What is “hands-on” learning for babies and toddlers, and why is it so important? An Early Childhood Development Specialist tells all.
On this episode of the Learn With Less podcast, Ayelet is joined by Jeana Kinne, M.A., of jdeducational.com. Jeana is an Early Childhood Development Specialist with over 15 years experience working with children birth to six years.
Her work experience has taught her that regardless of whether a child is typically developing or has some developmental delays, a parent’s engagement in their child’s daily lives directly correlates with their child’s academic and social progress.
On this episode, we discuss:
- Jeana’s own professional background, and how she came to do the work she’s doing today
- How Jeana defines “hands-on learning” and why it’s so important for young children
- How young children experience the world through sensory experiences
- Jeana’s top tips and resources for parents hoping to offer more opportunities for hands-on learning at home, even if they have limited time, energy, or materials
Great resources we mentioned in this podcast episode:
Pairing Process Art and Early Literacy Experiences: Learn With Less podcast episode
Pre-K Your Way: Jeana’s curriculum
- Pre-K Your Way Level 1: Beginning Academics
- Pre-K Your Way Volume 2: Intermediate Academics and Alphabet Activities
- Pre-K Your Way Volume 3: Advanced Academics, Multilevel Projects
Soothing Sammy, story book by Jeana Kinne
Soothing Sammy Emotions and Feelings Activities: Soothing Sammy program by Jeana Kinne
Natural Playscapes, by Rusty Keeler
Connect With Us
Ayelet: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest
TEXT TRANSCRIPT OF THIS EPISODE
Ayelet: Today. I am speaking with Jeana Kinne of jdeducational.com. Jeanna is an early childhood development specialist with over 15 years experience working with children birth to six years. Her work experience has taught her that regardless of whether a child is typically developing or has some developmental delays, a parent’s engagement in their child’s daily lives directly correlates with their child’s academic and social progress. So Jeanna, I am so excited to have you on the show today.
Jeana: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.
Ayelet: So I’ve asked you onto the show today really to speak to us about the importance of hands-on learning for young children. But first, why don’t you just give us a little bit more information about you and how you really started to get into the work.
Jeana: Yes. So I started as a young child babysitting, and then I moved into college and I started working at the children’s center on campus, which we watched all the teachers and the staff and the students’ kids. And I was undeclared at that point. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I loved that job. And I so enjoyed being around the kids and playing with them, and helping them learn and grow.
And so I decided to get my bachelor’s degree in sociology and human development. And then I went on to getting my master’s degree in early childhood curriculum development. And from there became a preschool director. That was my ultimate dream at that time, was to have my own school and direct it.
And so then I ended up transitioning into a new kind of career working with infants and toddlers with special needs and their families, supporting their learning and working with speech therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and also becoming a preschool consultation specialist, working with preschool teachers and staff in the area. Trying to better their programs. That’s more what I do today, but I still love the preschool and being with the kids.
Ayelet: Yeah. Well, and I know that that’s sort of your “golden age” and of course the Learn With Less podcast is more about the infant-toddler side, but everything that we talk about today, we’re going to be able to chat about the early stuff, and then heading into what’s coming next, as well.
So we’ve spoken a lot on the Learn With Less podcast about the fact that you know, infants and toddlers really do learn through observation and imitation and interaction with other people and with objects in the environment, regardless of whether, as you said, they are developing along a typical progression or whether they have developmental delays.
This is how young children learn. So we know that it’s a very much sort of a experiential process. But I would love to hear from you, how do you define hands-on learning?
Jeana: So hands-on learning to me means that there’s multiple different ways that children learn. And to have an experience with an object or an activity is better than just watching someone else do the activity. So, I know we had talked about the multiple languages of learning and how my whole master’s degree was on this theory by a guy named Howard Gardner who developed a theory called the “eight learning languages” or the multiple languages of learning. And he talked about how children learn not just through one language, but multiple languages at a time.
So by moving and by touching and by seeing and by hearing and by really becoming super engaged in an activity in more than one way. And that also means children that are not so interested in sitting down and doing worksheets or tracing letters. There’s other ways they can learn through moving and games that the adults are able to adapt the whatever learning skill they’re trying to teach that child to the way that child learns.
