“Can we go to the park today?” asks three-year-old Benjamin.

We are actually in the park when this comment is made. We spend many of our days at the park. It takes me a second to understand that he is asking if we can leave the “forest” section of the park and head to the playground.  As often as we head to the park, we very rarely make it to the actual playgrounds. We tend to be the “forest gang,” but today we follow his lead.

“Yes, let’s head to the playground!” I reply. Six little friends scream with delight and dash up the 60-foot hill to the slides and swings.

When we arrive at the playground, we discover a newly fallen tree with bark and branches scattered everywhere. I hear Ave call to her friends, “Who wants to make a creation?” But her friends are more interested in the playground equipment. I see the look in Ave’s eye. The tree is her playground today—her own personal treasure box. Her brain is on fire, and her creative juices are flowing. Ave quickly falls into a play buzz all her own. She starts collecting sticks, acorns, walnuts, rocks and large pieces of bark. She makes small piles and then settles in to start her “creation.” The blank sidewalk canvas is calling to this child. She begins to design, create and investigate, oblivious to her noisy friends on the playground.

Whenever I see a play buzz like this one blossoming, I offer my services.

“What do you need, Ave?” I ask.

“Bark, sticks, acorns, rocks…treasures!” she responds. “I need more treasures!”

Her “treasures” turn out to be discarded water bottle caps. Ha! I am sure that my brain is working as hard as Ava’s as I try to decipher her request. She never looks up and never stops to show me what she means. She is that deep into her play buzz. She has tuned out the world around her—and she is engaged in deep learning. This is the educational foundation that we strive for.

“Do you want STEAM? [Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math learning] I’ll show you STEAM,” I think to myself as this child creates her own curriculum. This is not teacher-directed learning. She owns this.

This nine-foot-long “creation” took our four-year-old friend 40 minutes of intense focus, determination and math and science investigation as she tried different pieces in different places before determining exactly where each piece belonged. She worked with an intensity that would make any early childhood educator dance with joy!

There are math and science benchmarks galore in this nine-foot work of art! Deep, brain-enriching, neuron-firing play. We have art, we have math, we have science and we have beauty. We have it all in this masterpiece from the hands of a four-year-old who used to worry me because I feared that she wouldn’t be able to sit for long periods of time once kindergarten began. Ave is a mover, a creator, an explorer, an investigator. She has been a hands-on learner from her earliest days.

Can Ave recognize her numbers from 1-20? She can’t. Can she count to 100? I don’t honestly know. I haven’t worked on these things with her. She hasn’t shown an interest in these benchmarks yet.

Do I struggle with that? Yes, I do. I am well aware of what that first week of “testing” in kindergarten will say about her “readiness.” Then I remind myself that Ave’s brain may not yet be ready for number recognition and counting, but her brain is ready for this! This estimation, this dimension-building and this logical, mathematical-thinking MAGIC that is happening before my eyes.

These interactions based on experience are truly the best way to lay the foundation for early math and science learning. These are the puzzle pieces that inspire children to keep learning. Ave has created shapes, worked with non-standard units of measurement, created sets and hit spatial reasoning out of the ballpark.

Math and science benchmarks are everywhere in this nine-foot work of ephemeral art! What exactly is ephemeral art? It’s art that is temporary and never expected to last. This masterpiece, in a city park where vandalism (sadly) is rampant, will be destroyed in a matter of hours. I feel a slight twinge in my heart.

I get down on one knee and say, as kindly as I can, “Ave, I am going to take pictures of your creation because I am worried that the wind or the raccoons or someone walking at night might accidentally break it. It is so beautiful, and I am sorry that it might get broken, but I promise to share a photo of your masterpiece with your family ….”

But, before I can finish my sentence, Ave stands up and says, “Oh, I know. Can we go back now? I am starving!”

This is a child who understands nature and ephemeral art. She engages in scientific exploration and mathematical investigation. The benchmarks for number recognition, when that part of her brain is ready, will come quickly and without effort. There is no doubt that her benchmarks in other areas of math are beyond her years. You can’t teach children what their brains aren’t developmentally ready to learn. Discover each child’s passion and learning style, and the benchmarks will take care of themselves.

Time has flown since Ave made her ephemeral art in the park—and she has just turned seven. As I write this, we are in the final days of the 2020 school year—a school year that has been disrupted by a global pandemic that has brought online learning into Ave’s life. It is not going well. Ave’s mother just texted me to say that online learning is not her daughter’s forte, nor is it hers. This is not how Ave learns, and it is straining their relationship and causing stress in the family. Ave is in tears, her mom is in tears and now her former preschool teacher is in tears.

Maybe it’s time for all of us to pause during this pandemic to take a good, hard look at what education could look like in America—without screens, without testing, without walls. It could be the treasure box that we give to this next generation of young minds. Another silver lining of the pandemic.

Oh, and Ave’s art creation in the park? It was left untouched for more than two weeks. I guess the raccoons and the would-be vandals appreciated it, too. So share the love and share the foundation of education through play! Trust me, it’s STEAM learning at its finest!  Stay safe, my friends. 

