CLUE #3: REPEAT
Repetition Leads to Learning and Mastery
It was 1995. We’d been busily producing the first season of Blue’s Clues for the past twelve months and our premiere date was fast approaching. One afternoon, co-creator Traci Paige Johnson and I found ourselves meeting in a conference room at 1515 Broadway discussing the rollout plan for Blue’s Clues with the programming and marketing executives.
We knew the programming team wanted to get the show out as soon as possible, and those of us on the show’s staff were writing, researching, and animating like our lives depended upon it, which in our case meant we were being diligent and slow. In fact, at this rate, by our premiere date we would have completed only seven out of twenty episodes. Seven. If we aired one episode per day, as was the norm for Nickelodeon and other kids’ networks at the time, we would go through all our shows in one week!
We also knew the marketing group was trying to figure out how to let the world know just how different our show was from the other preschool shows on the air. They knew we had a strong curriculum. They knew we had a different look with a live-action character living in an animated world. And, of course, they knew we were truly interactive in an unprecedented way. But how could they present these breakthrough aspects of our show without any context? It was 1996—no one would understand what “interactivity” meant. Thinking about this marketing conundrum, I had gone back to my roots. Research.
As if I were playing my own personal game of Blue’s Clues, I had looked around for clues to help me step back and get clarity on what made the most sense for sharing our important show with the world. My first clue was that I knew without a doubt that preschoolers want to hear the same bedtime story over and over again. The second clue was that when we tested the first episode of Blue’s Clues, the kids in our research groups wanted to watch the same episode over and over again. That’s right . . . the same episode. And the third clue was that those kids who did watch the same episode repeatedly were on their feet—screaming, laughing, and perfecting playing our curriculum-based games and finding the clues—after the fifth repetition. They interacted the most, were louder and more confident, and, most important, answered more questions correctly.
I had found my answer.
So . . . in that conference room, packed with about fifteen of the smartest executives at Nickelodeon seated around a huge boardroom table, this once meek twenty-six-year-old girl from New Jersey piped up. “What if we aired the same episode every day for a week?”
Suddenly everyone at the table turned and looked at me, mouths agape. But I kept on talking. And really fast. “For preschoolers, repetition is the key to learning. And, if we air the same episode every day for a week, kids will be able to watch our seven episodes over a seven-week period versus just one week!” Then I looked at the marketing team. “And . . . parents would clearly know our show was different from all the other shows because by Friday the preschoolers would definitely be screaming at the TV, ‘A clue! A clue!’ ” And then I smiled, you know, for good measure.
Knowing I’d need some big guns to back up my theory, I had enlisted the support of Dr. Dan Anderson and Dr. Alice Wilder, who shared relevant research on how preschoolers learn through repetition. This sealed the deal.
Nickelodeon agreed to try out what, by all accounts, was a crazy programming schedule. I distinctly remember the head of programming saying, “Well, let’s try it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll pull it. And we’ll all probably be fired.” We all chuckled nervously. I knew she was joking, but still.
When Blue’s Clues first premiered in September 1996, we had the highest ratings of any premiere at the time. Nickelodeon received phone call after phone call from parents. Some were confused by the programming schedule, and some were wondering why their kids were screaming at the TV. But most were calls of parent pride—the game play on Blue’s Clues showcased just how involved, invested, motivated, and interested their preschoolers were to learn. Nickelodeon was thrilled at the results and more committed than ever to continue the programming strategy that put us on the map.
Before premiering our second season, journalist Lawrie Mifflin wrote an article for The New York Times called “The Joy of Repetition, Repetition, Repetition.” She wrote,
A muddled mother telephoned Nickelodeon to complain. Her three-year-old daughter absolutely loved the new show called Blue’s Clues, she said, but there must be some mistake: the same episode had been shown every day that week. It is no mistake. In fact, it tells parents that this show’s creators deeply understand the world of people under the age of five, people who love to watch the same videos over and over again. Making children feel reassured this way is not a gimmick—it’s a recognized concept of early-childhood learning. Another is that preschool children love active, not passive, ways to learn, and Blue’s Clues gives them that, too.1
So, as it turns out, repetition is the key to learning. And it was also the key to our new kind of preschool show. (And no one got fired.)