Ayelet: Right. And it’s, yeah, it’s so hard because I think, you know, we hear, I hear so often from parents like, “well, you know, my toddler is, he would so much rather run and jump and climb and stuff like that than, like, sit and learn his letters.” So what would you, what would you say to a parent who says something like that?
Jeana: Well, and I, I like to give the expandable of as an adult, and you walk into a classroom about trains, would you rather someone sit at the front of the room with a PowerPoint and give you the 50 top bullet points about what makes a train a train?
Or would you rather experience through videos and for the adults maybe songs or maybe stories about trains are actually getting in there and learning the mechanics of trains and how they work and doing a lot of this stuff hands on.
And most kids want to be in there, hands on. They don’t want to be talked at or told what to learn. They want to actually experience it for themselves, which is how they remember what they learned, tomorrow. So if someone were to give me a PowerPoint if 50 train activities and they asked me tomorrow what were the 50 train activities, maybe I’ll say one or two.
Well, if I was actually actively engaged in building this train and singing songs about this train, I could probably tell you tomorrow 50 to 75% of what that person was trying to teach me with the train. So it’s all about making sure your child is experiencing these lessons in multiple different ways.
Ayelet: Yeah, and I think it’s so important to say too that this does not mean that you have to go out and, number one, buy expensive materials so that they can experience whatever it is you are thinking that they want to learn or should be learning about. It doesn’t mean that you have to go out and spend a whole lot of money on, you know, experiences like museums and wonderful centers…
Like these things are amazing add-ons that of course are wonderful and can benefit your children, but they are not the essentials. And what I think is important for the take home for parents and caregivers to hear is that that’s not how we can do it at home.
How we can do it at home and in a learning environment in general, say a daycare center or a school is with very simple materials, with movement, with play, with, you know, like you said, music and, and in communication with each other, right? It’s that interaction.
It’s not about sitting and doing a worksheet. It’s not even about sitting and coloring a worksheet. It’s about actually moving and playing and all of that experience with an object and with a person. And you’re nodding. So I want to give you a chance to respond.
Jeana: Yeah. In the curriculum like, and I create curriculum for parents to do at home with their kids and also preschool and daycare teachers do this, too. And one of the – trains is one of the themes – that starts by, they can either watch a YouTube video of a real train going down the tracks. Cause some kids have never seen a train before, they don’t even know it looks like or what the railroad tracks look like.
And then go to the library and get a book about trains, and then encourage your child to build a train out of empty cardboard boxes and maybe making the wheels out of empty toilet paper rolls, coloring the box of crayons. Even if you have a big box and you put a couple of them back to back, the kids can actually get in and out of the boxes and the different parts of the train.
You could talk about the front of the train, the caboose of the train, where does the conductor sit? All of that sort of stuff. And all that you needed were three big boxes and empty toilet paper.
Ayelet: Yup. And, and look what you have. You have vocabulary, you have core strengthening, right? I mean, and again this is a great thing for if you have an older kid and a toddler or even an infant who’s starting to sit up, like putting some cushions around them and helping them, like moving them around and working on that core. That’s great. These are all like, this is simple, right? This is…
Jeana: Yeah, Thomas the Train starts at what, two?
Ayelet: I know a lot of two year olds who like that stuff. Sure. Yeah. So I love that. Let’s talk a little bit about how young children experience the world through these sort of sensory experience. Because number one, I think there’s sort of a misnomer that’s going around these days.
We hear this sensory buzzword and we go to either one of two areas generally because of just the connotation of, and parents’ limited experience with this word and concept. Either we go straight to, like, Oh, sensory as in kids who have sensory processing issues or sensory as in a sensory, you know, tactile experiences, uh, things that you can touch, right? Like a sensory bin.
But that’s not all there is to it. So what are some of the other ways that young children can experience the world through sensory experiences?
Jeana: So sensory, if you think about the five senses that we all know, the sight, sound, auditory, the visual, that tactile, which is touch. All of those are senses. So when you’re working with kids and you want to encourage that all of those senses be used, including smell and movement. Like vestibular is how the kids are moving. That’s another way to engage with the world.
And so the sensory and the sensory system is how your body is responding to all of these things that are around them at once. So if you want to do a tactile, bin like with play-dough, then add some essential oils to the play-dough. So now it’s not just touch, it’s they smell something good. Or if you want to do a movement activity with a ball, you can run up to the ball and kick it and maybe there’s three or four different colors of balls.
