Information Literacy - Superb Bird of Paradise

Today A. watched a documentary about jungles.

He saw a Superb Bird of Paradise.

He asked what they eat, and wondered if they ate worms.

Mummy looked them up and found out that they live in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.

They eat fruit such as yellow figs, and a variety of insects.

Information literacy is something that my family really values. I want my children to know what information they need, how to get it, to be able to figure out if the information they have is any good, and to be able to present information in ways that other people can use.

When my children don't know something I like to first get them to make a guess at the answer, but as they grow I expect them more and more to know where to go to find that information. This starts off with me modelling the ways that I find information - books, the internet, videos, people who know more than me.

My children have some ideas about how information is stored. S. is only 3 but he knows you can look things up in books. He isn't expert enough to know the difference between fiction and non-fiction and he still has the habit of picking up adult fiction novels with great pictures on the front. I recall him picking a novel because it had a picture of an orange on the front, and one with a person driving a car. "I looking up CARS!" he declared. Children first play with ideas and approximate what they see around them... this is how we first experience adult ideas, "heuristically" - through trial and error.

Only when they get more expert will they be able to unpack how what they have learned is important, or why. At the moment the alphabet is a song, or a game... but soon enough it will be a valuable tool for hunting through the index of a book, or looking up a word in a dictionary... because, realistically, they aren't going to be completely relying on Google to do that for them. They may be digital natives, but not everything is on the internet, especially the more esoteric stuff.

Sometimes I fear that my children have too many answers at their fingertips - that somehow by letting "the cloud" do the thinking they may just not bother to retain information for themselves. In the day and age where we rely on our GPS to navigate us around town do we actually learn how to get where we are going, and form internal mind maps of our location? Will we be lost if the electrics fritz out and we are left to make out way blind... or will we just use the GPS on our phone, or call roadside assistance?

That's one reason why information literacy is so important in this day and age. Things are changing so fast that we don't know what the world our children or grandchildren live in is going to be like. We need to prepare them not for the world as it is, but give them the skills they need to adapt to a world as it will be... before it changes again. We need our children to have a very sophisticated skill-set if they hope to navigate seas of information, full of opinion, spin, bias, half-truth, sensationalism, fact, fiction... lies.

Holistic Development

One of the reasons that I enjoy and value home education, is because everything that we do can be a learning opportunity in many ways. We don't have to split learning up into subject areas or ignore personal growth in favour of academic subjects. Implicit in the "subject areas" of organised curricula is what you value. It could be argued that, in a mass schooling setting, "mathematics" has a value, but "relationship building" does not. This is where the Early Childhood Education curriculum in NZ is a step ahead of the curriculum for schools, or at least how it is delivered, because it implicitly values relationship building and protecting both mental and physical health of the children. It's frustrating to me that, in my country, normally when a child has turned 6 (by law, or 5 in common practice) they transfer to a community without parents, where they are expected to meet academic targets first and foremost, and must less emphasis is placed on developing interpersonal skills, or protecting a child's personal emotional growth.

My kids attend the local Playcentre so they can meet people, make friends and use the facilities like, puzzles, blocks, playdough and art supplies. Playcentre is a network of parent run cooperatives in New Zealand, offering childcare and early childhood education by parents in the local community. It means that I can be there in a kindergarten-like environment with my kids and let them be in the company of other children and supportive adults. Playcentres receive funding from the Ministry of Education which means that they have to meet goals and be accountable to the Ministry, deliver the NZ Early Childhood curriculum (called Te Whāriki -  said "fah-ricky"), and meet early childhood statutory regulations, to receive funding from the government.

This is both helpful and limiting. One of the points of Te Whāriki is to help educators identify what learning is going on when kids play, and a way of accounting for it on paper. It can be limiting to have other people set your objectives for you, but it's also helpful in that it provides a point of view, or lens through which you can identify facets of children's progress, and direction.

I'm currently thinking hard about what the four Principles of Te Whāriki mean to me, and how they can be used to identify and plan children's play and learning opportunities. Today my sons and I did some holistic activities. They learned and practiced all sorts of things by doing one or two activities.  I challenge you to find activities that aren't holistic, because I think that all human experience affects us on many levels. Two different people could have identified an entirely different set of growth opportunities as they watched what was happening. This is one reason I really value having a co-parent. As Obi-Wan Kenobi said: "you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view". Looking at things holistically is a practice of unpacking  how your values are reflected in an activity. I'm sure there are plenty of things I haven't identified in how and what my children learn that other people would pick up. As they say "It takes a village to raise a child".

