible guide to early years practice. The author examines current theories about how children learn best and focuses on how we can support and extend the learning of young children. This fully revised edition discusses Birth to Three Matters, the new Childcare Bill and the development of children's centres, and has additional focus on the Foundation Stage Profile

Packed full with case studies, the book offers:

• practical advice on how to successfully involve parents as equal partners in the education of their children
• guidance to ensure that the activities and support offered to young children will promote learning across a broad and balanced Early Years curriculum
• a focus on special needs, multiculturalism and multilingualism, play and culture, and the importance of interactions with adults and with peers.

Essential reading for students on Early Years courses, this book is also invaluable for practitioners, who can use this text as the starting point for developing their own methods within the frameworks of statutory documents relating to Early Years education.

Chapter 1

Understanding how young children learn best

Michael Chung is four years old. He goes to playgroup four mornings a week. At home his family speak Cantonese and English, and Michael is fluent in both languages. One morning Michael arrives at playgroup. He takes off his coat and hangs it on his peg. He greets all the adults and heads straight for the home corner. He selects a doll, carefully undresses the doll and then places the doll in a plastic bucket of water in order to bath her. He holds the doll in one arm whilst he pretends to squeeze shampoo from an empty bottle on the doll’s head. He rubs the head gently, using one hand to shield the doll’s eyes and all the time he talks to the doll in a crooning voice, saying things like ‘Don’t cry. It will be all right. It will be nice and clean.’ When he is satisfied that the doll is clean, he lifts her out of the water, wraps her in a towel and starts to dress her. First he puts on a disposable nappy, then a vest, then a ‘babygro’. That done, he picks up an empty feeding bottle and begins to feed the baby, this time singing to her. Finally, he puts the doll on his shoulder, pats her back and puts her down in a box which serves as a cot. Then he leaves the home corner, and goes over to a table where writing materials have been set out. He selects a blank booklet and begins to make marks on the pages, working from the front of the booklet to the back. Finally he takes a pencil and carefully writes his name on the front of the booklet and places it in the pocket of his coat to take home.

An everyday event in any playgroup, nursery or group. Nothing that Michael did was remarkable or surprising, and most people observing Michael would have said that he was playing in the way most young children play. But this little vignette tells us quite a lot about Michael and gives us an insight into what he already knows, what he can do, what he is interested in and how he chooses to spend his time. Information like this is essential to anyone working with young children.

In this opening chapter we will look at what is currently known about how young children learn—and, most crucially, we will examine theories about how young children learn best. We do know that young children can be taught to do many things in many different ways. Our concern is to examine the best ways to promote learning in young children.

What we mean by learning

‘Learning’ is a word we all use frequently and often without really considering what it means. It is a word we use to describe an enormous range of experiences and events.

Think about these statements:

‘I learned, early on, that I wanted to be famous.’

‘Children learn through play.’

‘When I first learned to read I couldn’t get enough books.’

‘Jamie learned to talk at nine months.’

‘I learned to drive.’

‘At school I had to learn poetry off by heart.’

‘I never learned another language.’

‘I used to hate olives, but then I learned to love them.’

If you analyse each of these you will find that we sometimes use the word ‘learning’ to talk about how we acquire skills—learning to drive, to walk or to use a knife and fork, for example. We use the word to talk about how we acquire attitudes—learning to enjoy the books or appreciate the taste of olives. We use the word to describe how we appreciate how to relate to other people. In short, the word ‘learning’ is a broad term that defines what happens to us in a range of circumstances and over an indefinite period of time. You will know that children learn at home, in the playground, at school, in the streets. Learning happens all the time.

What some people believe is actually happening when we learn is that connections between cells in the brain are laid down and strengthened. So, ‘learning’ also has a very precise meaning. At birth, the human infant has all the brain cells needed for human development. In order for the human being to function, however, connections or pathways need to be formed between these cells. You will have read that learning during the first five years of life is more rapid than at any other time. This is why the early years of life are said to be so crucial in terms of learning.