PRACTICING REPETITION WHILE MAINTAINING SANITY
My niece, Morgan, used to want to read the same book—Owen by Kevin Henkes, the story of a little boy mouse who was reluctant to give up his lovey (a blanket)—over and over and over again. It was sweet for a while, as Morgan would read it and cuddle up to her mom, holding her own lovey (a “baby”). But by the forty-ninth reading, my sister-in-law felt like she was going a little crazy. So, she changed it up a bit. She began adding little surprises and making up her own lines. This made Morgan laugh and it made Dawn feel better about reading it for the fiftieth-plus time.
WHY REPETITION?
Parents may wonder why important concepts on educational preschool shows are often repeated multiple times within a single episode, sometimes to the point where they’re convinced their child is hitting the Rewind button on the remote. There’s a reason for that.
Not only are preschoolers soaking in information and experiences, but it’s these early experiences that affect the brain structure. A child’s brain develops in an iterative, interactive process from birth through adulthood, but in the preschool years, a child’s brain is especially pliant. According to the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University, in the first few years of life, seven hundred new neural connections are formed every second. The more frequently information is repeated, the better the brain recognizes it, the thicker the associated neural pathways become, and more powerfully a concept or learning is reinforced and retained.2
This insight about the development of neural pathways is a foundational piece of what we know about early education. It’s also what excited me about weaving repetition into my shows as an intrinsic part of the curriculum. I knew that the more we exposed our young preschoolers to words, concepts, experiences, and activities, the more robust their brain development would be. By utilizing repetition in our programs, we are providing preschoolers with the opportunity to:
• fully comprehend concepts,
• practice skills,
• build mastery,
• boost their confidence, and
• increase their love of learning.
REPEAT AD NAUSEAM, DELIBERATELY
How long did it take you to learn how to drive? Ride a bike? These aren’t skills we learned overnight. We had to keep practicing and practicing and practicing. The same goes for our children. And the great thing is, they seem to be hardwired to inherently understand the importance of repetition, for they tend to naturally want to repeat things over and over (and over) again—the same book, the same songs, the same games, the same play. But it’s not exactly this repetition that makes something stick. It’s deliberate repetition.
Deliberate repetition may be the most important differentiating factor when it comes to success. People at the top of their game are so sparked, so passionate, that they focus and repeat, refining their work as they go, until they master it.
Author Malcolm Gladwell, who coined the idea of the ten-thousand-hour rule, stated that success is correlated with repetition and that “natural ability requires a huge investment of time in order to be made manifest.” Gladwell shed light on this concept through the work of researcher K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues, who interviewed a group of violinists at the Academy of Music in Berlin. After interviewing the students about their practice habits during childhood through the age of twenty, they found a direct correlation between the number of hours they practiced (i.e., repetition) and their abilities. In fact, the best players were those who’d logged more than ten thousand hours of practice (twenty hours per week for ten years!). Gladwell correlates success to practice. But author Cal Newport argues that it is not just practice that makes the difference—it’s deliberate practice, where you expand your abilities day after day. Newport says, “Successful people are experts at practicing. If you’re not expanding yourself in such a fashion, you’ll never be ridiculously successful.”3
My co-writer Debbie has been living out this focus-and-repeat strategy since moving to the Netherlands in 2013. I give her so much credit for picking up and moving from the United States to a new country, but of course, she was worried about immersing herself and she’s never been naturally good with foreign languages (her admission!). However, determined to learn Dutch, she is counting on the idea that by committing to her weekly Dutch lessons, doing homework daily, and consistently engaging with baristas and other locals in her fledgling new language, she’s eventually going to become fluent. She’s highly motivated, and though she has plenty of setbacks (acquiring a new language is a very “two steps forward one step back” kind of thing), through mindful repetition, continually putting herself in situations where she can practice her phrases in context, and regularly putting in the time to build up her vocabulary and strengthen her verb conjugation, she’ll eventually get there.
