Over the Fourth of July weekend, my wife and I had dinner out with family and friends during our trip to Bangalore, India where she is from.  We had a long table on the restaurant’s thirteenth floor balcony with a lovely view of the city.  As it happened, I sat at the end of the table, across from five-year-old Sareena, the daughter of close family friends.

“What would we talk about for the next hour or two?”  I wondered.  We started with a basic physics problem, how to safely remove the bright red cherry from the bottom of her tall glass of fresh lime soda.  After a largely non-verbal interaction, she met her goal using a spoon and plastic stir stick, only to let the cherry drop back to the bottom of the glass where she could fish it out again.  Sometimes problem solving is its own reward!

Our next conversation involved a spoon, a pen, and paper, prompted by the international symbol for “no-smoking” posted behind me.  First, I slowly printed the letters s-p-o-o-n on the paper, circled the word, and then crossed it with a single diagonal line.  Declaring “no spoon”, I banished one from our end of the table.  When she wrote “spoon ok” it returned.  Sareena quickly got the concept linking symbol-language-action, and played out variations with a water bottle, fork, and ultimately the pen.

The next topics attracted two tweens from the other end of the table, my niece, Rhea, and nephew, Vikram.  First, we drew mazes for Sareena and her younger brother Sonu to follow, and then created a rhyming contest made possible by the strong academic curriculum in Sareena’s kindergarten and our shared use of the English language.  In this game, we alternated writing rhyming words starting with “cat” and ending 17 turns later with “drat.”  Sareena’s final move, with advice from her mom, was “gnat”!

Looking back at that Sunday dinner reminds me that children are open to exploration and learning wherever they are, and often just need a little help to make the most of the opportunity.

Books, comics, TV, movies… I was a multimedia kid, pretty much from the start, taking in stories from many sources and appreciating the multiple perspectives that they inspired.

When I was a very young child my mother would read bedtime stories and sing me to sleep.  The book I remember most vividly is Bambi.  In my mind’s eye, I can still see the picture on the shiny hard cover.  Of course, I also knew the story and images from the movie, which had made a powerful impression on me, especially the scene hinting at the mother’s death.

In elementary school, my favorite TV show was Batman.  Too young to understand the tongue-in-cheek genre of the show, I was fully absorbed into the battles of good and evil annotated on-screen with exclamations like Biff! Bamm! and Kaboom!  I knew these were the convention of comics because my favorite was a 3D Batman book that I would read with a flashlight, under the covers, late at night. 

As a middle school student, reading for pleasure accompanied summer vacations at our family cottage in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.  While I loved the hiking, skiing, and swimming that defined the season, I also savored quiet afternoon shade with a novel.  I enjoyed thrillers like Day of the Jackal, and science fiction, like 2001 A Space Odyssey.  The latter was first a film, which I saw as a wide-eyed ten-year-old with my father.  Even at the time, I knew Arthur C. Clark had written both the screenplay and the novel, which I devoured trying to understand the metaphysical themes of the film. At first, I thought I did.

Back in school, I read literary classics, textbooks and then academic writing all the way through graduate school and into my professional life.  This sort of non-fiction feeds my mind now, but as a child it was the texts of popular culture that tasted like dessert.  Sweetest of all was my Mad Magazine collection hidden away at the cottage for summer consumption.  The iconoclastic writers and artists of Mad introduced me to a satirical attitude towards movies, TV, consumer culture, and political life.  With them, nothing was sacred.  In fact, it was the “usual gang of idiots” who introduced me to “201 Minutes of a Space Idiocy”, and inspired me to write and perform my own plays with my best friend, Steve.  They were the ones that opened up a different way of looking at the world than my everyday home life.  And that has stayed with me, always.

Children today need literacy, numeracy, and ecology—really, that’s all. 

Everything else that’s important can grow from this foundation.  I’m drawn to this deceptively simple approach, when I think about ways to organize a curriculum for young children growing up in a digitally mediated, globally connected world.  See if you agree…

Undoubtedly, kids need traditional literacy.  Whether on paper or screens, they need to read and understand written communication in various forms, and to express themselves with these symbols.  Similarly, they need to understand the nature of numbers, quantities, and the world of mathematics that underlies so much of science, technology, and financial wellbeing, not to mention everyday interactions about topics like “fair sharing” of toys, pizza, or other valued resources.

Ecology completes the picture because it’s all about connections, or the mutual influences within and among social, biological, physical, and other “systems” that constitute our world.  Of course, each of these domains holds important lessons of its own, from empathy, to nutrition, to the laws of motion and energy.  But, it is the interconnections, more than any other basic principle, that defines both ecologies and the global issues awaiting this generation.

