Why Preschool Matters

http://www.parents.com/toddlers-preschoolers/starting-preschool/curriculum/why-preschool-matters/

cowboy day in class, just got to love that hat?

Play or Learning, I think both, she is enjoying herself

THANK YOU EACH ONE OF YOU

I want to say Thank You to each and every classmate.  I have learned a great deal from each of you and appreciate all the encouragement and friendship you sent my way.  Thank You!

Some clever quotes about children, Enjoy

"Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up because they're looking for ideas"
-- Paula Poundstone

"I must take issue with the term 'a mere child,' for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult."
-- Fran Lebowitz

"The soul is healed by being with children."
-- Fyodor Dostoyevski

"A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer."
-- Author Unknown

"Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children. "
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Inspirational Quotes for Children

http://www.selfhelpcollective.com/inspirational-quotes-children.html

Quotes Describing Children

There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.   J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, quoted in Pearls of Wisdom

Children's games are hardly games. Children are never more serious than when they play.
MONTAIGNE, Essays

The deeds of the children are a testament to the upbringing they received from their parents.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI, Brisingr

NOTABLE QUOTES: retrieved from http://www.notable-quotes.com/c/children_quotes.html

Observing children and their play will teach us a pristine way of solving problems and having relationships.  Watching children show us how simple life can be if we do not complicate it with worries and power struggles.

Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
BIBLE, Mark 10:14

And ye shall teach them your children, talking of them, when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.  Bible, Deuteronomy 11:19

Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you the fear of Jehovah.     Bible, Psalm 34:11

Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.
BIBLE, Proverbs 22:6

I include some Scriptures to show God's respect and endearment for children and how He wants us to allow them to teach us.

Assessing the whole child

Assessment of the whole child is a more complex way of measuring the child but more complete, rather than tests that are done in thirty minutes on a computer.  What if the child does not do well with computers, or is a kinesthetic, visual, auditory learner or a mix of any of the three.  What if the child is timid or arrogant, the computer testing will not show the true child or the whole child.

My question is: is it necessary to assess the child?  As a teacher, I observe my children every day and take into consideration what each child is doing, going through, how he is advancing and what needs are obvious.  My co-leader and I discuss situations in private sessions every day, evaluating what is going on with each child. 

I understand that for a teacher of a larger class there might not be opportunity to do daily observations.  I understand that there needs to be some system of evaluating the child but sitting them in front of a computer for twenty minutes and expecting them to work through the questions with a teacher looking over their shoulder hoping they will put the right answer so that the school will look good and the money will continue to come does not seem to me to be what evaluation is intended to be.

Assessing children in kindergarten to fifth grade is a little different than my preschool class.  I know from past experience that the time for testing is very upsetting for some children, they become nervous and tense.  I believe that this time of tension causes the child to make mistakes that he would not make on a regular day. 

My daughter-in –law is a seventh grade math teacher.  I asked her how she felt about having to teach to the tests. She said that sometimes it helps her to make lesson plans and help her stay focused.  She said for her it is not necessarily a bad thing because teaching math is teaching math(she adds lots of fun activities) but if she was teaching in a lower grade with several subjects she would feel differently.  She would want to have more freedom of teaching and not have to be regulated as to how and what she taught. I would agree if I was the teacher, I would want to plan with expression.

The following discussion comes from the state of Oregon:

Definition of Assessment     Learning is the focus and ultimate goal of the learner-centered paradigm. Because of this, assessment plays a key role in shifting to a learner-centered approach. When we assess our students’ learning, we force the questions, “What have our students learned and how well have they learned it?” “How successful have we been at what we are trying to accomplish?” Because of this focus on learning, assessment in higher education is sometimes referred to as outcomes assessment or student outcomes assessment. (Huba & Freed, 2000)
We define assessment as follows:   Assessment is the process of gathering and discussing information from multiple and diverse sources in order to develop a deep understanding of what students know, understand, and can do with their knowledge as a result of their educational experiences; the process culminates when assessment results are used to improve subsequent learning.

