Making mud

Meghan Fitzgerald is founder and chief learning officer at Tinkergarten, which began in New York and is now expanding to other communities—including Austin!—to offer outdoor early childhood education classes for children and their parents. We invited Meghan to join us on the blog to share her considerable mud-making expertise.
 

I must admit that, as a former principal and brand-new mom of an eight-month-old, I was a bit uncertain about making mud, and I certainly wasn’t thinking of it as a transformative experience. “Making mud? What’s the point?” I wondered. “Is it worth the mess?” This was before my forest school training and before I started to really spend time with tiny people outdoors.

It turns out the simple act of making mud is a universally powerful pastime for young people (and not bad for us big kids, either). Yes, kids get messy. (Fair warning: They may even try to taste the mud.) But with a few exceptions, kids get completely absorbed in this pursuit. The great news for parents is you can do this virtually anywhere—with the most basic of materials (water + dirt!). Armed with a few tips, parents can help unleash the activity’s rich learning potential. Play in the mud along with your kids, and you’ll inspire immediate smiles as well as a lifelong comfort, even pleasure, in mucking around. That kind freedom spawns unbridled creativity and joy that’s just plain good for the soul. So let them go for it—you can make an outdoor cleanup part of the fun too!

Here’s how we like to approach mud play:

1. Pack a few materials: Unless you’re near a water source, you’ll need to bring it with you. We like to have around half gallon of water per kid so they can play and experiment for a while. Bring a small pail or container for each child so she can pour water as desired without dumping your entire supply.
2. Clear your spot: If you’re in a high-traffic area, check to make sure that there are no obvious hazards (e.g., broken glass, metal, dog doo, trash) where you’ll be making your mud. As you scan the ground, grab some sticks that kids can use for stirring and mushing mud.
3. Pour a little water. Then let them do the pouring: Trickle a small amount of water on the ground, and discover together what happens to the dirt. You can take a stick and even do a little mixing. Then hand a bucket to your kids, inviting them to transport water and see what happens when they add it to dirt. Stand back, and watch them get to work.
4. Dole out the water as you go: Allow (or help) kids to fill up their pails or cups and dump water as often as they like. Playing with water is, in and of itself, a super engaging lesson in cause and effect and physics. We prefer filling a large container (e.g., 5-gallon bucket) and letting kids serve themselves.
5. Play and “ooooooh” alongside them: Let them continue to pour, mix, and make mud on their own, but do the same alongside them. Every now and again, “Ooooh” or “Ahhh” at the mud puddles, rivers, and piles you make. Ask kids if they notice a difference between their mud and yours, giving an opportunity to describe the different muds using words such as soupy, thick, chunky, dry, wet, or sticky. Such a gripping sensory experience is a great opportunity to build language.
6. Make something (optional): If you think they are ready for more, do not interrupt their play. Simply make a mud pie by forming a fistful of mud into a patty and plopping it down somewhere. Gather nature treasures to decorate it (our oldest loves to make pizza mud pies most). Kids will likely get intrigued by what you are doing and want to try it too. If you have older kids (ages 3+), you can make mud faces on the trees!

Why is this activity great for kids?

Playing and experimenting with ooey, gooey mud helps children to strengthen their sense of touch—and we know that the better kids are able to tune and integrate their senses, the more effectively they can learn. Once kids know how to make and manipulate mud, they have a tool for play and building with virtually unlimited uses. When kids transform the shape, texture, or nature of materials (in this case, turning dirt and water into mud), they also engage in a universal behavior pattern called the transforming schema, which supports brain development. Best of all, when you let kids lose themselves in play and give them room to mess around, you offer them the openness and freedom they’ll need to develop true creativity down the line. If all this isn’t compelling enough, research also indicates that playing in the dirt is just plain good for kids’ health. So go on, get dirty!

Meghan Fitzgerald

Leveling with kids about leveling up

Guest contributor Alli Vaughn, parent of an alternatively schooled 14-year-old, is a local developer dedicated to cultivating a culture of inclusiveness and encouraging young people in their journey toward technical literacy. You can reach her at lvlupworkshops@gmail.com, @friendlyfulcrum on Twitter, and Lvl\U/p Workshops.

What if we leveled with students that knowing how to self-teach a new technical skill is at least highly beneficial, if not critical to a future career?