Some research has shown that these neural pathways are formed most effectively through experience. Each time a child encounters something new and interesting, the child explores the new object or situation, and as he or she does, connections between brain cells are laid down. However, there are dangers in just accepting this statement without more careful consideration. Most of the research done has been done on privileged children from privileged backgrounds. Certainly children learn through their experiences, but not only children from privileged backgrounds learn. A learning experience can be going for a walk by the river, making chapattis with your mum, helping in the house or sitting quietly and looking at the sky. We need to be sure that we understand that children will learn without expensive toys or resources.

Think about all the things you have learned in the past four years. Now think about all the things that you think Michael has learned in the past four years. What do you find?

Your list might have included things like:

• learned to make meringues
• learned to use an electric drill
• learned to tango.

In the list of what Michael has learned you might have included things like:

• learned to sit
• learned to stand
• learned to walk
• learned to use both hands in conjunction
• learned to understand and speak two languages
• learned how to bath a baby
• learned how to use a pencil
• learned how to behave at playgroup.

You will realise from this how accelerated learning is in the first few years of life. As we get older we do continue learning, but the rate at which we learn decreases dramatically. And do remember that our learning does not depend on money or toys or advantage.

So, we have established that learning appears to mean something very precise in terms of what happens physiologically. Many researchers and theorists have studied the development of children, and their work is useful to those of us working with young children as it gives us a framework in which to plan our work. It also helps us to justify what we do to parents and to other workers. We will start by looking at some of the things the most influential theorists have to say, and later in this book I will refer to them to support what I am saying.

The work of Jean Piaget

We will start by looking at the work of Jean Piaget, a Swiss theorist who studied his own children and children in groups. We will start with him because he is the theorist who is best known in the United Kingdom, not because he is the most important. His work is, however, important for a number of reasons. In the first place, he was the first person to show that the human infant is not passive, but actively tries to get meaning from all the experiences he or she encounters. Prior to this, people had believed that the infant had to be ‘fed’ experiences, but Piaget showed that the human infant is an ‘active learner’. Many people, when they first encounter this idea, think it refers to the fact that the infant is physically active and learns through this. Piaget meant, however, that the human infant is mentally or cognitively active. In other words, the human infant is busy trying to understand the world, and each experience results in changes in mental function.

To explain this, Piaget used the terms ‘accommodation’ and ‘assimilation’. Assimilation is seen as the process of taking in new information, of adding to the existing experiences and sometimes changing these. Remember that all of this happens in the brain. Accommodation is the next stage of learning and is when the child or infant uses information in the brain in order to adapt to the environment. You will realise from this that Piaget saw accommodation as the higher-order cognitive process, the one that allows us to solve problems.

The second reason for looking at the work of Piaget is that his work has had a profound effect on the school system in England. In his work he speculated that all children passed through clearly defined stages of development. The first stage, which he called the Sensori-motor stage, lasted from birth to the age of two. The second stage— which he called the stage of Pre-operational Thought—lasted from two to about seven. The stage of Operational Thought followed and was thought to continue to the age of about eleven. The final stage, that of Formal Operations, continued into adulthood. You will realise that these stages correspond closely with the English schools system: nursery/ infant from three to seven; junior from eight to eleven; secondary from eleven to adulthood.

Now it is important to note that although Piaget’s work was very important and influential, much of it has been criticised, and the largest body of criticism relates to this stage theory of development. At first glance you may think that what you have read so far makes sense. To anyone involved with children it is clear that children do develop and that the behaviour and learning of a seven-year-old are very different from those of a three-year-old. Piaget, however, tended to focus on what children could not yet do rather than looking at what they could do.

Think about the example which follows and see what you think you can deduce about what the child knows and can do and about what the child cannot yet do.

Four-year-old Rehana paints a picture at the easel, takes a pencil and makes some marks in the top right-hand corner of the page. The first mark is clearly an attempt at the ^‘R’ with which her name begins.

If you were considering what she knows, you might say that she knows that she ought to write her name on her painting and that she knows the first letter of her name. If you were considering what she doesn’t yet know, you might say that she doesn’t yet know how to write her name properly. For those of us working with children it is much more important to know what children already know and can do. This allows us to plan what to offer them next in order to help them take the next step in learning.

