HOW CAN MY 4 YEAR OLD DAUGHTER HELP ME TO BE A BETTER TEACHER?



From an early age, we have created the routine for our Mariana to express herself through imagery, providing materials, supports, instruments, but essentially "creating" specific moments: experiences with paints conducted by the "babysitter" (she an artist too) to "kill time and the homesickness of the Parents"; vacation graphic diary (one drawing per day exploring different materials); learning the numbers by making cutting and gluing of materials, for example...

More recently learning to write the name that quickly in his imagination happened to be the "signature" of the works and the sender of the "letters" that "writes" to parents, grandparents, friends, finally to everyone who likes...

 

 In common all the exercises, it is a simple concern to make our daughter understand the purpose of the exercise more than the rules she must follow, that is, to give her a stimulus of ignition to the imagination, accompanying her natural learning, for example: family, emotions, happiness, symbolic representation, stories, best experiences of the day, according to what the moment itself tells us that it should be the stimulus...

We also have as a rule never give negative feedback or correct your drawings, encourage and recognise the effort and give new stimulus to do more work and try more things.

These simple processes, common to most parents in their context of family development, are often or most often overlooked in university learning relationships and contexts. The rules are placed before the purposes; one inhibits the error and the attempt in favor of the pseudo assertiveness; the delivery time is sought for tuning and debugging the best solution or better learning path; the value of experimentation is diminished before the glorification of the mimicry of formulas ...

These are just a few examples of what comes into my head at this point in my creative growth in my daughter .... but also think of the learning she has had through this "discovery" of things through imagination, such as numbers and now the letters (of the name); I begin to think about other questions of the academy itself: Experimentation with or without learning objectives ?; how to perceive the effectiveness of learning through experimentation ?, for example.

I do not intend to have "right" answers, I believe that the ability to apply learning in the context of life is the final proof that effectiveness of the training course, but also having to disagree that academic "evaluation" only happens at the moment of transition of students to their professional context. so I defend the intrinsic link between the academic pathway and the (applied) research pathway of the students from the first moment they enter a degree. Thus it will be possible to evaluate in real life contexts the acquisition of knowledge by means of experimentation ...

Américo Mateus


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