Mulberry Tree Unschool Blog

Jean Piaget studied about young children’s cognitive development, and he concluded that young children (2y to 7y) are in the "Preoperational Stage", which means that children’s cognitive understanding is very flexible, not concrete. After the preoperational stage is the concrete operational stage, and universally, we know these differences. Thus, no matter which culture around the world, school starts at around 6 years old when children are ready to absorb solid ideas.

In the preoperational stage, you can observe one of the characteristics, children’s egocentrism. Young children’s cognitive understanding starts from him/herself, and it expands to outside. First, young children can’t perceive where “me” end, and where “you” start. This is why you see children fight for toys, they say “It’s mine!”, no matter who's holding it, "it's mine!". Here, we would like to share two different types of self recognition with egocentrism.

Stella’s case (Late egocentrism)

At her three years old birthday party, we shared Stella’s pictures: when she was a baby, at 1 year old, and 2 years old. Only Stella was in those pictures, but when she saw them, she denied and said, “No! This is not me! It’s a baby!” “No, that’s Edward!" (Her younger brother). In Stella’s mind, she is here. Right now, I’m here, “ME” is me. So, those pictures’ Stella couldn’t be her. This is a very clear egocentric view, but also we could observe that in her cognitive understanding, she is becoming able to be aware of where “ME” ends.

Kiara’s case (Early egocentrism)

Children love playing with water. Indeed, water is one of the most fundamental elements for human being. We see water everyday, drink it everyday, use it for cooking, washing, bathing and so many other different ways. Thus, at Mulberry Tree, we provide children with as many opportunities as we can to explore the world of water. This month, we installed a water box for indoor and a kid’s swimming pool for outdoor.

Indoor water box: Children started with three primary watercolors, two different sized pipets and four different diameter clear hoses. They were excited to watch how water went into the hoses and how they changed the colors. Using the pipet is a very good fine motor & eye-hand coordination activity, it’s the same skill needed for writing. Also, taking turns, keeping water in the box, and cleaning own spilt water, children were learning self-discipline too. Depending on the day, children were mixing water with different materials. For example, Paper. The children transformed paper into paper pulp. They also experimented with flowers, pine cones, seashells, playdough… etc. “Do they change?” “Anything happened?” “Do they sink?” “Do they float?” Here, children are playing but not just “playing”. They are connecting different materials and observing them. I feel we have a lot of Chemists in the classroom.

Outdoor swimming pool: Mulberry’s swimming pool activity starts from inside the classroom. In the morning, children talk about what they want to do today. Children who choose swimming pool need to be ready to go. They get together at the door, take their clothes off, put on sunscreen and mosquito repellent. Teachers may help the children, but those are considered as children’s task. Also, older children are encouraged to help younger children.

On June 12th, we held our first community sharing and outreach event at Hong Lok Yuen’s General Lounge. Before I write about what happened at the event though, I must start with what happened before the event! Because on the last week of May, twelve of our beloved parents came together to discuss what they can do to help us with the event and to grow! It has been our dream to create a closely knitted community school for our children, so we’re deeply moved when we see how everyone was banding together on this event!

We were so happy to see so many of our parents, both existing and past, personal friends, and passionate educators from other schools had come to join us at our event. The highlight of the event for us was actually the parents testimonials at the end. This section brought all of us teachers to tears and made all the hard work worth it! You can watch Clement Ho and Erika McGrath shared their own experiences with their children at the Mulberry Tree Unschool here and here.

The section that got the highest praise from the audience was Mabo’s “How Children Are Learning at Mulberry Tree Unschool”. No one had expected that something as simple as boys trying to slide down a few steps of stairs, can demonstrate a teacher’s mindset and attitude toward children. Here at the Mulberry Tree Unschool, we believe strongly in nurturing children’s intrinsic motivation. Mabo’s presentation gave a behind-the-scene look at how we interact with the children by respecting and valuing their will, guiding them to create their own learning activities based on those intrinsic motivations. Because of that, children are much more engaged in these activities, they feel good about themselves rather than feeling shamed for wanting to do what they want to do. Hence the whole class’s atmosphere feels positive because the children and the teachers are not entangled in power struggles all the time.

Mabo then went on to talk about how children learn literacy at Mulberry Tree, which was another eye opener for most of us adults who had grown up in teacher directed classrooms. Based on child development research, Mabo showed the different stages of a child’s natural writing development, from scribbles to mock letters. At the end of the video, you get to see how excited a child was after he successfully wrote the letter “Z”, the first letter of his name! This love for learning is what we are teaching and what the kids are learning here!

Some parents have raised their concerns about hitting in school, and we would like to address that.

As a Progressive Unschool, one of the key things that sets us apart from traditional schools is that we have an emergent curriculum. This means our teachers must think on their feet, be observant of every child's developmental stages, and constantly reflect and adjust their interactions and environment with the children. Before the Easter holidays, our teachers had a long discussion about hitting.

