“Texas has a bluebonnet, a bluebonnet, a bluebonnet”, the young voices sang as we walked through Woodville streets to view spring flowers and trees. Teaching tots Texas History is really a “hands-on” experience, and I thought as we strolled, that our efforts had paid off!
Earlier in the month we made bluebonnets from blue-colored popcorn glued to slender sticks and added green leaves, and the children easily recognized the live plants we saw. We learned to clap and sing “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and sang “Texas Has a Bluebonnet” to the tune of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. Students cut out Texas shapes, painted Texas shapes and bluebonnets, played cowboys dressed in boots, spurs, hats, chaps and vests, rode stick horses at a gallop and wildly rocked on horses as they tried to rope steers (and friends!). The cowboys looked for all the world like members of a very short “Hole in the Wall Gang” as they range across the playground, imagining themselves to be riding and roping with the best! On their own, the kids rigged ropes from a wide seat to the huge stuffed horse they were “riding” to create their own buckboard ... (“Like in the story, Teacher”, they said). On another day, as we walked to the library, cries of “Look, a Texas flag!” stopped our procession at the flagpole and each child paused to find for himself the flag like those we had made earlier that week.
Singing the bluebonnet song, spotting the Texas flag, and recognizing the Texas shape on highway signs are all instances of “generalization”, an educational term that means learning has taken place in one environment (the classroom) and is being used in another (on our walk). Whether the learning is as simple as toddlerlevel Texas History taught through experience with Texas shapes, flowers, animals, and flags, or more complicated, with textbooks, reports and Pioneer dinners, or by preparing a thesis on a specific portion of Texas History, generalization indicates that what has been learned is being used in a meaningful way by the learner. Locating and/or using learned information encourages children to want to learn more. Recognizing the blue spikes as bluebonnets caused questions about the names of other flowers ... thus children learnt more vocabulary for objects and other concepts.
Materials with which young children learn must be concrete, real, and relevant. This is why we use the blue popcorn and the boots, the stuffed horses and cowboy hats. Learning specific names for flowers teaches children that even similar objects have differences; learning to look for those differences is a skill they will need later to differentiate “d” from “b” as they learn to read. We all remember what we have learned best if we use more than one sense for processing the information ... can you imagine learning to knit without handling yarn and needles? Would it be possible to learn to change spark plugs or to repair electrical appliances imply by watching? Can you learn to ski by watching the Olympics? Without the opportunity to manipulate, to use materials and objects in learning, and enough time to repeat the learning activity, we may not retain information well enough to use it later as we need it, whether we are toddlers, teens or adults.
The most important thing that parents do at home is, like the schools, provide lots of changes for this learning to take place. Every activity is a learning time for children. Children DO learn from parents and others in their homes, every day, even if they are not “formally taught”. What they are learning, from attitudes to vocabulary, ought to be useful to them wherever they may use it.