Today my boys did a jigsaw puzzle of Voyager of the Ancient Mariners. They encountered a sea serpent, compass, the equator, the international date-line, and the look of maps, the locations and sounds of the names of different continents and countries, and discussed how the map wraps around, and in the days where people explored with ships made of wood, there were no planes or cars. A. looked at Ferdinand Magellan's ship and said it looked like the ones he saw in the cartoon "The Mysterious Cities of Gold" (a story set in 1532).

The boys also did different tasks so they weren't in direct competition, practiced speaking at appropriate volumes, took turns, problem-solved, practiced conflict resolution, catagorised and sorted pieces, recognised patterns, matched like shapes, used their fine motor skills, and persisted until the task was complete. My children have in no way mastered their use of this skill and information, but the more they interact with it and use it for their own purposes, the more they will retain and use, and the more they will learn which things interest them, and which are irrelevant and boring.

Setting a precedent

Since my eldest broke his collarbone he has been doing more sedentary activities. I'm not generally keen on letting him sit around all day but it has stopped him from playing roughly with his brother, and feeling pain. He has been using his problem solving skills, attempting to learn how to play new video games despite being pre-literate and not able to follow the text prompts. He has been enjoying playing Lego Starwars and finished the story mode very quickly with minimal input from anyone else ("I think the bit that you're missing is you use the grapple hook to attach a rope to the walkers' legs and then fly around them in circles to trip them over." "oooooOOOohh").

He has also been watching a lot of cartoons. The way we do things, this means he has been watching things that we have chosen specifically for him to watch and he is streaming files off a server to watch in all their ad-free glory on the large screen TV. This sort of glorification of media is probably not ideal, but at least we know what he's watching and can talk to him about any messages he gets, that he needs to unpack.

Today the big question on his mind was "Why were Rarity and Pinky being so mean to Fluttershy? Why wouldn't they let her buy the cherry?"

So we had a discussion about setting precedents. If you do something one time, then people might expect you to do the same thing the next time. It's like if Great-Granny offers you a marshmallow when you leave her place, you want a marshmallow every time. If Fluttershy lets someone charge her an unreasonable amount for something she really wants, then next time he goes to sell her something he might want to make her pay more too... and Rarity and Pinky Pie didn't want that guy trying to get lots of money off their friend... so they were actually trying to be nice!

This all seemed to be straightforward enough... but I was asked, why was he charging so much? Because she really wanted something, he felt like he could ask her to pay a lot, because there was only one left. That's what's called "limited supply". If there is only one of something that people really, really want, then the person who owns that thing sometimes puts the price up, because people are so desperate to get it that they will pay a lot of money for it. It's called "Supply and Demand".

Further explanation proved to clarify this, but I doubt it will go in just yet. I think it helps to introduce ideas, even if they are a little bit over what a child has experience of. They can play with the ideas and might recognise a few things if they encounter this idea again. They may know what to look for in interactions with others. Just because a child seems to have their head around a concept the first time they encounter it like this, doesn't mean they are going to retain the information. We only hold onto information that is useful and relevant to us. That's why I think it's important to talk to my kids about how they make sense of their world, even if the experiences are simulated ones like in video-games and television programming. One of the great things about not relying on syllabi and curricula is that you can cover material as it comes up and when it is relevant to the person who is trying to make sense of their own world. It matters to them.

Say what you like about television programming, it does allow children to experience a variety of social and physical situations that they would otherwise not be exposed to, from the relative safety of the couch. My children can learn a lot about bullying, and making friends, and lions, and diseases, and X-Games, and.. supply and demand from the relative safety of the couch, and without having to be the ones making the blunders... though I doubt it will ever really stick for good until it's made real for them in their own lives.

Play, Approximation and Rote Learning

Once long ago, okay about 3½ years ago, I spoke to a parent who was bragging about her daughter being able to count. The daughtifully would dutifully recite her 1,2,3s and earn beaming smiles and coos of adoration... but she had no idea what numbers were. It was cute, but I was not as impressed as I was "supposed" to be.

My son is 3¼ (because until you are at least 6 years old, every one of those quarters matter!) and he likes letters and numbers... He can pick out an S, and A, an M, and a K. A few days ago his baby sister was chewing on a fridge magnet (as you do?) and he grabbed it off her because she was chewing on his "S"... and he found her an M to chew on instead... he's always liked things to correspond. He likes the circle shape of O but he seldom remembers its name, and he likes that Z is in "Buzz Lightyear". With my kids' literacy I have never particularly been hung up on them learning alphabetical order. Phonetics and visual recognition of "sight words" seemed more important to me. What do you use alphabetising for in reading? Not a lot. It's much more useful for doing things like navigating an index.

