TOWARDS MEETING THE DEVELOPMENTAL NEEDS OF

PRESCHOOLERS IN THE CLASSROOM¹

 Deborah Paris

      All of us who work with young children have good intentions: our goals are to promote growth, independence, a sense of well-being, a zest for activities, a curiosity about the world, and the ability to learn.  But often we are flummoxed in our endeavor.  Why, when our intentions are so good and so noble, do we at times fall flat on our faces?  Why, when we have structured the most ingenious activities, laid out the most fascinating toys and tools, do we at times elicit not the best in children, but the worst?  Why, when we think we are doing it all right, does it come out all wrong?  What I am hoping to address is what it is really like in the classroom, what teachers really have to cope with, what our real goals are, and how we can build in success rather than failure.

      I suppose that is our starting point.  What do I mean by success?  Is it a classroom of perfectly behaved children who follow directions, sit still, never raise their voices, never make a mess, are always happy?  Although we might not complain about such a mythological classroom, that is not what I mean by the classroom of a successful teacher.  Clearly, the job of a teacher is “to teach,” but what is it that we want to teach?  And how do we do it?  If the job of a preschool teacher is to help the progress of normal development, help connect the child both to his inner and outer worlds, and to help the child become increasingly independent, informed and aware, then what we are talking about today is not how to make everything look good, but how to create a classroom where what is going on within the children is central to what is going on in the classroom.  The connection between the develop­mental stage of the child and the curriculum of your classroom is the goal of early childhood education.

     It was Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, a formative thinker of child analysis and herself a teacher, who delineated the concept of developmental lines.  What these developmental lines set forth is a continuum in the growth of a child that takes him or her from infancy to childhood and on to adulthood through steps in development.  These steps are the same for all developing children, though they may be accomplished in a myriad of individual ways, depending on the child, the environment, and the life experiences that come his way.  The underpinnings of such a seemingly basic design are quite complex; Anna Freud’s ideas take into account the unfolding and changing inner life of the child that goes through alterations in feelings and interest over time, as well as the interactions between that child and the environment - first his parents/caretakers, then reaching further into the world via extended family and school, etc.  In Normality and Pathology in Childhood, Anna Freud states that “whatever level has been reached by any given child ... represents the results of interaction ... between maturation, adaptation and structuralization,” (p. 64) that is to say, between normal growth, response to the environment and personality development.  These developmental lines “convey a convincing picture of an individual child’s personal achievements or, on the other hand, of his failures in personal development” (p. 64).

     What are the lines Anna Freud lays out?  She describes the movement: 

from Dependency to Emotional Self-Reliance and Adult object Relationships (or in other words: mutual caring relationships)

toward bodily independence - suckling to rational eating, from wetting and soiling to bladder and bowel control, from irresponsibility to responsibility in body management

            from egocentricity to companionship

            from the body to the toy and from play to work.

      As Miss Freud continues to describe the intricacies of all this development which is taking place in the young child, she also talks about application of this theoretical concept to the real world.  “The child’s readiness to meet events such as the birth of the sibling, hospitalization, school entry, etc., is seen then as the direct outcome of his developmental progress on all the lines which have a bearing on this specific experience.  If the appropriate stations have been reached,  the happening will be constructive and beneficial to the child; if this is not the case, either on all or on some of the lines concerned, the child will feel bewildered and overtaxed and no effort on the part of the parents, teachers, nurses will prevent his distress, unhappiness, and sense of failure ...” (p. 88).