As Debbie is experiencing, the more you do something, the better you will be at it. There’s an art to the way repetition is undertaken. It’s not mindless “drill and skill” we’re after. It’s repetition in a way that also reinforces the love of learning. For our preschoolers to reach their full potential, the most useful ways to reinforce repetition is through scaffolding, routine, and positive reinforcements.
THE SECRET OF SCAFFOLDING
Deliberate repetition, called scaffolding, is the key ingredient we use in all of our programs to garner mastery. When most people think of scaffolding, they picture the temporary structures erected alongside buildings during construction. Typically built out of metal poles and wooden planks, these makeshift structures offer tangible support to workers as they go about doing their job of building or cleaning or repairing. When they’ve completed the job, they remove the scaffolding, and continue on to what’s next.
In the context of education, scaffolding plays a similar role. Coined in the 1950s by cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, instructional scaffolding is the support given to children in order for them to achieve more than they would by themselves. The most effective scaffolding uses a trusted guide and hands-on activities that are repeated in deliberate layers of increased difficulty.4
I use this educational concept of scaffolding as a foundation for everything I create. It always begins with our main character—he or she is the “guide” who theoretically holds hands with the preschool viewers as they experience our stories, conflicts, and curriculum. Then, we thoughtfully scaffold each game we play in an episode by presenting increasing levels of difficulty throughout. It’s this very approach of scaffolded games that has differentiated our shows from the rest. Just as construction scaffolds grow along with the needs of the workers so they can safely go higher and higher, we are supporting our child’s learning and growth. Like training wheels, but smarter.
USING SCAFFOLDING AS A TOOL FOR LEARNING
Step 1: Be an Involved Guide
Before a construction team builds up their scaffold, they must first create a sturdy foundation. In education, this foundation comes in the form of a positive, trusted, and involved guide who can support the depth and growth of a child’s learning. In our preschoolers’ lives, parents, teachers, caregivers, and carefully chosen media guides and peers play this critical role. As an involved guide, our role is to spark an interest in our preschoolers, keep the learning on target, ask guiding questions, and repeat all of the above until they’ve mastered the task or behavior. Not to be mistaken with “helicopter parenting” that is overly hovering, an involved guide takes cues from the preschooler and repeats questions and strategies while modeling to support the learning with the end goal being our child not needing the scaffold anymore.
Fred Rogers on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was the first to use creative production and editing techniques to convey this idea of his being an involved guide who was virtually “hand-holding” the preschooler. If you watch closely, you’ll notice that Mister Rogers would be shown in an exterior shot opening the door to his house and in the next shot, filmed as an interior shot of his “house,” he would walk through the open door. He then continued to show the transition of where he was going—to his closet, to the living room, to the kitchen—as if the preschooler at home were walking with him.
When Fred Rogers introduced this virtual hand-holding, for the first time ever a program considered the cognitive development of their young viewers in the way it was filmed and edited. Unlike adults, preschoolers can’t make the same sort of cognitive leaps that many television shows expect their audience to make. For instance, consider a show that cuts from a shot showing a family walking out their front door to a shot showing that same family playing on the beach. As adults, we recognize the transition that needed to take place to get to the beach—walking, biking, or driving to their sandy destination. But preschoolers can’t make this cognitive leap, which means they get confused. And when they get confused, they stop paying attention. And yes, you guessed it—when they stop paying attention, they stop learning. I make sure this idea of “hand-holding” is used in all of my shows, but it’s also analogous to the way in which we, as parents, need to hand-hold our kids as their trusted guides so they feel safe and secure in order to learn.
Step 2: Slowly Increase the Levels of Difficulty
Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist and theorist in the early 1900s, added to the child development work of Piaget’s stages by emphasizing the importance of social interactions. Like Piaget, he believed that children learn best through hands-on experiences, but he also believed children could learn new tasks on a deeper level and get to another stage with the right kind of intervention. Specifically, Vygotsky believed a child’s “zone of proximal development”—essentially what a child can do herself—can be elevated with scaffolded intervention by a knowledgeable guide.
For example, imagine a preschooler is playing on the swings at the playground. She is able to swing by herself but is unaware of the fact that pumping her legs just so will increase her momentum and allow her to swing even higher. But when someone else shows her how it’s done, coaches her, and encourages her to repeat it until she’s mastered it, she can literally take her swinging to a new level. As a parent or caregiver, you’re not swinging for her, you’re not tearing her down for not knowing how to swing higher—you are modeling a tool for her to use and learn for herself.