My older son is 5½ and he has been using literacy programs on the computer. Some of them sing alphabet songs of various sorts. Some have exercises where you have to input "2 letters before X"... for some reason. I got him a laminated card with the alphabet to aid him with such problems and he's become pretty good at counting forward and backward through the alphabet, he now knows the "directionality" - that you read it from left to right, and start a new line on the left when you run out of letters, and he has set himself the challenge of learning the alphabet song. When he asked me how he was doing I had to honestly break it to him that he was habitually missing out J. The other day he was in his room quietly singing to himself and then he hollered out to me "MUMMY!! I REMEMBERED J!!!".

My younger son loves to watch his brother. He loves to do what he can do. Recently this has meant learning how to do his own car seatbelt... and trying to learn the alphabet song. When little ones start to learn everything is guesses. It's approximating what you experience around you, trying it yourself, seeing what works and what doesn't. S. has been "counting" for a while now. It normally goes "1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 1, 4, 3, 4, 3.... 4!!" Lately he has a new favourite number which he can recognise the numeral for. "1, 6, 3, 4, 6, 1, 3, 6, 4, 6!" Adding to his knowledge of counting S. is trying to ... count? the letters by alphabet. He will point to letters on the cover of a book and start at "A, B, C..." Today he got very excited and a little confused as he pointed to all the letters, reading "A, B, C, F, G, T, U, V, W, U, V, Q, R, Z, 6, 23, Z!!"

There is a place for rote learning, but teaching a child their 123 or abc, does not make them suddenly comprehend the meaning. Using these ideas and playing with them is what gives us insights into these things. Today my son was in the sandpit and I drew a squiggle in the sand. "S!" he labels correctly and then he kneels down next to me and draws a mirror image of my squiggle "S!" he yells again. His approximation is close enough for me, and I smile. Today my son made a recognisable mark, for his own message. He started playing with the form of language, and making it for himself. Nobody told him to... he just copied what he sees around him on a daily basis. A few weeks ago he took magnetic letters off the fridge and made BZZ. I am told this spells "Buzz Lightyear!". These are the experiences through which my children gain their literacy.

Naming the Fish

On Tuesday I took the children to the after hours clinic so that A. could have his collar bone checked. While we were in the waiting room th boys were checking out the fish tank. "Mum come and look at this! I found a plecostomus!" I watched as a little fish suckered onto the glass and huffed it's way up and down searching for algae.

"Ooh! have you found our vaccum-cleaner fish?" said the receptionist as she came over to talk to us.
"It's a plecostomus..."
She rolled her eyes. "Or a whatever it is you just said..." she laughed. "I'd love one of those to clean up my place!" she joked with the kids.
The other receptionist came over to us "Are you naming MY fish?" she smiled.
"I was just showing the kids your plecostomus..."
"uh, Plick...?"
"For short" joked the other woman.
"Pleco, for short." I smiled.

I know that a lot of people don't think it's relevant or worth their time to learn about the world around them. Perhaps the names of fish is a "waste of time" to learn. Unless you are talking to people with an interest in fish you don't really need to have specific names.. you can always say "the brown one"... or "the one with the frilly tail". The problem comes when people get scared of things with big names.

One of my hopes for my kids, is that they will want to find out about things because they are curious. I don't want them to be turned off finding something out just because they encounter a big word. Big words are not difficult or scary, yet plenty of people hide them from children fearing that it is "over their heads".

Newsflash; EVERYTHING is over a baby's head. These are all things that people become familiar with through time and experience. To a small child every phrase is just a pile of syllables. People shorten words like "hippopotamus" and yet never hide words like"library", or "refrigerator". Many phrases that little children are familiar with are like giant words to them - "justaminute!" has no component parts to a small person. It's just a collection of sounds strung together. And yet by the time we are adults we freak out at words we don't know.. alien ideas... the domain of "weird", "difficult", and an indicator of "I can't".

When I was growing up my family loved words - my grandfather in particular. He liked the way they felt to say, and he collected knowledge like it was treasure. He liked to know the Latin name for anything you could point to. When I was about 5 years old I found a sea-snail shell and he told me it was a "struthiolaria"!

Struth-io-laria... feels great to say. I was raised in a family where words were a game. They were fun, and challenging and approachable. Something you can do. We had other-language words too. My mother was raised in Fiji. My brother and I we heard common phrases that were just long strings of syllables. Phrases with meanings, but no distinct words. We learned the words later.