     What Miss Freud is describing is a continuum along which children move as they get older.  The three-year old is just beginning the movement along these lines, while the five-year old is further along.   Consequently, the ability to tolerate different things tends to increase as the child gets older.  For example, concrete thinking is more concrete in the three-year old, less concrete in the five-year old.  Let me give you an example of concrete thinking.  A three-year old wasn’t feeling well and was told by her parents, “You have a little bug.”  Her parents were quite startled subsequently when she announced to visitors -- “I swallowed a bug.”  Another example is of  three-year olds who are often terrified by Halloween costumes because they are at the early end of the process enabling distinction of fantasy from reality, fiction from fact.  The three-year old’s thinking is still merged with fantasy, and reality can be confusing.  A colleague of mine, Betty Fleming, shared a story about a four-and-a-half-year old, much later along the developmental lines, who told her at Halloween, “I know all those people in costumes aren’t real, but I just learned that, so I don’t know it for sure yet.”  Both the three-year old and the four-and-a-half-year old are having a problem distinguishing fantasy from reality, but to different degrees.  In setting up a classroom, however, one wants to eliminate activities which contribute to the blurring of fantasy and reality for all preschoolers.

     None of us would argue that we want to promote in children exactly those developmental movements laid out by Anna Freud.  The goals of preschool education are both reflections and manifestations of all this.  Hopefully, what you all do as teachers and caretakers is to help the progress of normal development and help connect the child to the world.  Thus, teachers of the young children try to help them become learners.  A number of significant steps take place during these years which will influence all future learning and it is the mastery of these steps that should be the goal of preschool curricula.  What are some of these steps?

     I think the first step for a child entering preschool is rooted in the idea of relationship.  We all know that children prosper when they feel connected to the adults in whose charge they are left.  But entering school requires an extension of this notion, for a child needs to learn to view the teacher, as a teacher, not as a substitute caretaker or a parent.  This means the model for the teacher-student relationship is not that of the total mother-child relationship, though hopefully early nurturing experiences will have helped create a sense of trust and interest in other, known adults.  What the teacher offers is an expanding horizon and the fun of using one’s curiosity to learn about the world around us and the world within us.  It compliments but does not duplicate what home offers.  The process by which a child comes to know the teacher and the school environment is gradual, and hopefully the introduction to school takes this into account.  A gradual separation program, with the parents staying during the initial stages, means the place and the teacher are connected to and sanctioned by the most trusted of adults, the parents, which leads to the child’s ability to connect and trust as he or she gets to know the teacher.  Thus, a relationship can prosper and school can be experienced as safe and interesting rather than fearful and overwhelming.  The gradual separation is also helpful for parents, who benefit from becoming familiar with the environment to which they have entrusted their child; far better relationships between teachers and parents can thus develop.  Hence, the ability to separate is the sine qua non of adapting well to school.

     There are further developmental tasks children will hopefully master during their one, two or three years of preschool; the ability to delay gratification and its partner, frustration tolerance, are two of them.  Without these, civilized conduct quickly goes by the wayside while each child’s instinctual drives and narcissism struggle for supremacy.  In school, we are trying to aid the movement from primitive gratifications (getting what he wants right now), to more mature ones (managing like a big boy or girl, feeling powerful enough to control oneself, etc.).  Other accomplishments go hand-in-hand with these masteries of impulse: learning to wait, to share, to function in a group, to enjoy peers as true “others” rather than as mere vehicles for one’s own will.  Other crucial tasks to be mastered are the ability to ask questions, the ability to be wrong and the experience of learning as an increasingly neutral function.  All this is part of a process and takes time and development.  In later schooling, we often see what occurs when these steps are not mastered, for even if a child can read and add, his or her ability to learn will be severely compromised without the accomplishment of these developmental tasks.  Of course the child’s center of experience and growth is the home, but school can take into account the developing child’s struggles and focus on these issues as the core of the “learning” in preschool, for this is what will help children become true learners over time.

     If a child has not mastered these steps by elementary school, he can’t really learn; if a child has mastered these steps, he can learn anything at the right time - that is to say as long as expectations are developmentally appropriate.  So in the preschool years, what may be more important than what you teach, is how you help children learn.  This means, going back to Anna Freud’s ideas of developmental movement, that we need to start where the child is; our goal is to promote development rather than demand adaptation.

