Frequently Asked Questions
Pre-School
With Augusta Mann

QUESTION: How do I create opportunities for individual activities in a group setting of mixed ages in Head Start (1-5 years)?

ANSWER: An environment rich in manipulative materials, including computers, and audio recorders/players will make it easier to design varied individual activities for different ages. To constantly add to your ideas for activities, make a habit of browsing through lots of early childhood journals and books and visiting other classrooms in your school and in other schools as often as you can. Also, I’m sure you know of some internet sites that are full of ideas for independent learning activities and can exchange the addresses of interesting sites with other teachers.

For example; one site: http://www.perpetualpreschool.com is an “Editors’ Pick” and has a section “Learning Environment” with ideas from other teachers that you might find helpful.

Teachers in your school and neighboring pre schools could join together and maintain an “idea exchange” using e mail or video conferencing if available, or fun after-school “pot luck” dessert sessions once a month.

QUESTION: Is it positive to teach Head Start children both English and Spanish at the same time, during the same lesson? What is the best age to start teaching a child a second language?

ANSWER: As we know, children have a wonderful capacity for learning languages. If young children hear multiple languages spoken daily in the context of everyday activities, from birth on, they will learn these languages and develop an “ear” for the various phonemes and nuances of each of the languages. I think this continual informal, yet intentional interchange of native and second and third languages in the context of familiar experiences is the best “teaching” of languages to young children.

Songs written with lyrics in two languages are a wonderful opportunity for bilingual experiences for young children. If you don’t yet have the three books below, you may find them rich in material for bilingual study and practice in Spanish and English. Two are by the author Jose-Luis Orozco: Diez Deditos Ten Little Fingers and Other Play Rhymes and Action Songs from Latin America and the award-winning book: De Colores and Other Latin-American Folk Songs for Children. A third book: The Great Children’s Songbook Edited by David Eddleman has some excellent songs with both English and Spanish lyrics.

If you can find these types of bi-lingual song books together with audio taped recordings, the options for their use increases.

Young children also may enjoy seeing charts of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese and Japanese symbols for common words.

QUESTION: We are considering having a small journal in our classroom for children to have access to at all times. Is this prewriting activity appropriate for children ages 18-36 months?

ANSWER: Children daily seeing and hearing their teacher writing his thoughts in his personal journal is a powerful activity. They will want to mimic him and want to “write” their thoughts in a journal. This mimicking of the process of writing ones thoughts demonstrates an understanding of the connection between reading and writing and can be a very important activity in the early stages of literacy development. With very young children you may want to limit their journal “writing” to one page rather than give them an entire book to use. Maybe a loose-leaf notebook can be used as the children’s journal, and then children can “write” their thoughts on separate pages that are then placed in the journal.

QUESTION: In the Heads Up Satellite Head Start TV program Augusta spoke of “teaching up” not right on the level of the children. How is this Developmentally Appropriate Practice?

ANSWER: All highly successful teachers continually expose their students of all ages to language, information, ideas and concepts that the students do not yet have enough background knowledge and experience to fully understand. As parents we often “teach up” to our young children by using “adult” vocabulary and explanations in our discussions about the world around us—knowing that our children do not yet fully understand the explanation and language, but understand a glimmer of the ideas.

The brain takes in everything that comes to it through our senses and then stores this information. All of these stimuli is organized and gradually forms a strong foundation of language patterns and background knowledge about the world around us. It is often later retrieved when some experience provides a cue--a relationship to this “stored” knowledge from long ago. The more experiences with language and knowledge that a child has stored, the more advantaged they are in formal education.

E.D. Hirsch demonstrates examples of this “teaching up” in his popular books. In his book: What Your Kindergartener Needs to Know, he directs parents to “introduce”world history and geography. He states, “The goal in kindergarten, then, is less to explore historical events or ideas in depth than to orient the child to the past and plant the seeds of knowledge that will grow in later years.”

He advocates that parents introduce to their five year olds, summaries of some of the main features of each continent; the directions north, south, east and west; and the United States of America as a country on the continent of North America. Some of the topics in the various chapters of the book are: The Pilgrims in the New World; “Democracy”—What’s That? ; The Great Wall of China; Thomas Jefferson: The Idea Man; Theodore Roosevelt: The Teddy Bear President etc.

These subjects are normally not in the kindergarten curriculum, but as the children hear about this history, the seeds of knowledge are planted for later blossoming.

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FAQ - Pre-School