Hitting is a normal developmental stage for children between the age of 2 and 4. We know that and have experimented with different intervention points when conflicts occur. We started with blocking the hitters and firmly saying "No, I won't let you hit" to allowing them to struggle with each other over whatever objects, especially with the older boys. Sometimes these struggles escalate to hitting, with one side or both bursting into tears. Throughout the conflict, we would do "sportscasting" as usual, verbalizing how each side is feeling and what they wanted. When the conflict has ended, we move in to counsel them about how they felt, how the others felt, and how they could've handled it better. This gives children a chance of handling conflicts themselves first rather than being dependent on adults to always “fix” their problems for them.

We would never force a child to "say sorry", or force them to shut down their emotional outburst and to emulate adult behavior. We want children to remain genuine children and not some confused mini-human beings based on an image of an adult.

Despite the benefits of emotional growth through these incidents, we've realized that managing hitting has cost us a lot of mental and physical energy and also takes up the children's time for play. After careful discussion, we've decided to focus more on prevention and intervening earlier, so children have more time for play and creative projects. One way we do that is have staff shadow and monitor more active children very closely and intervene before they can act out.

Some parents have asked us: the children just come here to play, how do they learn anything? Here’s Mabo’s answer.

At Mulberry, we use an Emergent Curriculum, where teachers observe children’s play, find their interests, and base our curriculum on their interests. For example, last week, the children were really curious and motivated to learn about crickets. We harnessed this intrinsic motivation to encourage skills such as self-control, observation, thoughtfulness, concentration, and even drawing and later, possibly 3D modeling!

Zavier, almost four and our oldest student, often sparks peer learning with the younger students. He was playing with a magnifying glass to see things BIG. We had some live crickets in a glass box. Allison told Zavier that he can bring the crickets inside so he could see them even bigger. I told him the crickets can be on the large table.

There were things on the large table, so I asked him if the space was ready for crickets.

"What do we need for crickets? Do we need a house for them? Do we need a playground for them?” I asked. (I wanted him to come up with an idea to make something…)

Zavier decided to make an open space, so he started to clean up the table (neat!). Meanwhile, I was inviting other kids in. Ethan and Lucian joined. There was a little issue as it turned out the crickets belonged to Ethan but after I asked him to share, he was willing to.

I asked the children questions to encourage their creativity and imagination: “Is this table ready? If I put him, what does he do? Does he run? jump? Where will he go?” Also, I added a little math concept to “1, 2, 3, go!”

The cricket landed on the open space. I could see the kids were observing carefully, and I facilitated their activity while they imagined and created things for the cricket, like a cave with a floor plan.

An interesting interaction took place yesterday. Girl A was arranging the animal figures on the floor when one of the animals was knocked over. She said: "Ohh noo… it's fall down. It fall down and hurt", picked it up, gave it a hug. She said: "Kiss", and gave it a kiss. She then asked me to kiss it too. I played along with her a couple of times, but I also wanted to show her another way. So the next time she asked me to kiss the elephant, I said: "I don't want to kiss, I'll ask if he's OK." "Are you OK Mr. Elephant?" Stella replied "YES!" for Mr. Elephant right away. I said, "well, let's make sure Mr. Elephant is really OK and that he isn't hurt. It's OK to say 'No' when people ask you if you're OK."

When children experience negative emotions, we as adults often feel for them too much and want to kick these bad emotions away for our children as quickly as possible. A lot of us will immediately go cuddle them, say things like "it's OK…", "shhh…", "you're fine"… etc. When we say these things, we're teaching our children that these negative feelings are bad, we shouldn't have these feelings, and so we should just ignore them. Many of us were probably brought up this way too, so it's a lesson for us too - "We are ALLOWED to feel angry! We are allowed to feel sad! Our feelings are real and we have the rights to express them."

There are many negative consequences of not acknowledging our children's negative feelings, one of which is child abuse. Here's an excerpt from Dr. Louise Porter's research on child abuse:

_"Nevertheless, ignorance about their bodies and sexual matters increases young people’s vulnerable to abuse; therefore child safety topics can be of some value within the school curriculum and even more valuable when the information comes naturalistically from parents. The fundamental principle that will keep children safe is: It's my body, I get to choose.

Reinforce this message with children from an early age: if they do not want tickling, they get to choose for it to stop; if they do not want to kiss Aunt Hazel, they do not have to. Teach children to recognise their feelings. Even before they are talking, teach them words to describe their emotions: when throwing a toy around angrily, you might say: ‘I can tell you’re very angry’."_

www.louiseporter.com.au/pdfs/child_abuse_web.pdf

Don't like wordy academic papers? Janet Lansbury has this great blog post for you - http://www.janetlansbury.com/2012/12/no-angry-kids-fostering-emotional-literacy-in-our-children/