     What does this mean for the actual classroom experience?   It means taking into account the kind of thinking that governs the two to five year olds, the strength of their fantasy versus their understanding of, or conviction about, reality.  It means it is the adult’s job to support the reality side, for a three year old is not yet certain that witches and Spiderman do not exist, or that Uncle John really will not bite off her finger.    It means one of our aims is to help the child control himself rather than our having to control him.  It means helping curiosity move to the world and neutral things.  It means helping them sort out who they are and how they fit into the world of the classroom.

     Now I am probably telling many of you things you already know.  The idea of the developmentally appropriate preschool has almost become a catchword of the 1990's.  But “developmentally appropriate” doesn’t  really guide us.  What we need to know is where the child really is functioning  in order to know best how to guide him or her.  This is influenced by what is happening to him both on the outside and inside.  Children bring many of their own stresses to school - stresses about separation, or the birth of a sibling, or feelings about mom’s working, or illness.  The list can go on and on.  And of course many of these events in a life are often not things we can control.

     Such stresses are often the nuts and bolts of children’s daily lives, and we want to help children with these stresses.  This means not only getting to know the children in your classroom, and learning to interpret behavior as coming from feelings, but also providing a milieu that does not add to the stress portion of the child’s life by asking them to do things they are not yet ready to do.  Mrs. Erna Furman, in her book, What Nursery School Teachers Ask Us About, says in her chapter on stress:  “We cannot judge by our adult experience what constitutes a stress for a child and we do not recognize the signs by which he shows his stress.  This prevents us from sparing him certain stresses, from helping him cope with others, from knowing when he struggles with it successfully, and when he does not”  (p. 54).  So, if we understand better where the child is developmentally, we can better assess what may be a stress.  The idea here is probably best understood in terms of later development.  We would not ask a first grade reader to read War and Peace, even if he could read the words.  Nor would we ask a ten year old to drive a car, even if he has great small muscle coordination.  This is because they have not yet developed the deeper skills and knowledge to accomplish these things.  So what we want to guard against in the classroom is asking preschoolers to do the equivalent of reading  War and Peace.

     I thought that a few vignettes from my experience consulting with teachers in various preschools might be helpful in illustrating what I mean by all of  this.  I have learned a great deal from the teachers with whom I have worked.  Not only have I grown to admire the enormous energy and care required by the invested preschool teacher, but I have also seen the incredible inventiveness and responsiveness that are the hallmarks of a truly good teacher.

     Thus, when two experienced teachers at a school approached me about some difficulties in their classroom of three-year olds, I knew that they were coming up against something new to them.  One teacher had never taught three-year olds before, the other only for one year.  Their class this year was of 14 very young three-year olds, some of whom had participated in “Mom and Me” type programs the previous year, but most had not.  Consequently, separation had been a primary concern for the teachers in this class, and they had worked to help the parents stay and establish a connection between parent and school, parent and teacher, and child and teacher.  Though this period had been more difficult and slow for some than others, the teachers tried to encourage letting it happen in a process kind of way.  Yet, once school was truly underway, things did not proceed as hoped for.  Why, the teachers asked, was the room so chaotic, the children so immature and unable to listen?

     They brought a particular example:  group time was a nightmare in the classroom.  Children didn’t come when asked to sit down for group; they wiggled and lost focus during that time, and were unresponsive to the teacher’s words.  Group time was an uncomfortable time, then, for both the children and the teachers.  What should we do?

     What became clear as we talked together was that the teachers felt the object of the group time was to teach something of substantive interest - about the weather, the food groups, about clothing or stories.  What we realized, however, was that for some reason the children were taking in none of this.  When I went to observe the class, I saw all that the teachers had described.  The children ignored the teachers’ requests to come sit down, and once literally herded to the corner for group, were at best spacey, at worst jumping up and down, pushing one another, talking as the teacher talked.  It was a mess.

