Over heads

Yesterday A. woke me up and while I was still in bed gathering my thoughts, he brought me a book to read him. It was all about Isaac Newton, and we read about one of the most basic precepts of physics, the First Law of Motion. Then for dessert we went on to the hypothesis of Copernicus about the Earth orbiting the Sun, and had a discussion about parallax.

That evening my boys were going through a book on ocean creatures and my 3-year-old pointed out a puffer fish to his Dad, and spider crabs. This morning my older boy wanted to know more about a picture, in the same book, that he saw of an oil-rig. The caption was all about the Piper Alpha disaster of 1988. My son wanted to know if there were any survivors, so we went and checked online and found that there had been 167 deaths, and 61 people had survived. We discussed whether or not this was a lot, and counted with our fingers, and imagined how many people would fit in the room that we were in.

S. is a bibliophile: our lounge often has puddles of library books

One of the main precepts of my educating style (pedagogy) is that I don't want to protect my children from the world, but rather introduce them to the world in a way that they can comprehend. Knowing your children is really important when you hope to be their guide in learning. I know that my oldest son, at the age of five, considers death a fascinating thing. He fights his anxieties about it by thinking about it and using his rational judgements on matters of mortality. When he was three, he was the boy who insisted on watching when I killed the roosters for dinner. Because I know this, I am a little less worried when he wants to know about oil-rig fires. I don't have a large group of children to worry about so I am free to discuss explosions and rescue attempts without fear of upsetting other children and giving them nightmares. While I'm not about to let my son watch zombie movies, I can afford to share different things with him than he would have access to in a school setting.

Yesterday morning, before swimming lessons, I was asked to read a picture book called Mario's Angels about the Italian fresco painter Giotto (di Bondone). Today we looked online at pictures of his frescoes at Scrovegni Chapel - pictures of people and angels and things. If I had been the one picking their "curriculum" I would never have picked this book, partly because I am an agnostic, and partly because I am not familiar with the subject material (which is a shameful reason for someone who considers themselves a life-learner).

None of these things is really the sort of study that would be "suggested learning" for 3- to 6-year-olds. Some people would ask me "Isn't this all a bit beyond them?", but my answer is that it doesn't matter that they learn it all now. I am happy for them to encounter life as it comes. Library books offer amazing opportunities to discuss things that wouldn't otherwise come up in conversation, especially when my younger son will get out any book at the library with a colourful cover.

When we are little everything is new and alien. Humans are fantastically good at adapting to whatever world is around us, which is how human babies learn to live wherever we are, be it frozen wastes, arid deserts, tropical islands, temperate forests, dense jungles, or high-rise apartment blocks. We learn what we do. We learn what we hear. We learn what others around us do. In our family, we find things out, and we look things up.

If there is one thing that being a parent has reinforced to me, it is the gradual pace of learning. Being exposed to something once is not the same as learning it. Just because a baby has taken its first step, does not mean it can walk now. Any teacher will tell you that the secret to understanding something is using it, and "repetition, repetition, repetition". We incorporate new understandings and habits by building on our breadth of experience. We either slot new information into our previously existing ideas easily, or we have to unlearn something we weren't getting quite right to make sense of something new (assimilation and accommodation). Our earliest experiences are our fundamental understandings to which everything else joins up. They are our core; the trunk of our tree of knowledge.

Children look at their experiences through their own unique lenses. The things they learn are based on their personal experiences. They may have heard something countless times and it will only stick when they have a need for the information, or it's used in a way that reminds them of something they have direct experience of. My children have not learned that Giotto was alive in 1266, and that he was contracted to paint chapels, but they may feel like the word "fresco" might have something to do with painting next time they hear it mentioned, if they ever hear it again... and if they never hear it again, they will lose that information. The human brain is great like that. Perhaps a concept as simple as "if it's not moving, it's not going to move until something pushes or pulls it" is so self evident that it's not worth holding onto too, but there is a lot more to learn from reading books. Part of what is learned is how  it is learned, so by looking for information in books or the internet, my children are at least learning the places that you can find things out, that you need to know.