So they’re visually seeing all those different colors while they’re moving into getting that vestibular input, or even swinging and counting. And all of those different activities have multiple sensory components to them. And I think that is what kids respond to the most. And it’s how we see the world as adults. We have to experience it 10 times, right?
Ayelet: That’s right. And there’s, like we talked about, there’s a lot of research that even indicates that like babies experience the world with this sort of sensory “Sensorama” kind of thing where they’re literally, they’re like smelling a color and seeing how something tastes like, It’s, it’s just a very different “sense” of things.
And I think the other piece of the puzzle here that I want to take home for parents is the fact that, like, everything is a sensory experience. Literally like if you are watering the driveway with your child, how can you make that more learning? It’s more of a learning experience, meaning how can you engage more senses? How can you incorporate more of these sort of four pillars that I talk about in terms of play, talk, sing and move, into any experience that you’re, that you’re engaging with your child.
So yeah, that’s great. Well let’s take just a brief break to hear a word from our sponsors and then we will hear a few tips from Jeana about supporting early development through hands on learning and we’ll hear about some of her favorite resources for parents and caregivers interested in learning more about this topic.
Ayelet: Okay, Jeana, let’s get into it. We would love to hear your top tips for parents and caregivers who really just want more ideas for supporting their little ones through hands on learning experiences. So what are some of your best tips for families who need a few more ideas and support?
Jeana: My favorite thing to do is just pay attention to what your child loves to do. I think that that is the key. Do they love to move? Do they love to sing? Do they love to dance? Do they love to do artwork or paint? And just encourage more of that! Incorporate different things that they like to do and then incorporate different or new skillsets that you want to teach within that learning language that they’ve already demonstrated to you that they love doing.
And then, what we already talked about was not to go out and buy a ton of things. You already have them at home. There’s so many different ways that you can manipulate objects from ice cubes to blankets and pillows and boxes and wooden spoons from the kitchen, and tape and paper and all sorts of things that you already have at home, and you can do activities in five or 10 or 15 minutes or just let your kids go for as long as they want to or as short as they want to.
I think those are really, really important: that all kids have different attention spans and all kids, and that’s fine! They’re developing and growing and we expect them to want to go run around the house every 20 minutes, that’s normal.
Ayelet: Yes, exactly, right! I think a lot of parents think like, okay, I’ve set up, now I’ve set up this activity that I found on Pinterest that looks so great and that is perfect for my kid because I know he likes trains or whatever it is.
Right, but he’s only interested in it for two minutes and then he destroys it or he goes over to the other side of the room and it’s like… Exactly! That is how long it lasts! That’s how long any given activity probably is going to last, unless you can add more of the sort of repetitive pieces of it or add more interesting ways to play with that object, or vary it a little bit, right? We talk a lot on the podcast about repetition with variation. That’s the key to so much of play with infants and toddlers and beyond.
But it’s really I think giving families a sense of how long something is most likely going to last. And this is, again, this is another reason why like you don’t go out and buy those expensive materials or spend all this time preparing an activity because literally gonna last five seconds and that’s it! So the best thing to do is just to create some open ended experiences or opportunities, set out some stuff that you already have, and go from there and see what happens.
Okay, great. And I want to say too that as we get into resources also you mentioned that you have this amazing curriculum which is perfect for this sort of toddler slash incoming like preschool and kinder, incoming kindergarten sort of set. And so with those kinds of things and the Learn With Less Curriculum, and things covered in the Understanding Your Baby and Understanding Your Toddler books… Like, you’re covered guys.
So let’s hear a little bit about some of your favorite resources to share with families. I want to hear some of the stuff that you’ve created and then what other kinds of things you love to share with families, as well.
Jeana: So I created, what I found was that a lot of parents were struggling with finding out how to teach their kids skills that they would need for success in kindergarten. Now that their kids are developmentally ready for some of these more advanced learning things like learning the alphabet, learning their colors and shapes and all those other things that we look at towards success in their first week of school.
We don’t want them to fall behind or be frustrated. I created some activities you guys can do at home with your kids that teach those skills through these hands-on learning techniques. So it’s a little bit different. It’s not worksheets to print out. It’s not things to cut out and cutesy crafts to do. It’s a very open-ended play-based hands-on activities that actually teach the skills that preschool teachers teach, based on the kindergarten standards. But these teach in the way that children learn best.