     Both teachers were more accustomed to four and five year olds.  They described the three-year olds as immature, in part because they were unfamiliar with three-year old development.  We needed to go back to what was going on with the young three year old to get a handle on how to change things in the classroom.  First, the teachers and I observed how the children did not seem to know both teachers’ names.  Nor did they respond to the visual warning of impending group time -- the flicking on and off of the lights.  Although some were engaged in purposeful play during free time, most were wandering from activity to activity, child to child.  Although they looked animated because of the constant movement, upon closer examination, one could see that they looked spacey or anxiously wild.  The teachers had also observed this, but didn’t know what to make of this and wanted to know, “what are we doing wrong?”  We talked about the first school experience for the child, the introduction to a new physical place, a new and large group of children, to teachers whom they did not know.  For many of the children, the concept of a teacher was a brand new one.  So we wondered if perhaps we were expecting too much from these three-year olds too soon.

     We started by thinking about how the children seem confused between the two teachers.  When I described how chaotic is must seem to their young minds, and how it might be helpful to establish first a firm one-to-one relationship with a teacher, the teachers came up with the idea of dividing the 14 children into two groups of seven each.  As they warmed to the idea, they talked of how they, like the children, had been feeling overwhelmed and confused by the group.  The idea of seven children seemed far more manageable than 14.  Their idea was to have each teacher be the one to welcome their children for the day, be the snack table teacher, and initially to be the group teacher.  They carried through on this, and were much relieved as children began to seek out and respond to their own teacher.  And the teachers began to better  individualize the children in the classroom.  They got to know the parents better, were able to talk with the children about their parents and with the parents about their children.  All fixed, right?  Wrong - group time was still a mess, even though they subdivided it.

     Next, we began to think about the function of group time.  We tried to enter into what it was like for the three year old, still getting familiar with the school room and school experience.  What was the chaos of free play telling us?  I felt it was telling us that the children were feeling disconnected, lost and a bit overwhelmed.  True, this subsided some with the better connections established between the teachers and their children.  But the general lack of focus bothered everyone.

     I asked how free time had been introduced, and we realized that it hadn’t been.  As in most schools, the assumption was the children would enjoy playing with the toys.  What was missing in this thinking was the idea that children of this age need to be prepared  every step of the way, need to be oriented before being able to enjoy or master new things.  Contrary to common consensus, children don’t like surprises or chaos, for their mental and emotional apparatus is not yet able to sort it all out, and children can, thus, feel overwhelmed and anxious when they don’t know what is going on.  To get the feel of this as an adult, it may help to remember what it is like when we begin something new - starting at a new school, for example.  Most of us want to know in advance when we are supposed to register, what the requirements are, who the best teachers are, where the classroom building is located, what bus we need to take, or where we park our car.  (Some of you  may have had these very same questions about coming here for the first time?)  But, as adults, we know how to formulate our questions and find out the answers.  A three-year old isn’t there yet, so new and unorganized experiences can’t be mastered quickly, only gradually.

     This made great sense to the teachers who immediately began to put out fewer activities, tell the children the day ahead what would be out to play with, and helped the more unfocused children make plans for what they might play with.  They talked with the children about  the various ways to play with some toys or activities.  Furthermore, the children were becoming better acquainted with the children in their small group, evidenced by their beginning to know the names of the other children.  Things began to calm down in free play.  (Let me interpolate here, that this makes it sound smooth and easy.  Memory and condensation can do that, producing a kind of “therapeutic amnesia.”  In truth, all this took time and remarkable frustration tolerance, and a belief in the need for process, on the part of the teachers, for there were many ups and downs along the way.)