So, teaching data analysis to young children seems completely contradictory to me.  How do we look at data sets and make sense of it?

Young children need to collect data that is meaningful to them.  This can be in the form of scientific inquiry such as; how many sprinkler days did we have this summer?   or, what is everyone’s favorite kind of juice? The data can then be collected and categorized into data sets.  Usually, we want to explore ideas that yield manageable data sets for young children (2 – 3 sets, ideally).  In the case of favorite juices, children may say orange, apple, grape and possibly one other.

You should tally their responses by using visual cues that can be read by pre-readers. You might draw three glasses on the top of the tag board with one filled with orange, one filled with yellow and one filled with purple.  The colors will visually represent the juice and will make sense to the children.

Under each choice, the children can write their names to represent their choice, or if they are not ready to write, you could put their photos under their choices.  You have now created a usable data set that is analyzed by the children.  The analysis should be readily seen and understood by the children.  You can ask questions of the data, for example; Which juice is the favorite amongst our group?  Which juice is the least favorite?  How many children chose each kind? etc.

Next week we will continue looking at data analysis and the young child.

In this first example, children voted for their favorite foods by drawing a picture of the food and writing its name.  The graph is simple and easy to understand.  It meets my criteria for good graphing practice because it:

1.  Creates a data set that can be evaluated and revisited later.

2.  It provides easy visual clues that quantify the numbers of choices that can easily be interpreted by children.

3.  The children can see who chose what food so those choices can be explored further.

My only suggestion for improvement would be to create a grid on the board so that each space is evenly distributed.  Otherwise, you run the risk of children gluing their choices down with variable spaces between.  This can cause confusion for the children who are still puzzled by appearances. You want your graph to be clear.

This next one is not so good, for a variety of reasons.  At first glance, this might look like the others I have presented but once I describe the process you should see where the problems are.

The children were asked to vote for their favorite color – simple enough, right?  The teacher labeled the graph well with the words supported with an example of each color.  That’s where the good stuff ends.

The children were then asked to come up to the board and vote for their favorite color using a small manipulative to represent their choice.  The basket was filled with dinosaurs and cars and animals.  The children didn’t really struggle with making their choices, you can see that from the chart but….

1.  The graph cannot be revisited.  When moved, all of the small plastic objects fell off.

2.  There is no way to know who voted for each color.

3.  The confusion is multiplied because the small objects were also colorful.  Many of the children wanted to choose an object that was their favorite color, but it didn’t make sense to them that their object and their choice didn’t match.  This didn’t make sense to any of the children in the group.

4.  The objects are variable in size and were placed in uneven spaces on the board.  Again, I would encourage you to always make a grid with even spacing for the children.

And now let’s look at the not-good-at-all.

This activity was great.  The children measured one another using the nonstandard unit of blocks.  I loved this part.  

Here, the teacher has neglected to create a clear graph for the children to “read”.  It is language-based, doesn’t provide visual clues to understanding the data, and is altogether useless.  The children can’t really revisit it or make meaning out of the data.

This could be used to create another, more appropriate graph, but that gets away from the whole primary purpose of the activity.

Graphs should be made with and for the children.  Using the ideas from above, when graphing with your children be sure to consider how they can make meaning from the data collected and then provide many useful and developmentally appropriate clues to support their understandings.

Above, you can see that this group of children chose their favorite book between “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” and “Panda Bear, Panda Bear.”  Using name cards with the children’s names written carefully across the top, and then a small picture of each child in the corner, children voted by placing their name card under their book choice.

What is good about this?

1.  Children’s names are reinforced with their photographs.  Remember, many children can recognize their own names using a variety of clues, but they may not recognize any of their classmates names.  Using the above technique, all of the children can “read” the data using the photographs as additional support.

2.  The slots for names are evenly spaced.  There is a clear one-to-one correspondence between the cards and the slots.  One card per one slot.  This helps support the children when they count the results. This also means that the children won’t be “fooled” by the votes.  They can easily see which book received more votes.

3.  There are only 2 choices.  Often, teachers are tempted to think that “more is more.”  For children under 3 I believe that choosing between 2 options is entirely appropriate.  You will also find less hemming and hawing when the children make their choices.

4.  The “graph” remains in the classroom.  Children can go and revisit their data set after the activity is over.  Teachers can ask the next day, or the next week, “Who can tell me which book had the most votes?” and children can go over to their data set and revisit the graph and figure it out for themselves.

5.  The books are familiar and recognizable by sight.   The book covers are copied and reduced in size and are completely identifiable to even very young children.

6.  If done well, children can count how many votes each book received.  It is also possible that some children can figure out how many more Brown Bear received than Panda Bear by showing them they can count on from the bottom of the Panda Bear list.  This is very difficult to do, but you may have some children who are ready for this.

Next week, we will look at more graphing examples and get lots of ideas for activities you can do with your own children.