Starting from Where the Kids Really Are

Huang Jin Kun (Shenzhen, China)
September 6, 2011

During the summer vacation of 2011, I had sponsored again the parent-child class of the “Motor Development” workshop from “the Basic Life Skills” workshop series, in the same hotel that I had done it last year.

Apart from the business reasons of making some money and promoting the said workshop series, there was an important private reason in sponsoring said workshop, i.e. to facilitate the healthy development of my son, Bill. From the name of the workshop series, “The Basic Life Skills”, we knew that it was for laying a firmer foundation for living one’s life, very suitable for my son who was six year and a half this year. I had placed Bill in the class starting last year, though he was the youngest there, because of this consideration.

In the class of 2010, all the participants were either friends or relatives. They were all accommodative to Bill. Just to make sure he would not become a nuisance in class, I arranged my father- and mother-in-laws to join the class, too. If he was not OK in any way, he might be escorted out of the classroom right away. The venue was in a resort hotel. He would not be bored anyhow.

However, this back-up plan was never executed. Bill was very co-operative. When the activity interested him, he would join. For those more difficult, he would just play with another boy, who was only a few days older than him, at the back of the classroom, so long as they did not make too much noise. In this way, Bill had experienced all six days of the “Motor Development” workshop.

From his behaviours in the 2010 class, I thought he would not learn much and I did not deliberately observe him for progress in any way. But since early 2011, more than six months from the 2010 class, things started to emerge from Bill which led me to believe that some unexpected changes were made.

The first thing I noticed was about the trampoline. I clearly remembered how Bill was both excited and cautious when he was bouncing on the trampoline during the 2010 class. He was so completely relaxed bouncing on the trampoline in the 2011 class that he started to experiment with different postures. That kind of on-his-toe cautiousness was gone. This showed that he had a great lift in his movement coordination skills.

The second event was that Bill was chosen by his kindergarten teacher to be the lead male role in an English drama. There were quite some lines to remember. According to the teacher, he was taught twice and he got it. Other classmates had to be reminded during each rehearsal while some still could not remember after more than a dozen times of rehearsal. Bill’s amazing English learning ability totally surprised me. Maybe the 2010 class of “Motor Development” had prompted some internal changes in him. Who knows?

Therefore, I had expectations when Bill was in the 2011 class of Motor Development. In the first day of class, he was in excellent shape. He took a front seat on his own, voluntarily sharing some opinion or feeling every now and then, and was playing in each activity. In the second, there were times when he felt too difficult and refused to join the activities. In the third, when he withdrew again, I negotiated with him, saying that he would go back to the hotel room to play with his “easy” games, in a threatening tone with an angry pitch. I hinted that I sponsored this workshop largely for him and he was wasting the opportunity! The result? Bill decided to come back. Afterwards, he was in each activity, playing happily. This kind of negotiated occurred several times, lesser and lesser toward the end.

I discovered that Bill was choosing his learning methods according to his perceived learning abilities. In the 2010 class, when he was five and a half, he had chosen to learn in more childish ways, playing only simpler games. In the 2011 class, he was a year older and had chosen a wider range of activities, including those with more repetitive drilling elements. He was optimizing his learning.

I did not know what kind of progresses he would eventually made due to the 2011 class yet, but I had already got some glimpses of them. Several days after the 2011 class of Motor Development, I brought him to another workshop, the Double Doodle Play. It was basically a class training participants up to draw symmetrical pictures with both hands at the same time.

Bill again complaining of its difficulty before even trying. After several simple warm-up exercises, however, he discovered that he could do it, naturally with both hands. His confidence was up. The contents of his drawings moved from simple cartoon figures to more complex real objects, as guided by the course facilitator. Before the course, he could not even draw a tea cup. After it, he could grasp lines and shapes in his pictures. Of course, there were indeed some parts of the course that were too much for him as a six-year-old. That did not pose a problem. He knew how to retreat to the level where he could cope.

We help our kids know precisely where their ability levels actually are, no exaggeration or under-estimation. Moreover, we do not just provide training opportunities to kids; we also walk our talk. In so doing, kids may naturally follow their own rhythms to walk their own developmental paths. I believe that the consequence will be happier learning processes and more fruitful learning results.