     This same idea of preparation helped us with the group time problem.  The teachers began to tell children in advance that group time would be coming up, that they should watch for the signal - the flicking of the lights - and the teacher’s announcement.  They would approach certain children individually - those who had a harder time with transitions - and remind them of what was coming up.  They helped children complete projects or make plans to complete them, or helped the children put things away in a calm manner.  Then when the time came, they would focus on helping the children move to the area where group was always held.  This was a hard time for some of the children, and the teachers in the past had physically tried to move the children, holding on to their shoulders to move them along.  Now, with the focus changed from getting group  started to helping the children learn how to change activities, follow directions and be in charge of themselves, the teachers talked to the children rather than moving  them, helping them notice where they were and where they were going.  That each teacher was closely connected to seven of the children helped this move along gradually.  Once the children had arrived, the teachers helping them with sitting, with a prescribed circle so that there was no front and back, no closer or farther from the teacher - very egalitarian seating was the rule of the day.  Wiggling did not disappear immediately, and indeed this continued to be a hard time for some of the children who had other feeling issues.  In general, though, it improved for most children, who were better able to focus on what the teacher was saying, having not felt surprised or disorganized by what preceded.  And the teachers could then recognize whether Johnny or Sally was having a problem, rather than be overwhelmed by a general lack of containment.

     All this, as you may all recognize, was quite time consuming.  Indeed, the main learning at group time was about how to get to group rather than teaching the prepared lesson.  But this makes sense if you redefine your curriculum goal - if the accomplishment of the task of getting to group time and sitting in one place and taking in is the goal, then it makes sense to spend the time and effort in helping the children master it.  And of course there is spread from this - children who have learned to listen, follow directions, and change activities will function much more autonomously in the classroom and will have laid down a basic skill necessary for all future learning.  Hence, it is a crucial goal, one that must be taught.  Now, this class was a very young class, so more attention was needed than might be true with older children, or those who have had previous experience.  But even those children, in a new classroom, with a new teacher and new children, can benefit from the slow and careful introduction of procedure.  As this becomes familiar, far more energy becomes available to the children to learn about the rest of the world.

     The idea of preparation is one with which all agree, but sometimes we miss how complete it needs to be.  The new emphasis on enrichment has hobbled teachers, as parents often interpret as enrichment those activities which can overwhelm children by asking them to do things they are not yet ready to do.  This was the case when another preschool teacher at a different school commented that the children in her class were impossible on the days they went to dalcroze class, the music and movement class the school made available to the children in their extended day program.  The school felt it was important for four year olds to be exposed to new experiences; the longer day, they felt, required more activities, and the parents wanted their children to have something extra since they were paying so much money and their children were at school all day long.  Upon inquiry, I discovered that this class was not held at the school, but at the community activity center, and the children took a bus there.  The class was not taught by their teacher, nor by any staff from the school, but was taught by an employee of the center.  On the dalcroze days, the teacher had a hard time getting the children to pay attention, and some children became clingy or overly excited.  But after the class, the teacher said the children were very excited and happy, and her feeling was that the program was beneficial.  They would run around and yell, behavior not normally seen in her class, but she interpreted this as high spirits and pleasure.

     I think this is one of the most common difficulties for teachers, for behavior can look one way, but really mean something else.  Often it helps to look at two things to assess what is really going on:  one is how it makes the teacher feel, for often that is our best clue to how the children feel - when you feel frantic, or out of control, or angry, it is often because the children are feeling frantic, out of control, and angry.  Children often induce in adults the uncom­fortable feeling they are experiencing.  The other helpful guide to what behavior really means is to see how it ends up.  When it ends in fights, tears and/or injury, you can be pretty sure something was amiss, that all was not as you thought.  And wild excitement in children, with its loud laughter and energetic movement, can look in some ways to be fun, but often for the children is a reflection of feeling too much, too out of control.  Since children enjoy feeling in control, they can feel distressed when they feel helpless; excitement is “fun” when the child is in charge of the excitement (i.e., when he can stop when necessary), and ceases to be “fun” when he feels he cannot stop.  Teachers know this by how quickly these high spirits veer into trouble.  It is a discharge maneuver rather than real fun.

