I spend a lot of time online learning about the best ways to teach my classes. One of the things that is most frequently suggested for working with preschoolers is to change things up all the time.
“Don’t do activities that are longer than 5 or 10 minutes!”
The reasoning being that preschoolers have trouble concentrating on one activity for longer than that.
However, from actually working with them I’ve seen evidence to the contrary.
True, it’s very hard to get preschoolers to sit still – when they’re doing something they’re not interested in. I experienced this several times while I was working at a summer camp. Trying to get eleven preschoolers to sit still and all sing the same songs in unison, over and over, was painful. I had to give them a reason to want to participate – “Who wants to choose the next song?” – and I know from my research that external rewards do not necessarily lead to long-term performance.
It is much more beneficial to the person if learning is intrinsically rewarding – that is, doing the learning is the reward in and of itself. You don’t learn because you might get to pick the next song or because if you do it will make your teacher happy. You learn because you are genuinely interested in the thing you’re learning about.
And when someone is truly interested in learning about something, nothing can stop them.
Take my student A, for instance. During our first lesson, I brought a bunch of small items and a container of water, intending to do this activity with her. As you can probably guess, that’s not we ended up doing.
Instead, A spent the next fifteen minutes scooping the water from the container into a plastic cup with a spoon. Then she poured the water from the container to the cup, then dropped some items in the cup. It was overflowing now, so she used the spoon to transfer the water from the cup back to the container, and then she poured it all out again. Then she started stacking items on top of each other. She repeated these actions – scooping and pouring and stacking – as I said, for about fifteen minutes.
She was just as focused on her task five minutes in as she was fifteen minutes in. Of course, I had to gently return her attention to the English lesson because that’s what we were “supposed” to be doing, but I’m positive that A would have happily continued scooping and pouring the water had I not distracted her from her work.
The same situation happened at the summer camp. Every day the children did a special cooking or crafts activity while the lead teacher pulled kids out for a bathroom break. It took a good fifteen to twenty minutes to make sure everyone had gone to the toilet. And the children had no trouble stringing beads and clipping clothespins into patterns for the entire length of time. They weren’t bored and running around looking for something to do after just five minutes. They were deeply engrossed in their tasks, because the doing of it was interesting enough to hold their attention for long amounts of time.
I know that scooping and pouring are some of the Practical Life activities available in Montessori classrooms, and that she knew that children were capable of engrossing themselves in work they found personally interesting for long periods of time. As always, it’s been interesting to see how her theories come to life in the everyday realm of children.
Miss Jaya Z. 