The ability to evaluate one’s own work accurately and constructively does not develop automatically. The more intellectually immature students are, the greater the chance that their personal investment will bias what they see when they look at their own work. (Weimer, 2002)

Definition of Assessment Retrieved from http://tep.uoregon.edu/index.html

I wanted to find out about assessment in Guinea, West Africa but did not find anything.  I know that their educational system has many difficulties.  All children are supposed to go to school but many do not have access to a school and cannot afford the tuition.  The adult literacy rate in Guinea is 29%.  Meaning 29% of all adults can read and the majority of those are men. I do know from having lived there that the women who do learn to read are taught by missionary women. This is usually done on a one-on-one basis making the advancement very slow. 

West Africa, Combatting the world's lowest literacy rates retrieved from  http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=84052

 Therefore, I did research on Sweden. 

Defining Exemplary Curriculum

Section five

All the exemplary curricula reviewed held that the children actively construct their own learning. This review came out of the 1996  Ministerial meeting on Making Lifelong Learning a Reality for All.  The countries participating in the review were Belgium, Australia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.   The concepts from such a diverse group brought social, economic, and political ideas and different political views toward the education and care of young children.

The scope of the review covered children from birth to primary school. The review, in an effort to assess the experiences of childhood adopted a holistic to the study of early childhood policy and provision.
Experiential Education (EXE), a model of education developed and researched in Flanders, found that effective learning for young children takes place by attending to the child’s well-being and involvement. EXE theory and practice suggest that the most valuable way to assess the quality of any educational setting is to focus on two dimensions; the degree of the child’s emotional well-being and the level of involvement

 Swedish National Agency for Education, Childcare in Sweden (Skolverket: Stockholm, 2005), www.skolverket.se/sb/d/354/a/944.63 OECD. OECD Country Note - Early childhood education and care policy in the Flemish community of Belgium, (OECD: Paris, 2000), http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/47/40/2479277.pdf.  

Defining Exemplary Curriculum retrieved from http://www.gnb.ca/0000/ECHDPE/pdf/Section5-e.pdf

It appears that Sweden is dedicated to the education of their children.  They have a more relaxed system of assessment than does the USA.  The University of Gothenburg says that the aims of the current nation testing and assessment system is used to enhance individual education achievement, to clarify the curriculum goals of the subject and make a clear indication of the strengths and weaknesses of the individual learner, to make a concrete goals in the system and in the grading criteria, to enhance fairness and equality in assessment and in grading, to provide statistics to be analyzed on the local and national level for the achievement of the child.
SQA SEMINAR, Glasgow, 8 April 2009 retrieved from www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/files.../CfE_Presentations2009_GudrunErickson.ppt

An interesting article on assessment:
Defining and measuring creativity: Are creativity tests worth using?

Creativity tests measure specific cognitive processes such as thinking divergently, making associations, constructing and combining broad categories, or working on many ideas simultaneously. They also measure non-cognitive aspects of creativity such as motivation (e.g., impulse expression, desire for novelty, risk-taking), and facilitatory personal properties like flexibility, tolerance for independence, or positive attitudes to differentness. Raters can score the various kinds of test with substantial levels of agreement, while scores are internally stable to an acceptable degree. The tests also correlate to a reasonable degree with various criteria of creativity such as teacher ratings, and are useful predictors of adult behavior. Thus, they are useful in both research and education. However, they are best thought of as measures of creative potential because creative achievement depends on additional factors not measured by creativity tests, such as technical skill, knowledge of a field, mental health, or even opportunity. However, the multidimensional creativity concept they define indicates that assessments should be based on several tests, rather than relying on a single score.

Cropley, A. J. (2000) Defining and measuring creativity: Are creativity tests worth using? Roeper Review vol 23, issue 2, pg 72-79 Retrieved http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a918739141

Ann Hudson  Elementary Student Learning Styles Inventory Retrieved from http://connected.waldenu.edu/learning-and-perception/assessing-student-learning/item/794-elementary-student-learning-stles-inventory?pop=1&tmpl=component