     With this in mind, let’s look at the dalcroze class, which in a way is like a field trip, but a repeated one.  It at least has the virtue of becoming more familiar.  Why do I link this with field trips?  Because it is taking the children out of the familiar milieu, away from their familiar people, often in an unfamiliar vehicle with an unfamiliar driver, to do an unfamiliar activity - not an easy amount for a young child to integrate.  In general, I feel that field trips are one of those activities that look as if they are enriching and beneficial to very young children when they often are not.  Too much effort on the part of the children needs to go towards the mechanics mentioned above to leave energy or neutral interest available for the processing of whatever new information is provided by the new environment.  How can children take in, in any useful kind of way, a museum or even a park, when they have had to strain their still developing ego strengths to merely get there?  Think about how we had to teach them to come to group time in their regular classroom!  This is why everyone usually comes back from a field trip exhausted and feeling overwhelmed, which in children is often conveyed by wildness and silliness.

     Field trips, however, often become part of an early childhood curriculum because parents expect it or see it as enriching.  They forget that a trip to the zoo with mom and dad is far different from a trip to the zoo with eighteen children, a bus driver, etc.  And often teachers feel that the children, at times deprived of enriching activities at home, need the broader exposure such an experience offers.  The same is true of activities such as skating, swimming, dalcroze, etc.

      This is not to say that at some point, after a child is firmly established at school, has a good relationship with the teacher and the classroom, and has ability to verbalize his or her questions, needs, and concerns, that introducing such excursions is asking for trouble.  At this point, usually with the older preschool child, it is often the nature of the excursion or the way it is approached that leads us astray.  With our dalcroze class, no preparation had been done to introduce the children in a gradual way to this change in their routine.  Ginny Steininger, the previous director of education at the Hanna Perkins School, described for me a field trip for ice cream, which began with slow preparation, short forays to landmarks that would become familiar to the children and ultimately concluding with the actual trip to the ice cream parlor.  Time was given to the process of doing the field trip before the content could be looked at - how you make ice cream, etc.  The initial curriculum goal was the breaking down of the field trip and learning how to approach one.

     The pleasure of knowing what is going to happen, and the delight in it happening as one knew it would, is what you want to help children with in planning trips away from school.  It gives them knowledge, preparation, and control.  The opposite is confusion and helplessness, sheep being herded by kindly shepherds, with no one gaining from the experience.  With the dalcroz class, the teachers broke the trip down into component parts, starting with a trip to visit the bus, get on the bus, meet the bus driver.  But they didn’t go anywhere.  Next was added an actual bus ride, then a visit to the community center to meet the teacher, see the facility, then return to the classroom.  The actual class itself came at the end of lengthy preparation.  Not all the children loved the dalcroze class, but none were overwhelmed by it.  The school eventually eliminated the class for the younger children.

     Another area that is often confusing, not just for teachers, but for parents as well, is holiday time.  We come to holidays as adults with our own memories and wishes, either of wonderful times from the past, or deprived times.  And we  either want to recreate for children what we remember, or provide for children what we missed.  What is left out of this thinking is a number of important elements.  First of all, our memories of the past are not from our preschool years, but from times when we were older.  Furthermore, our thinking here is often governed by our own needs and feelings, not those of the children.  We need to think about what children are really like, what the content of holidays often is.  Holiday frenzy is not just fostered by a depressed retail environment!  It is fostered by an effort to fulfill some sort of fantasy of a good time.  What gets left out of this are two things:  thinking about how all this is interpreted by the three, four, and five year old, and thinking about the goal of celebrating holidays in the classroom.  What is it that we are trying to accomplish?

     In The Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens describes a holiday as “a good time, a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time, when hearts open to one another.”  But Scrooge is governed by “deeds of passion, pride, envy and selfishness.”  The story is the process by which Scrooge learns his lesson, becoming a civilized person - loving, mature and caring.  Scrooge had a lot to learn before he could enjoy his holidays properly.  And so do children!