In devising the stages, Piaget tended to focus on what children could not yet do. This is particularly true of children in the Pre-operational stage, which is the stage that most concerns us. According to Piaget, children under the age of about seven are not able to think logically or to conserve ideas of number, length, capacity or volume. Piaget’s theories about this stage came from a number of experiments he did with children where he gave them tasks to do. Many of these are well known, as, for example, giving children two identical lumps of plasticine and then dividing one lump into a number of smaller lumps. The child was then asked ‘Are they the same?’ Younger children tended to answer that they were not the same, that the lump that had been divided up into several smaller lumps ‘had more’. Some critics of Piaget point out that since the children had witnessed the adult dividing up one lump of plasticine, they must have assumed that this had to be a trick question. Other critics suggest that the children couldn’t see the point of the activity or of the question and so tended to give the answer they thought the adult wanted to hear.

Piaget also said that young children in the Pre-operational stage are not able to take on the perspective of someone else. In other words, young children are what he called ‘egocentric’: they see themselves as being central to everything and cannot see the world from anyone else’s point of view. He did not mean that young children are selfish, but that they cannot mentally put themselves into the position of someone else. To illustrate this, he carried out an experiment involving three papier mâché mountains. The young child was placed in front of these models and then a doll was put in a position offering a different view of the mountains. The children were asked to select the drawing which showed the view the doll could see. Very few of these young children were able to do this; they tended to select the picture showing the view they could see. For Piaget this was evidence enough.

How do you feel about this? Have you encountered young children who are able to demonstrate that they are able to appreciate what it feels like to be in someone else’s shoes? How about the child who rushes over to comfort a friend who has fallen and grazed her knee?

Martin Hughes (cited in Donaldson 1978) tried a different experiment to demonstrate that young children are able to take on the view of someone else. Children were told that a teddy had been naughty and were then asked to hide the teddy from a policeman doll. Many of the young children were able to do this. The reasons for this are both interesting and directly relevant to our work with young children. Hughes believed that these young children were able to ‘decentre’ (that is, to take on the views of another) when what they were asked to do made sense to them. He also believed that young children demonstrate what they know best when they are able to draw on their previous experience. In his ‘Naughty Teddy’ experiment he felt that many of the young children had had experience of hiding things or of hiding themselves. They also might have had experience of being ‘naughty’ and could see why the teddy might need to be hidden from the policeman.

A final word about the work of Piaget. He did his work on his own children and the children of his peers and colleagues. All of these were white, privileged children—mainly boys—and the conclusions he drew cannot straightforwardly be used to apply to children as such.

A pause now, to draw breath and to pull out the two main themes of this section:

Summary

• From birth, human infants actively seek to understand their world.
• Young children learn best when they can see the purpose of what they are doing and when they are able to draw on their previous experience.

The work of Margaret Donaldson

Let us now turn to the work of a more recent theorist, Margaret Donaldson. She was one of Piaget’s fiercest critics and the person who motivated Hughes in much of his research. In her book Children’s Minds, published in 1978, she looked at how children are taught when they first start school and related it to what was known about how young children learn. The learning that children are required to do when they start formal schooling is what Donaldson called ‘decontextualised’, which means that it is not rooted in a context. Take, for example, children being asked to colour in a set of balloons on a worksheet. This is not something that is set in a context that makes sense to young children. Why are they being asked to do this? What purpose does it serve? Will it matter if the big balloon is red rather than blue? As a contrast, you might like to consider the young child painting spontaneously at an easel and selecting which colours to use.

Abstract learning—which describes much of the learning children do at school—is very difficult for young learners. They need to be able to draw on their previous experience and to use practical tools and activities to help them make sense of what they are doing. Of course, all children do nee...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Chapter 1: Understanding how young children learn best
• Chapter 2: How to support and extend the learning of young children
• Chapter 3: The new Childcare Bill
• Chapter 4: Introduction to the Curriculum guidance to the Foundation Stage
• Chapter 5: Living and communicating in a social world
• Chapter 6: Understanding and explaining the physical world
• Chapter 7: Exploring the world and expressing ideas
• Chapter 8: Ensuring equality of access and opportunity
• Chapter 9: Documenting what children do
• Chapter 10: Partnerships with parents
• Bibliography