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4 Learning Principles from Neuroscience: If You Have and/or Work with Young Children, You Should Really Read This

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  Helm and Snider (2020) recently published a text titled, Growing Child Intellect: The Manifesto for Engaged Learning in the Early Years , which offers a strong argument for why the Project Approach to learning should be front and center in early childhood (PreK-2) classrooms. The Project Approach involves teachers organizing and integrating learning objectives and standards into intellectually stimulating, authentic, student-driven projects. Successful project products (e.g., a brick courtyard path created by preschool children) and their processes are shared throughout this engaging text. Though I encourage anyone interested in learning more about The Project Approach in the early years to read this book, it is the authors’ brain-based justification for using such an approach that I highlight here. Specifically, Helm and Snider offer an amazingly accessible synthesis of how and why our understanding of learning has changed in recent years. Rooted firmly in contemporary neuroscienc
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Should We VTS in Preschool?—100% YES!

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  Do you consciously use visual thinking strategies (VTS) to understand new pieces of fine art? Do you use them to make sense of other images? VTS are often incorporated into museum programs; visitors and researchers alike describe this meaning-making process as an invigorating experience. Cognitive psychologist, Abigail Housen and former MoMA director of education, Phillip Yenawine, originally developed VTS in 1991 to expand museum visitors' visual literacy skills. Today, VTS is used in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms across the country as a means of cultivating visual literacy and supporting comprehension. New research suggests VTS even builds preschool children’s visual literacy capacities and that it nurtures their oral language development (Yenawine, 2018)—a key contributor to reading success. So, how can you get started using VTS with your students and/or children? The first step is to select an appropriate piece of artwork. Finding images that make good us
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Are You Addressing All 6 Early Childhood Math Standards? This Thematic Children’s Literature Matrix Can Help

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  Did you know that  research  suggests children who enter kindergarten with a solid understanding of preschool-level math typically perform better on measures of math and reading achievement years later? It’s true! But, what specifically do preschool children need to know, and how can we best support their conceptual knowledge? According to the Development and Research in Early Math Education ( DREME ) Network, math experiences in the early years should aim to build conceptual knowledge across all six major math subareas ( Number Sense, Arithmetic Operations, Algebra, Geometry, Measurement, and Data Analysis and Probability ). Research also tells us that the amount of math-related talk teachers engage children in influences the depth of their conceptual understanding and that children’s books offer an entry point for math conversations (Klibanoff, Huttonlocher, Vasilyeva, & Hedges, 2006).This fact often makes me wonder if I am engaging my daughter in enough intentional math ta
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The Importance of Exposing Young Children to Wordless Picture Books

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These days it seems that teachers and parents are devoting an ever-increasing amount of time and energy to supporting the decoding efforts of very young children. In the varied preschool and kindergarten settings I observed over this past year, automatic letter recognition, noticing the distinct sounds in words, mapping sounds onto letters, and blending sounds to make new words were common instructional focuses. On the one hand, this is encouraging news—a mountain of research suggests that these skills are prerequisites to the development of fluent reading. And, they haven’t always been targeted in early childhood settings. On the other hand, whenever we increase the amount of time and energy spent on one component of learning to read, we risk decreasing the amount of time spent on equally important components. In his book, The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads , cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham warns us of this phenomenon: “When we con
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Help Children Regulate their Emotional States for Better Learning

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Emotional states (fear, disgust, sadness, frustration, anger, anxiety, curiosity, joy) are created and regulated throughout our bodies and they take processing priority in our brains. Simply, put our emotional states play a key role in influencing our behaviors. Likening our emotional states to weather, Jensen (2003) emphasizes their unstable nature: “States create ‘weather’ conditions in our brains at every moment…this weather usually changes every few seconds” (p.1); however, unlike the weather, he maintains that we have some control over our own emotional states and the states of others. This is good news for educators and parents. Through careful observation we can learn to read children’s emotional states which better positions us to help them move, if necessary, into a state more conducive to learning.   You might begin working towards this goal by carefully watching a single person and making a prediction about their emotional state; then, use the person’s behavior to check yo
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Nurturing Creativity during Covid-19: Have You Tried ScratchJr?

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My daughter, Gabi, began working with ScratchJr about two weeks ago; the intensity of my longing for the moment she realized the potential of this coding platform for young children is on par with my eagerness for her to enter the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Knowing her well, I’m confident both experiences will blow her mind and nurture her creative spirit.   ScratchJr was created and is maintained via a collaboration between the DevTech Research Group at Tufts University, the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, and the Playful Invention Company. Professor, Mitchel Resnick, heads up the MIT Media Lab where he developed the original version of this coding platform for older learners ( Scratch ). In his book,  Lifelong Kindergarten , Resnick (2018) acknowledges America’s highly problematic obsession with standardization and standardized testing and he poses the question,  “How can we encourage and support creativity in an era when standardized exams set the agenda for
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Antiracism Education and Young Children

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Young children notice differences everywhere. Though parents may find children’s utterances specific to the differences they observe among people off-putting at times (my five-year-old is the first to question anyone not wearing a mask in public), it is important to realize that children’s acknowledgements of human differences are not only natural, but desirable. A sincere curiosity to know more about the diverse world in which we live should be celebrated and cultivated. Encouraging children to notice and appreciate racial and cultural differences is one way to promote an antiracist worldview.  Additionally, we should not wait to engage children in conversations and experiences centered on the examination of differences. Research suggests children as young as six months old not only notice racial differences including skin color and hair type, but that they also begin to form racial biases (e.g., demonstrating a preference for interacting with members of their own race). Lack of expo
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