Children’s perceptions are beautiful. I don’t know which little bits of aural information they hang on to, or why they come to conclusions, but just conversing with them is just plain fun. They say funny things like, “I fell and I think I broke my butt.” or “I have all this stuff in my nose and it’s going up in my brain and it’s hard to think.”
Sometimes they’ll get into physical humor like just falling off a chair for no apparent reason and if you don’t look worried at them, they start looking around to see if anyone saw it. That’s not even the most funny part to me; that would be the fact that lots of other kids saw it and they just kept on reading or working on whatever. It’s part of their everyday world. Just like when we see a drunk fall out of the car, I suppose.
I love the things they write, too. It comes from the heart or sometimes a book or sometimes it is merely a collection of words they are sure they spell correctly. Children write about their moms or dads a lot. Reading the writing of a child who feels secure and loved always gives my skepticism about the future, a little kick of hope.
Children learn about plagiarism the first time they read a report about the “quiet migration of these regal birds.” They look confused when asked what it means, and feel little obligation to really be able to explain it. Their idea of what a report is evolves over time. It goes from sort of winging it, copying out of a book and finally emerges as a beautiful butterfly full of misspellings and grammatical errors. We start out by reading the sentence to them and explain what it means, have them tell us how a kid might say that and prompt them to make the edit. The migration sentences turns out to be something like, “The birds are cool and look really proud. You can hardly hear them.” (You’re welcome middle school teachers.)
I had a great laugh today checking some social studies assessments. When asked about the community, one of the questions asked what was always in front of a public building (the flag). While most of the kids got it, my favorite answer was, “A door.” We also had about 30 different spellings of the name Barack Obama when we asked the name of our new president. Incidentally, one child thought the new commander in chief was Sarah Palin, another Michelle Obama and one declared it was Max, the sixth grader upstairs.
During this time of year when teachers spend hours on curriculum planning, preparation, ponder and diagnoses, let’s remember that what we teach six and seven year olds is only sometimes what they learn.
Get some sleep.