I have it either printed on Amazon, you can buy it in the books or I have a membership class where I walk you through everything and help you adapt the activities to your children and your family individually, give you ideas of substitute materials. If you don’t have something so you don’t go out and buy that expensive thing, or if your child doesn’t want to sit and do this activity, what could we do instead?
Or if you have a busy family and you’re learning on the go all the time or in the car or at the park, or we, I help adapt all the activities to anything because really kids learn everywhere and so that’s what’s in the membership course. Right now, It’s for kids. It’s open right now, today for kids that are starting kindergarten in 2020, so for older kids, but then in the Spring, we’re opening up for the three year olds.
Ayelet: Very cool. So this is great for all of you guys who are sort of aging out of the, you know, birth to three age. This is what we really focus on. So I just, I believe so wholeheartedly in what you’re doing Jeana. And I’m so happy to have a place where we can send people as they age out of our curriculum, as well. First of all, where can we find those things on your website? JDeducational.com. Is that right?
Jeana: Yes. When you go to the website, there’s two dropdown menus, one says for parents and one says for teachers. So if you’re a parent, or you can drop down there or if you even, I have some parents that have little daycares or in co-op groups, they use those activities in there also. So there’s two different memberships, honestly for a teacher or for a parent.
Ayelet: And then, what are some of the other kinds of things that you like to recommend the parents look at?
Jeana: Well the other, the other thing I have on my website is the Soothing Sammy kit that teaches emotional, social and emotional skills sets. That teaches kids how to calm down and manage their emotions. Cause I know we talked about how just because the kids know all of their academic skills for kindergarten, that’s only half the battle.
The other part is that they can understand how they feel, communicate their feelings, problem solve, share space and toys with other kids. And so Soothing Sammy is a book and a parent set that I’ve created that teaches kids how to do that in a hands-on sensory based way. We’re talking about it in a way they remember. So that’s the other thing I have on there. So that is the social emotional support and then the academic support.
Ayelet: Right, because it’s a two sided, two pronged thing. And I was sharing with you also before we started recording that we went to a kindergarten panel because my son was starting kindergarten and it was a question that had come out by some of the parents asking all these kindergarten teachers, “what is the best way, what can we do over the summer to make sure that our kids are ready” and or like “how do we know that our kids are ready for kindergarten?”
And the answer that I’m so happy that all of the kindergarten teachers agreed upon was, “I can teach a child to read. I can teach your child math. What I cannot teach your child are those social emotional skills that they need to come into kindergarten with like impulse control, emotional regulation, being able to sit and being able to be ready to learn.” That’s what play does. That’s what play-based curriculum does.
That’s what you as the parent can do and support with emotional language and with tasks that just help with all of those things. We’ve had so many great podcast episodes of in the past about you know, how to teach these skills.
But I just want to say I think it’s so awesome and so important that you Jeana, are addressing both sides of that, because it is two sides of the same coin. What about other resources or books or things like that you like of others?
Jeana: One of my favorite things, and you can Google these, is to look up Reggio Emilia or I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but it looks like process based art and as I said that is so important. It all comes back to how kids learn by doing and it’s not really what the art project or the craft looks like at the end. It’s the process of how they got there. That’s where they’re building their skills.
Ayelet: And we actually, this is great cause we actually have a great episode of, in the past, with Julia Linstead who is the founder, cofounder of KidArtLit, and the whole episode is about pairing process art and early literacy for infants and toddlers. So guys read that, listen to that. I’ll send you the link to do that. I’m a huge fan of that. I’m a big fan of anything Reggio.
And the last one, I know last time we did talk about the book for creating an outdoor environment. It’s called outdoor. It’s like outdoor place scapes I think is what it’s called and it is such a cool book that teaches all the different ways you can bring what you’re learning inside, outside. And I know you had a question about that. We can get into more. Yeah. Oh, fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Jeana.
This is awesome and thank you to all our participants of the Learn With Less Curriculum who are here listening live as a benefit to our membership community. We are going to continue the discussion and open up for a Q&A session for you guys in just a minute, but for everyone listening from home or on the go, thank you so much for joining us and we will see you next time.
