The first set of refrigerator magnets we bought had 3 sets of the alphabet’s 26 upper case letters with several duplicates of commonly used letters (E, N, S, A, etc.). We kept these in a large bucket in the kitchen so the kids could play with them on the bottom half of the fridge. For […]
This week I thought I would let you all in on an exchange I had with another of the friends/colleagues/acquaintances I asked to complete the Parent Questionnaire. Although this person did not ask to remain anonymous, s/he didn’t really respond to the questionnaire, except to recount some of her displeasure with the school system in […]
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I love playing games. I really love playing board games. I grew up with Monopoly and Scrabble and, later on, Trivial Pursuit and Risk. I didn’t know until I was a teacher of young children that there are wonderful games designed specifically for very young children and most of them support mathematical concept building in […]
Last week I described the first half of Chapter 2 “Objectives for ‘teaching’ number” from Kamii’s book Teaching Number in Preschool and Kindergarten. If the main objective of education (according to Piaget) is autonomy then how does the objectives for teaching number fit? Kamii describes the difference between the “construction of number” and the “quantification […]
Camelia is a colleague of mine at the college and our offices have been on the same floor for years. She is a much-loved math professor (In case you didn’t know, this is a little unusual, as math professors often get a bad rap, simply because they teach difficult content and are blamed when it […]
Even though September 21st marks the “official” end of summer, I always think of the end of August as the end of summer – and then I am completely surprised when it continues to be hot until October. Last week we talked about change and how to prepare children for it, so this week I thought […]
In this article entitled “Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School” the author, Alison Gopnik, makes an interesting argument about the value of exploration. She references two other studies that had remarkably similar results – children who were allowed to explore materials without direct teaching about those materials explored and discovered more of the material’s attributes than […]
This time of the year we are reminded that life is filled with hellos and goodbyes, with going away and coming back. Young children do not have enough experience in and with the world to be completely sure that the people who love them always come back. It may take years for some children to […]
When autonomy becomes the aim of education, educators will attempt to increase the areas of overlap between the area of overlap between the two circles. In Chapter 2 of Number in Preschool & Kindergarten, Kamii lays out one of the most basic principles of Piagetian theory. According to Piaget, the goal of education must […]