The White House recently released a directive to teach coding in every single K– 12 public school in the nation. That’s going to take a while to implement, and I believe it’s only half of the problem. Knowing how to recall a provided answer is not a highly valued skill in a world where everyone can look up facts and syntax, but understanding how to use what you already know to learn what you need to know is. Ask any programmer if they are still using just one language, framework, or version of anything since they first learned to program. The answer is almost always “of course not!”

The good news is that we can address this. In fact, businesses want us to. They spend a lot of money trying to train graduates about this.

What if I told you that developers often learn new skills by themselves, with only sketchy documentation, and due to the pace of things, manuals are often out of date?

Google “stack overflow” and you’ll be faced with pages of questions from new and seasoned programmers alike collaborating on learning new skills. Look a little closer: There isn’t really one single answer to any of the problems. This is the reality of development!

Don’t believe me? Go schedule a lunch meeting with just about any developer working on anything new, and you’ll get your answer. The good news is that the problem is pervasive enough that tech folks are working on better documentation when they can, but it’s going slowly.

What if the students whom studies show are most hesitant to jump into the upper echelons of technical literacy had a safe, encouraging, and inclusive environment to do so? How might that change the next 10 years?

Projections show that while the total workforce going forward will become progressively more minority-based and female-heavy, neither of these populations is currently on any significant growth trajectory for future technical career involvement, and we lose them in High School. At the same time, reports on future job growth indicate a sharp uptick in the need for these workers in the next 10 years, and current participants are mostly male and Caucasian. Austin is an up-and coming tech hub in Texas, and a rapidly growing tech hub nationally, with no sign of slowing down soon.

Austin, we have a problem. Even though we have a growing workforce now, we won’t actually have enough people to fill the jobs coming down that pipeline! The largest issue is not a lack of initial interest in cool technical stuff (after all, these subjects are very interesting in many ways) but rather a lack of continued interest, and we think it’s at least partially due to the lack of a welcoming culture.

Think about it: Nothing turns a person off like feeling that they don’t know enough, or they don’t belong.

The good news is that recent studies show that the creation of a welcoming culture and community around technical field participation just may be the key to sustaining long-term interest!
 

Spotlight on the Little Program That Could

Taking place this spring at Griffin School and Skybridge Academy, Lvl\U/p’s Intro to Full Stack Development is an after-school workshop series for high school students, adapted from the Rails Bridge Curriculum, and is designed to build confidence by fostering a small-group, inclusive, welcoming environment where students work through real-world fundamentals and processes used by software development professionals.

Many programs here and elsewhere simply aim to teach students to code. It’s a worthy goal, but it’s problematic, and I think there are more beneficial ways to accomplish the same thing. Lvl\U/p workshops turn the code school model on its ear, with a goal of students learning how to learn a new technical skill through discussion, activities, and, of course, hands-on programming. The structure naturally fosters a warm, welcoming environment where not only do students learn the basics of CS and a no-nonsense framework but they also learn about the relevance of technical literacy to their own goals. No matter what their future chosen field, the ability to map that understanding to learning a new technology is an extremely valuable skill going forward.

The pros have been programming longer, but they often need to learn new things each time they participate in a project. I believe kids are capable of learning these fundamentals, and I think they deserve for us to level with them about how important these skills are! Every student’s development journey is unique, as is the journey of each professional developer, but we each have a responsibility to change the culture, together.

Alli Vaughn
 

Why storytelling is better than lecturing

Guest contributor David Sewell McCann is chief tale spinner for sparklestories.com, a streaming website of original children’s audio stories. He has honed his four-step process of intuitive storytelling from years as an elementary school teacher and parent and now teaches workshops around the country. He and his family live in Austin, where their children attend alternative schools. We are thrilled to bring you some of David’s wisdom, along with a very special Sparkle Stories offer just for Alt Ed Austin readers!

My son left the gate open again, and the dog is in the street.

My daughter is worried about catching the Zika virus.

He is afraid of grasshoppers, while she is sure she doesn’t have to brush her teeth.

Every day we parents hear about our children’s fears, aspirations, assumptions, confusions, and concerns, and we, as the primary adults in their lives, want to help. We want to tell him it’s OK. We want to explain to her why it is important to recycle. We want him to know that it is extremely unlikely that he will encounter a member of ISIS. We want to list out all the reasons why it is not OK to pinch her sister.