And we had adult words, and science words, and our father would break them down for us. "Bicycle" was taken apart and it meant "two" "wheels". Instead of the daunting mess of syllables we had parts of words with their own meanings. When we look at big words, we see the familiar building blocks of meaning. I was reading a book in 2011 and saw the word "ichthyophagus" and thinking back to my "fishy-lizard" ichthyosaurus.. and my "flesh eater" sarcophagus... I pieced together "fish eater". Words are a fun puzzle if you know how to play the game.

I don't expect my children to love language the way that I do, but I don't want them to fear it either. I want them to be able to embrace new things and not put them the "too-hard-basket". So for now, we use language to get our point across. We discuss "micro-organisms" rather than "germs", and "plecostomi" rather than "vacuumcleaner fish" but sometimes we just refer to "icky stuff" or "the sucky one".

Looking Things Up

On Thursday, after swimming lessons, we met with some friends at the park. One of our friends (Miss P. 5yr) had a scavenger hunt activity sheet of plants and animals that you might find at or near your house in Wellington. I had a look through it and there were many common things that we recognised and discussed, such as tui, cats, blackbirds, weta (which S.'s cat, Minty, likes to hunt), sparrows, harakeke, and white tailed spiders. We asked A. if he had white tailed spiders at home. He said "I've never seen a white tailed spider... only black-headed jumping spiders".

Black-headed jumping spider

About a week ago A. found a spider on the ceiling of his bedroom and asked me what it was. I have recently been fearing that I give him too many straight answers, and not enough strategies for finding things out, so I said "Ooh! we could look it up!" and grabbed a book on NZ insects from the shelf. He flicked through the book and located the picture of the spider, and I read out the name to him. I now understand what a boon having a half decent home library is and how blessed I was growing up in a home with great books in the time preceding the internet.

About two weeks ago I was reading Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and there was an illustration of some scary deep-sea fish. A. and S. have been fascinated by the scary teeth and glowing lights of things like the angler fish (like in the movie Finding Nemo) and they wanted to know what types of fish they were looking at so I used a Google image search for "deep sea fish" to find the one that looked right. It turns out that it was a viperfish. At the moment internet searches must appear as magic to my children, but over time I hope they will learn a lot about finding the information they want. Now we have a couple of books on strange and interesting fish from the local library.

Misadventure

Yesterday my younger son got angry with his older brother and pushed him off a wall onto the back lawn. It hurt. Elder son retired inside and waited for the pain to go away. It didn't. Gentle inspection convinced me that it was probably a cracked collarbone. Off to the after hours surgery went we, and I was surprised to find how little the pain was affecting him, so long as he had somebody to talk to. A lovely lady in the waiting room listened as he regaled her with stories about his baby sister, and our cats, and his grandparents, and the paint we just bought from the paint shop to paint a big rock in our yard.... it seems that a busy mind is a happy mind for our 5-year-old. The doctor was quite surprised at how chipper and chatty he was, considering the severity of the break.

Today was a very quiet day. We have not had a very quiet day since A. was taken away for the day to a family bach up the coast at Waikawa. He spent most of the day today on the couch watching cartoons and on the computer playing games (although he did help me with some gardening).

Most recently he has been using a site online called Busy Things to which we have access through our Christchurch City Library membership. It's something that both the boys enjoy and one is generally happy to observe while the other plays. It has a lot of literacy, numeracy, problem solving and so forth and one of the better activities for our elder son is an art sandbox, which allows him to putter and play in a fairly unrestricted way. He has a tendency to avoid artistic pass-times if they are too complex, difficult to get the results he wants, or just too fiddly.

Our younger boy has been enjoying singing along with alphabet songs while his brother plays. He doesn't know all his letters yet, but he recites the last part of the alphabet fairly well, and knows that "zed" comes after "wye". He can find an A for his brother, and S for himself, an M for his sister, and "K for Mummy!"
He seems to think that both 6 and 9 are called "six!" and that counting goes: "1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 6, 4, 2, 3, 6..." He also likes "eleven", "fourteen", "sixteen" and occasionally "one hundred!"

I've spoken to my younger boy about what happened to A. I asked him if it was scary and he said it was, and that he had gotten angry and pushed him. In such situations he normally says "I not going to do that ANY more!" but this time he told me that he might push his brother again on a different day. We'll have further dialogue on this subject, I am sure, but I'm not going to try and make him feel sorry for something he doesn't regret. The more he sees his brother in pain the more he will get an understanding of what happened and I'm sure empathy will come in time. Whether this translates into actual remorse remains to be seen. Sounds like he was pretty ticked off at the time and may well feel justified.

With one son walking wounded we may have a lot more screen time that we had planned for.. but we also have a huge pile of library books too - some stories, some interesting non-fiction stuff, and some in other languages... so that should be fun, if it's distracting enough.