Blog Post #13

Instructions: Watch Doris Fromberg's youtube video What Kindergarten Should Be and write a blog post on what you learned from this TED lecture. This assigned is specifically for Elementary Education majors who wish to teach kindergarten.

My Blog Post:
Doris Fromberg starts off her What Should Kindergarten Be? lecture with the obvious fact that children should learn concepts and skills in direct ways. Everyone needs to consider that young children learn in different ways, comparing physical experiences and comparing interactions with other people and their own feelings. They learn a lot through their imagination and pretense. Fromberg states, "engage in pretense". Research shows that high fantasy children, children whose families have pretended with them, tend to have more patience. Those high fantasy kids also are better with connecting making and are more pretensive. You always seem to see early childhood students sitting on the floor playing with building blocks. What other term for them than building blocks! Because physical activity with 3D materials is creating the spacial perception that they will need to understand concepts in some of the following subjects: mathematics, physics, chemistry, and geography.

The subject of surprising experiences really caught my attention in Doris Fromberg's lecture. If you have a group of students and you ask them which magnet with collect the most paper clips, they will more than likely chose the bigger magnet. Those students would normally pick the bigger magnet because they associate bigger things with stronger things. Therefore the bigger magnet will collect the most paper clips. But if you surprise your students by telling them that the correct answer is the smaller magnet, they don't expect it. This allows them to experience it and learn from it. So they expect, experience, and then compare surprise, learning, and assessment. Fromberg states that professional kindergarten teachers are always assessing their students to see how to further challenge them. Because if children feel competent, they know the possibility of them succeeding. Then they can continue forward with a higher percentage of dealing with an occasional setback easier.

Doris Fromberg's lecture was very interesting and extremely well spoken,as are all TED lectures. But she makes some very valuable points for kindergarten specifically. Furthermore her lecture is very informational and I recommend everyone take time to watch it if kindergarten interests you!