We want them to understand—and then we want them to feel better or change their behavior. And yet, most of the time, nothing really changes.

She is still worried. He left the gate open. Why don’t they listen?

Well, I believe it is because you are not speaking their language. You are explaining, when you might want to try describing.

Explaining is the language of science, statistics, and law. It is factual— fixed—and basically a dead language. It works for specificity and clarity but doesn’t work as well for change.

Describing is organic. It develops, it changes, it is dynamic, and it is what happens when we tell a story. Storytelling is the language of children.

If you don’t believe me, next time you want to get your child’s attention, try saying the four words “Once upon a time,” and see what happens. Those four words are the most potent spell any wizard can utter. It means that something very magical is about to unfold—something transformative, something unexpected: a story is about to be told. The room quiets, eyes glaze over, jaws slacken, and your child becomes a vessel ready to hear your wisdom.

And then comes your chance to deliver the wisdom of your choice. Tell a story about a boy who left the gate open one too many times and his favorite chicken ran away to live at the neighbor’s farm. Spin a yarn about the most charming, lovable grasshopper that ever was. Unfold a tale about a girl who was so surrounded in love that no illness could touch her.

And here is the thing: the story doesn’t have to be any good. Really. It can be the worst story ever told, and yet your child will manage to extract the magic, will find the wisdom, will sift through all the rubble and find the gold.

And they will thank you for it.

For inspiration, or if you find the craft of storytelling too daunting, then try out sparklestories.com and listen to some of our stories. You can input search words like “chores” or “fear of bugs” or “valentines” or “sensory integration” and several audio story options will appear before your eyes. There are now almost 900 original stories in the catalog, so there will surely be something there for you and your child.

If you input the code ALTED (all one word, all caps) then you can extend your free trial period to 15 days at no charge. And you will love the app that comes with a subscription!

For more information on storytelling, child development, and child study, you can click on the “Sparkle Schoolhouse” category on our blog here.

Meanwhile, when you are faced with a behavior or emotion or dynamic with your child that you would like to change, try this:

Close your eyes and take a breath. Do whatever you can to inch toward a grounded, peaceful place (even if it is only an inch) and then, ask your child, “What is one of your favorite animals in all the world?”

He or she will stop and think about it. Give a reminder that it’s “in all the world”—in Africa, Australia, in South America, in the jungle, the savannah, the arctic—anywhere.

When an animal is declared, say, “I’m going to tell you a story about that animal.”

Then tell one. Go ahead and tell a clunky, awkward, poorly formed story starting with “Once upon a time” all the way to “The End,” and . . . see what happens. As best you can, try not to judge yourself. You are just starting. Listen to some of our stories, or those of other storytellers, for inspiration. And then . . . try again. It will be well worth it.

David Sewell McCann
 

8 ways to encourage creativity in your child

Heidi Miller Lowell is a frequent contributor to the blog. She is a multimedia artist and educator who leads classes and workshops for all ages and summer camps for kids. Learn more about Heidi’s offerings here.

Prospective employers list creativity as the most sought-after quality in potential employees today. Our education system struggles mightily to design a curriculum that promotes creative thinking. Research shows that children’s brains are growing differently than ever before because of a lack of unstructured play and an overabundance of pre-made entertainment.

How do we promote creativity in our children? Here are my favorite eight tips and sources for supporting your child creatively.

1. Modeling is everything. Children learn by example. If you don’t feel confident, get some help online. There are tons of great e-classes teaching tinkering, sketching, painting, design, and writing for folks who are busy. If you want your children to be creative, do creative activities in their presence and with them.

2. Provide a creative provocation for your child. The provocation is a concept used in the Reggio Emilia method of education. The blog The Artful Parent has some great ideas for setting up provocations.

3. The book Young at Art by Susan Striker focuses on the creative development of children from birth through preschool. It talks about strategies for keeping creativity at the forefront of your daily life when you have small children. Some of the strategies would work great in a home with older kids too.

4. Engaging Learners through Choice-Based Learning by Katherine M. Douglas is an essential resource for all art teachers, homeschool families, and anyone interested in progressive education. This book emphasizes that even young artists need to be treated like real artists. This means giving students a say in what and HOW they make things. Douglas details setting up art stations and offers tips on teaching with a variety of media.

