Developmentally Appropriate Practice
Take a Closer Look – Assessments
Chapter 2.6
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Stories have an amazing way of conveying profound concepts to people with their intriguing plot, ability to connect to the audiences and providing entertainment. We often use them to teach moral values to our kids, isn’t it? Here, we have got a story for parents too.
We hope this one opens a new perspective to Parenting… So here we go!
Mr. Prateek Sharma enrolled his 3-year-old daughter in the best preschool school in the city with a thought that he will give the best education to his child. As days passed post-admission and about a month went by, he had doubts about his decision. You may ask why?
He never saw baby Natasha with any home-work, no worksheets, no lessons to learn or memorize. “Are they even teaching my kid anything?” he used to wonder. So he decided to visit the school himself and find out.
As he spoke with the teacher, she just smiled out of experience. He was not the first parent with such questions! Parents often look for evidence of learning in their kids like tracing letters or memorizing sight words. After all, they did the repeating of the alphabet and worksheets themselves when they were in school.
Let’s Reflect
Families are sometimes anxious about their child’s success and achievement in school. They start thinking about which college their child is going to go to, and forget that, the need of the hour is for the child to learn basic life skills – tie their own shoes and the ability to wash hands themselves etc.
The story continues…
The teacher began by acknowledging his worries patiently. “Mr. Sharma, times have changed. I understand your concerns but having studied child development, I can tell you that children learn differently before age 8 than they do after age 8, and preschoolers are at the younger side of even the early learning spectrum. I request you to change your perspective a little and not look for skills in preschool that usually come later”.
But Mr. Sharma wasn’t convinced. He was still frowning. It was a matter of his child’s life at the end of the day. But the teacher was determined to explain things to him till satisfaction.
“We focus on developmentally appropriate practice at our school. Preschoolers cannot learn on demand—they learn because they want to. Instead of keeping report cards and test papers, we use drawings, photos, or notes comparing what a child did at the beginning of the year to work done later in the year as a progress record. Keeping in mind that younger children learn differently than older ones, we take play very seriously and create intentional scenarios to make them advance towards specific learning goals”
“Madam, I am trying to understand what you are saying but how am I supposed to track that my child is actually learning? I am not a child development expert like you. So it would be really helpful if you could help me with that”
“Good question. Let us specifically talk about Natasha” she said as she took out a folder from her cupboard.
“This is Natasha’s folder. In our classroom, we endeavor to make sure that kids love books, so we have kept plenty of illustrated ones. I have noticed that Natasha always picks up a book on animals. Have you noticed that she knows how to hold the book so that the print is upright and the cover is facing the front? That’s something she wasn’t doing at the beginning of the year, and that’s a sign of her growing awareness of print. That is a sign of learning.”
“The other day she told me how her mother made a recipe from a book and it really fascinated her as she also joined her mother to help. From there you can tell that she has the intent of understanding the content of books. In fact, she is also progressing with her writing and abstract thinking skills”
She pulled out two sheets from the folder. “Have you seen this picture she drew? Just look at her efforts to write her name. The fact that she’s already writing some of the letters in her name indicates that she has made the connection that letters represent sounds and meaning.
Bottomline being, you can spot her learning curve if you closely look at her making efforts into new zones that she never did before. Moreover, you can help her deepen the understanding of concepts if you yourself switch to DAP in everyday routines instead of looking for high load worksheets and didactic approach at her tender age”
Mr Sharma was perplexed. He had never paid attention to this aspect.
“I know that the world is fast and competitive, where parents are anxious about their kid to be the best and beat others but I urge you to not rush. Give her time to enjoy what she’s learning—which is actually a lot and right on schedule—and you will be pleased to see her love reading on her own in a year or two. Our most important job right now is to make reading and learning fun so that your child can make progress every day. That’s developmentally appropriate practice. Soon, she might just sleep you off to bed with a story from her book!”
“Hmmm”, he said convincingly. With a pause, he said “I hope she is learning English well. I mean what is the point of English medium education if the child cannot speak it fluently”
“Technically, we first provide a strong support for children’s home languages as it helps them learn quickly so as to build a strong foundation of prior knowledge. This in turn helps children learn English and succeed in school. Supporting the languages and cultures that make children unique is an important component of developmentally appropriate practice”, she said signing off.
Mr. Sharma sighed with relief. Today he came to a school and got schooled himself. Probably this is what kids do to us. They shift our paradigms and in a process of educating them, they make us learn too. They help us give new perceptions.
On his journey way back home, he lingered on how he will introduce DAP and track Natasha’s progress from all that he learnt that day.
Hope, this helps our parents reading this right now too!
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