     What often makes holiday time a particularly difficult one at school is the excitement, often carried over from home and the culture in general, that permeates the school day and school interactions.  Parents and teachers alike can be confused - all that excitement must mean the children are having a good time, right?  But when we look at how it goes, with fights, tears, disappointments, people getting hurt, or merely unable to listen, to take in, at school, we can let ourselves recognize something is amiss.  What gets interpreted as pleasure is often not pleasurable at all;  instead it is that same overwhelming, “too much” feeling that children try to get rid of since they can’t master it.

     Most school programs are trying to teach about the content of a holiday - often content that is scary, abstract, mythic, or far beyond the ability of the young child to grasp.  The child who is struggling with reality testing, with trying to figure out what is real on the outside opposed to what feels real on the inside, can have a hard time with ghosts at Halloween, with Santa Claus at Christmas, even the Easter Bunny at Easter.  Three-year olds are still uncertain about whether people can change, and can worry that their teacher has altered when she dons a mask; and four-year olds who are full of omnipotent wishes, can lose the idea of pretend when they put on their  Power Ranger costumes, feeling like they are truly off to do battle!  Since young children do their learning in the context of a relationship, the way holidays are celebrated or explained is often best ac­complished at home, with the family.  Family traditions can become established that can be treasured parts of life.  What, then, should the school’s part be?

     Perhaps the school’s role of education is best served by taking into account the Scrooge-like nature in all of us, particularly in the young child, and the confusion about reality.  Certainly the sharing of different traditions, different religions, different customs can hold a fascination for children because it is family-based.  When a parent comes and makes potato pancakes at Chanukah, or sings a Christmas song from their country of origin, or makes a special treat traditional to their customs, this is interesting to the children as they get an idea of how different families celebrate holidays.  In a certain way, this makes a child feel more firmly based in his own sense of family; “My family goes to grandma’s . . .”, etc.  But all this makes sense to the three and four year old, just because it is family-based.  The effort here is not to pass on the “excitement” about a holiday, but the con­nectedness of a holiday.  This is not to say that as children get older, more content about holidays cannot be included, or that holidays can not be celebrated with the making and eating of special treats, for example.  But that must parallel the child’s ability to understand the information or the activity in a neutral, clear way, and should serve some integrative and truly fun purposes; these goals are attained gradually, over time.

     What can be done in the classroom to make the holiday a good rather than over-excited time?  Again, Ginny Steininger shared the evolution of thinking about Halloween at the school.  When Ginny first came to the school, in an effort to minimize the scariness of costumes of a non-threatening nature.  I remember one year when they dressed as pieces of fruit!  Over the years, with a lot of thought, the children made costumes of what they wanted to be when grown up - astronauts, football players, doctors, cowboys wandered the classroom.  But what the teachers still noticed in the nursery class was the befuddlement of the children, all dressed up at school.  What Ginny and the teachers determined was that dressing up did not make sense at school for this age, that somehow it was intruding on the “schoolness” which the children enjoyed, without offering anything useful in an educational way, for the children to enjoy.  Eventually, they decided not to celebrate Halloween by wearing costumes at school, but did enjoy making special Halloween cookies and decorating the room.

     All of which brings us full circle, back to the ideas where we started.  If we take into account where children really are in their thinking and feelings, how they take in, relate, and show feelings, then that will determine what works or doesn’t work well in the classroom.  Keeping in mind the ideas of starting where the children are, preparation, and step-by-step process may seem too basic and obvious to have devoted all these minutes to, but without proper attention to these issues, we create for ourselves, in our work with children, troublesome spots that do in both teacher and child.  Consequently, the question best asked about classroom activities is, “What is the purpose?”, for that keeps the focus on the connection to the aim of the schoolroom - to promote development.  It is really the “how” of learning that is the essence of preschool education.  Thus, helping a child break down and integrate whatever is being taught provides the most basic and significant cornerstone of learning.

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