5. After you read the book above, you may want to stop and visit Austin Creative Reuse in The Linc. This center is stocked full of recycled materials that can be used for a bevy of art projects. The prices are great, and you can leave knowing that you are actually helping take care of our environment!

6. The book Creating Pathways to Literacy through Art by Beth Olshanky is also a game changer. It promotes creativity and literacy and comes with a DVD that models some of the lessons.

7. Look at any camps, schools, and extracurricular activities you’re considering for your child to see if their focus is on product or process. Any school that display 15 of the exact same penguin pictures in a display might be focused more on making pretty pieces of art for parents to see than on offering kids a valuable learning experience. Process-based art gives kids a chance to find their own creative voices rather than giving them step-by-step directions. Kids make mistakes. They work on finding solutions. Mistakes are the best teachers.

8. Come join us at Art Camp this summer at Four Seasons Community School! You can find out more at my website, heidimillerlowell.com.

Heidi Miller Lowell

Teaching driving readiness to young teens

Missy Menzes, occupational therapist and founder of Extra Credit! LLC, is dedicated to helping school-aged kids and families dealing with “hidden disabilities” and learning differences. As program director of Driving Readiness for Teens (DRT) and a member of the Texas Teen Safe Driving Coalition (TTSDC), Missy is excited to be able to add a unique and valuable perspective to caregivers of potential drivers. She hopes to reach the central Texas community as part of her volunteer roles in the TTSDC’s Zero Teen Driving Fatality Initiative and others nationwide as a guest blogger for the Drive it Home™ project.
 

Community mobility is a necessary part of human independence and socialization. While most individuals can use public or private transportation, not everyone can or should drive. As a pediatric occupational therapist, one of the most important and unique roles that I have taken on is facilitating driving readiness potential for high-risk teens. Principles of my DRT therapy program and concepts of “driving fitness” are relevant to any parent raising a potential driver.

The first step of assessing readiness for driving is to notice how the child moves, sees, thinks, feels, and takes on general responsibilities. All of these attributes will, in some way, affect driving performance. Parents of middle school and even younger school-aged children should ask the question “Is my child coordinated, attentive, and adaptive?” Start addressing noted concerns in any ways you can on your own, and seek assistance for areas of need from qualified therapists or other professionals early on.

Pre-driving skills include coordinated use of extremities, quick/accurate visual & cognitive perceptual processing functions, and safe attention and reasoning abilities. A driver must be able to effectively filter and process incoming sensory stimulation while attending and responding to “most critical” information. One must also be knowledgeable about rules of the road, have good anticipation skills, and be capable of managing unexpected events as well as stressful situations.

My DRT therapy program activities vary among families to enhance the areas that we determine to be specifically problematic or at risk for their children. Students perform individualized home activities between sessions. These vary from simple postural and coordination exercises to more complex visual and cognitive processing games. I occasionally prescribe the use of cutting-edge technologies such as Drive Fit® or Interactive Metronome® at home. These modalities help build skills of noticing, prioritizing, and reacting to information both quickly and over time.

Once foundations for driving are well established, it’s time to proceed to pre-driving “passenger level” training activities. Most of my program recommendations at this stage are based on specialty training I received from Miriam Monahan of the Driver Rehabilitation Institute. If you have a child with unique needs, I highly recommend you work with an occupational therapist trained in American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA) courses, if not a certified driving rehabilitation specialist.

For ideas to guide your own “backseat driver education” before permit time, my advice is to thoroughly check out driveithome.org from the National Safety Council. I have all my DRT participants reference Drive it Home™ because it offers free parent resources, including digital driving lessons, courses, programs, and videos. Parents can use this information as a way to initiate dialogue about teen driving risks and road safety, but much of it can also provide ways to approach aspects of driving earlier on with your children.

Every parent has the opportunity to help teens be better prepared for driving by addressing some readiness skills before permit time. You can ask them to put down their phone or tablet, stop thinking about what happened today and what’s to come, and stay focused on the road when a passenger. Teens could practice identifying cars in the blind spots with you, help navigate by providing directions, and notice general distractions or obstacles to avoid.

