An open invitation to all early childhood teachers, administrators, parents and advocates

March 8, 2008, 8:30 - 11:30am
Mid-Pacific Institute Preschool & Elementary School

How do we honor the strengths of each child, while at the same time prepare her to be a reflective thinker and positive participant in the community?

Each child has unique patterns of thinking that can be revealed by careful observation of how he plays and explores a wide variety of media such as blocks, clay, drawing, or acting out a pretend scene. These media are part of an expanded definition of literacy, which can be viewed as a type of fluency in representing one’s own thoughts. When a child can represent and revisit her own thinking, this process enables her to rethink her assumptions about how the social and physical world works. And when teachers document a child’s thinking, they too revise their assumptions about what she knows and gain a new basis for high-level conversations with her.

Dr. Forman will lay out this approach and explain how it measures the quality of a child’s thinking without the usual method of counting the number of skills a child has attained. By expanding the definition of literacy to include these and other media, we become more capable of reaching our objective of honoring the strengths of all children as well as better preparing them to fully experience and participate in their community.

George Forman, Ph.D., is a well known author of books that extend the theory of Piaget to early childhood education. He was a research psychologist at Project Zero at Harvard University, working on research about how children symbolize in media such as blocks. clay, paints, etc. Since 1986, Dr. Forman has been working with the city of Reggio Emilia in Italy on their educational model for young children. His current work looks at pre-primary professional development via digital video on the worldwide web.

This presentation is funded by the Samuel and Mary Castle Foundation, the DuPont Family, and Mid-Pacific Institute.

Call 441-3800 or email sschultz@midpac.edu to reserve a space by March 4. No fee. Limited seating.

Download the event flyer

Posted on February 13, 2008 4:26 PM | Permalink