Imagine children knowing that rain falls, helps trees to grow, is collected in reservoirs, is funneled to the sink to help rinse their toothbrush, and then goes down the drain to be cleaned and sent out into the world again.  What if everyone just knows “throwing away” is a windy road that each bit of trash takes on its way to decomposing or re-use.  Of course, young children can only understand a small part of these interconnected processes at first, but they are fully capable of seeing that the world works this way and they have an active role in it.

To paraphrase Jerome Bruner, the famous cognitive psychologist, we can teach any subject in an “intellectually honest” way to a child of any age.  In mathematics, this might mean dividing objects into groups and counting how many are in each to share equally with friends.  In “ecology” it could include playing with dominos or computer simulation games to see how change in one place is connected to changes in another.

As children grow, exploring these foundational concepts will help them grasp the important web of connections that define their world, and help them guide it to be a healthy green world.

Resources:
The Children & Nature Network (C&NN)
The Story of Stuff

Should young children be using technology?  This video shows a one-year-old viewing family photos on an iPhone, and interacting with his parents in ways that we know promote early language and literacy development.  It is a good example of why a hard-and-fast rule like “no screen time for children under two years old” is not very helpful anymore.

Imitating adults is one of the primary ways children learn.  In a world increasingly saturated with information and communication technologies (ICT), it is natural for children to want access to these tools too.  But even adults can spend too much time with them (as evident in terms like “crackberry”, not to mention the good ol’ fashioned “couch potato" ) and there are potential dangers (child online safety, damage to devices), so how should we approach determining what’s right for kids?

Rather than simply counting minutes in front of a screen, a more balanced approach takes into account what children do with technology.  For instance, is your child:
* actively involved, making choices and initiating activity; or, just watching passively—physically and mentally? 
* engaged in a variety of activity types (structured games, open-ended art, following a story), or repeating the same simple activity over and over? 
* exploring age-appropriate content that you, as a parent, value (real-world knowledge, academic skills, classic stories, your child’s “passion topic”, etc.)? 
* engaged in some kind of social interaction related to play, able to talk about his/her activity and accomplishments; or, only playing solo? 
* involved in a balance of ICT and non-ICT activities?

For your part, spend a little time playing along with your child or watching.  Ask open-ended questions that prompt your child to share her perspective on the activity.  What are you trying to do in this level?  Who’s that character?  Find ways to extend what they are learning to other media (crayon-and-paper follow up to digital art), and balance this play with non-ICT activities like hikes in a park, talking at the dinner table, or playing with wooden blocks and dress-up clothes.

I like to remember something Alan Kay* says…. that “technology” is what we call tools invented after we were born (who calls an AM radio “technology” anymore?).  What’s new and exotic to us now will be the everyday tools of our children as they work and play in a more digitally-enhanced, globally-connected world. 

* Alan Kay, the computer visionary who sketched plans for a Kindle-like “dynabook” for children way back in 1968.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay

What questions does your child ask?  What do you wonder about?  Often, perhaps most of the time, we adults are immersed in the daily work of life.  But sometimes, a question calls us into action. Curiosity guides us to find out what, who, where, how, or why?  In those moments, questions pull like gravity, our senses are on alert, and our minds are oriented to solving the mystery.  Children glide easily into this world of discovery, and are happy when we follow them as fellow explorers or guides. 

This experience came alive for me over the weekend, while visiting the new California Academy of Sciences.  I witnessed many kinds of discoveries (and made a few of my own)… A toddler nestled on his father’s arm, gazing at a bright blue butterfly in the rainforest exhibit… A preschooler crowding close to a dark, glass-covered cave with branches and wiggling shapes underneath… “What’s that!?" He whispered… “A bat!” answered his older sister… “Cool!”…  (I wonder what questions his family would hear later about bats, caves, sonar, batman, and vampires)… A dozen elementary school kids and one dad playing a collaborative video game that displayed one species at a time -- spider, flowering plant, tortoise, etc. --  on a large touch-sensitive monitor and asked each person “How did I reach the Galapagos Islands?” (swim, float, raft, wind, fly, bird drops?)…. And, families exploring brightly-colored replicas of foods for breakfast, lunch, or dinner and information under each identifying its “carbon footprint” on the natural world (I learned a few things about food production and transportation).

There’s a lot to explore in a good museum, but the world of discovery is accessible everywhere, and there’s no age requirement.  I recently watched an 8-month-old girl investigate a new toy (see “skwish toy” on YouTube) by first gazing at it, then grasping, shaking, pounding on the table, listening to the rattle, mouthing the knobs, dropping it on the floor, and finally playing a game of “fetch” with an accommodating adult who would bring it back to her each time. 

To Piaget, the famous developmental theorist, this is a child in the “sensorimotor” stage using all her senses to interact with the world and understand it.  She’s like a little scientist.  Or, perhaps she was just immersed in the world of discovery, and her parents joined her there, with their own questions for me about child development and learning, and how to guide her. 

Do your kids ask questions?  How do you guide them?   

Looking forward...
Jim