Of course, safety is always Priority Number One. If implementing this or any other type of parent-initiated readiness training is in any way distracting or emotional for you as a driver, don’t do it! There are other ways to practice pre-driving skills safely. From afar, one can safely observe traffic flow at a neighborhood intersection or community traffic signal. Individuals can also take note of driving behaviors while shopping somewhere busy. An important aspect of readiness is awareness that people break rules sometimes. A safe driving practice is to make sure the careless actions of others don’t cause you to have an accident.

Perhaps most importantly, caregivers should practice good habits for teens to follow. You know the big ones: buckle up, follow the road rules, always be a defensive driver, no texting or phone use (even over the speaker), only initiate use of navigational systems if necessary when the vehicle is in park, and keep your vehicle in good shape. There is really no good excuse to break these safety measures, but some habits can be difficult to curb.

Drivers should also avoid eating/drinking, listening to the radio/movies in the car, putting on/taking off things, reaching for objects, glancing at a phone or other device, or having distracting conversations/thoughts. These actions have led and can lead to serious accidents. It’s also important for drivers to keep emotions in check and practice time management. It’s never safe to drive under the negative influence of added stress or pressure.

I know that many of these tips can feel difficult if not impossible to follow at times. The important thing to remind yourself of is this cold, hard truth: driving is the number-one killer of teens. Teenagers cannot comprehend their levels of risk as inexperienced drivers and are more likely to engage in distracting behaviors. It is also much easier as a caregiver to set driving rules and say assertively to a teen, “You absolutely cannot _____ while in the car” if they can’t argue back to you, “But YOU do it, so why can’t I?!”

As seasoned drivers, we need to remind ourselves of how stressful the learning-to-drive process can be for everyone involved. As parents, we can start teaching kids early on, and they will (hopefully) listen to us, imitate us, and do as we say. More work ahead of time should mean less of it later on, and this will be especially useful when dealing with a teen who is hormonal, emotional, distracted, or stressed.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you have found this perspective and some of the suggested recommendations of value. It has been a pleasure acting as a guest blogger. Please use any of the tips I’ve provided here as loose guidelines. As a parent, you are ultimately the only one responsible for actions taken with your child. Driving is one of the most dangerous things that we regularly do, and this important privilege should never be taken lightly.

Drive safely!
“Ms. Missy,” OTR

P.S. To learn more about Extra Credit! LLC, visit www.extracreditaustin.com and like us on Facebook to receive informative postings. For more information about OT’s role in driving rehabilitation and community mobility, please check out AOTA and the Driver Rehab Institute.
 

Imagine new possibilities

We always jump at the chance to publish Marie Catrett's lovely Reggio Emilia–style documentation of her young students’ learning. Here’s the latest, a photo and video essay on the many uses the children have found for their classroom’s light table. Marie directs Tigerlily Preschool in South Austin.
 

Agency is the idea that when we act, and act strategically, we effect change upon our environment. Babies are agentive, reaching out into the world, building knowledge, ability, and strength from their own active experience without a negative internal voice suggesting otherwise. “I can’t” comes later when people tell children they are too small, what they want to do is too dangerous, or there’s not enough time to allow for all that pokey trying. But children need thoughtful adults to hold the space for them to explore with the trust and awareness of their own inner judgment. Do what feels right for you in your own body, I tell a child who’s thinking about whether to make the swing go higher. Hold tight with both hands (my rule!), but do what feels right to you.

In my teaching I observe children to understand them better and strive to be a supportive presence that honors the children’s agency.

When things get stuck, I might state what I see: Hmmm, I can’t let you push him, but tell me about what’s not working. This play isn’t working yet, but I know we can figure this out. Then I ask questions. What do you think? How else could you ______? Can you think of another way to _____? How could we find out? And my favorite question for a child who has just made something interesting happen is how did you do that? The response will be wonderfully agentive: Well, first I did this, and then I did that, and then . . . . Wow!

We want children to have a strong sense of agency and from that imagine new possibilities.

The key is curiosity, and it is curiosity, not answers, that we model. As we seek to know more about a child, we demonstrate the acts of observing, listening, questioning and wondering. When we are curious about a child’s words and our responses to those words, the child feels respected. The child is respected. ‘What are the ideas I have that are so interesting? I must be somebody with good ideas.’
—Vivian Paley

When thoughtfully providing children with a new experience to support their continued work, it seems to me that I have a responsibility to provide an introduction that expands rather than limits possibilities. Provide a child with quality materials and give her time to make her own discoveries—the delight of “Look what I just did!” I’ve thought about this idea quite a bit this semester as my children have gotten to know the new light table in our classroom.  

A piece of Reggio equipment that we see in each of their classrooms excited the imagination of North Americans. But the light table, after its purchase, is often misunderstood and underutilized. Think of the light table as a tool that will work independently to teach the children about translucency and opacity. They can do anything on the light table that they might do on any other table. Leave it to the children to figure out what the table is for! It’s safe for them to use either wet or dry media on the table—collage, paint, markers or to build with Legos—or anything. You can even eat there. Note the many uses the children invent. Left to their own exploration, they’ll come to discover what’s light permeable and what isn’t. Our strong Image of the Child and our commitment to children’s agency alert us to back off from providing familiar materials so that children can make their own discoveries.
—Seeing Young Children with New Eyes: What We’ve Learned from Reggio Emilia about Children and Ourselves by Sydney Gurewitz Clemens and Leslie Gleim

Here are some of the uses the children have discovered for their light table:
 

This afternoon the light table became a place to do clay. Viviana did some very fun flat faces, carving through the clay so the light illuminates the features. Stella, busy with flat-making for pizza, gets connected with a rolling pin to see if that tool helps her take clay where she wants it to go.
8/24/15
 

Shivani (proudly): Guys! Look at the table!
Macky (proudly): It’s a parking lot.
Stella (admiringly): Look at all these squares.
9/2/15
 

Stella tells me she’s not happy with the way she’s making the letter S. I can give you something to help, I say, using a pencil to make a row of S's. She gets a marker and traces over her page of practice S’s. Actually she gets many markers and does each S in a different color. Writing “rainbow” has become a thing with the group.
Stella: That S is my best one.
9/10/15
 

Always looking to help the kids find more uses for their light table, this morning I left a basket of very pretty leaves out close by, hoping somebody might notice and combine the leaves with our fantastic light source. Kids did notice the leaves. Viviana decides she’ll draw them at the light table (hooray!) and she begins. Pretty soon somebody thinks that they wish there were flowers for drawing too. I get down the rest of the arrangement, a wonderful assortment of floral shapes and textures. I tell the children that if they see a flower they’d like to draw, they can each take one out of the vase at a time for looking at more closely. One child is pretty certain there’s only one way to draw a flower, making four small circles close together in what looks like a symbolic representation of flower. This is how you do it, she insists, I know because my babysitter taught me. The children consider this. Is there only one way to make a flower?
Marie (gently): I see that is one way to make one kind of flower. And you can do that. And you know what else, let’s look closely at the flowers kids wanted on the light table for drawing because . . . hmmm  . . . oh, I am seeing so many different shapes, I wonder about other ways to make flowers, too?
There is talk about making different kinds of flowers.
Shivani: Look at this flower!
Stella: I like this. I like this drawing flowers.
9/28/15
 

I am delighted with the latest kid-invented use for our light table. The back story is that in tidying my home I recently came across several spatulas and a big spoon, thought these kitchen items might appeal to the children in the dress-up/pretend-play collection, and added them in. About a week ago kids began making up a game where you push a whiffle ball across the room using the spatulas. This has been called "doing golf." Today the golf game had an entirely new setup on top of the light table, and I see much to admire in the children’s play: inventive use of the table, including making fine use of the on/off switch; "winning" is handled and made inclusive by the children; Viviana’s suggestion that they pause the game to make time to practice; their clear delight with themselves!
10/16/15
 

We’re continuing to take our time with paper and exploring collage making. I had put out a bin of tissue paper, hoping to encourage more discovery of what kids can do with tissue paper after one child noticed that the thin paper could be squeezed, rolled, and shaped much like our clay. Today kids could keep exploring tissue paper on top of the light table. We can crumple, fold, roll, and tear the paper so far. Viviana combined several pieces and announced she’d made a flower, see?
10/21/15
 

Stella (carefully covering every bit of the paper with paint, then using a toothpick to inscribe her name): I made the whole world.
10/26/15
 

Viviana (working with wire after her baby brother’s birth): Come look at the baby I made.
11/5/15
 

Marie Catrett