A CASE STUDY: BLUE’S CLUES AND SUPER WHY!
Repetition and Scaffolding to Promote Problem Solving
As I’ve described before, for Blue’s Clues, we repeat three levels of the same game, and incorporate a factor of increasing level of difficulty for each game. And using Steve (or later, Joe) and Blue as our involved guides, we “hand-hold” our preschoolers as they play the games. Because the rules are always the same for the three layers, our viewers know how to play and can focus on the next level of challenge.
We incorporate scaffolding into our games in several different ways. First, we always begin with the easiest level of a game and gradually work up to the hardest level of that game. Second, over the course of a half-hour episode, there are three distinct games played, which we likewise scaffold, starting with the easiest and ending with the most difficult, which is to remember what the clues were and think about how the clues relate to each other and add up to answer the question of the day.
Dr. Dan Anderson conducted a study to test the effects of the repeat viewing of Blue’s Clues. He found that when preschoolers watched repeated viewings of the same episode, they showed higher levels of comprehension, especially in their use of problem-solving strategies. The show also improved children’s flexible thinking, which includes solving educational riddles, creative thinking, nonverbal skills, and verbal skills. Interestingly, Dan and his colleagues found we were actually changing the way preschoolers watched TV in general.5 Because of the sticky repetition, preschoolers were bringing what they knew to other shows, interacting with their content, and therefore, we can assume, learning more from other shows as well.
For our literacy-focused show Super Why!, we know that the skills involved in learning to read build upon each other. For example, preschoolers first need to know how to label and identify letters, next they need to know how those letters have a sound, and then that when the letters come together they form words, and lastly, that those words form sentences, which have meaning. By changing a word in a sentence, a new meaning is created.
Because we understand all of these layers of preliteracy learning, in Super Why! we used scaffolded game play in a slightly different way than in Blue’s Clues. First, in every episode we always started with an Alpha Pig letter identification game. Then we would alternate between having either a Wonder Red word decoding game or a Princess Presto spelling game. Each episode ended with a Super Why! game of reading comprehension. Depending on how much time was available based on the story and script, each game was also repeated two or three times. Across the entire series, the level of repetition for each skill was extremely high. By using a variety of examples, we were able to reinforce the mastery of these skills as transferable concepts that preschoolers could (and did) use as they read outside of the show.
I SPY, PUZZLES, AND LAUNDRY
Once we understand the concept of scaffolding as a way to build up the support our children need, the next steps involve slowly increasing the levels of difficulty to deepen what they know and what they’re able to do and then purposefully remove the supports as they become more proficient. We can apply scaffolding to our lives through games, media, and everyday situations and activities. For example, think about the simple game of I Spy. When you first start playing, start by spying something easy, but over time you can choose increasingly difficult objects that are harder to spot and use clues to help your preschooler figure it out. When that becomes too easy, up the ante by having preschoolers take over and be the ones spying something and challenging them to come up with clues so you can guess and find.
Puzzles present another perfect scaffolding opportunity. By beginning with simple puzzles with only a few, large pieces and over time graduating to puzzles with more, smaller pieces, you’re naturally increasing the challenge while simultaneously offering them a chance to practice or repeat the same type of spatial relationship problem-solving skill. Even the most mundane activities like sorting or folding laundry can provide all kinds of opportunities for scaffolded learning if you’re willing to get a little creative (and realize that scaffolding household chores means they may take you a little longer). Clean laundry can first be turned into big sorting game, for example sorting by type of clothing and by color, and the next level could be matching, such as pairs of socks. Over time, you can introduce folding and putting things away in their proper place.
SCAFFOLDING IS A GUIDING HAND
Scaffolding is about providing a guiding hand in how our kids learn so they will develop not only with a strong sense of who they are, but with the ability to solve their own problems. We:
• give our preschoolers guiding words, not answers;
• recognize what our kids are playing and provide a guiding hand to up the ante on their play so their learning deepens;
• look for opportunities to add challenge and learning when we engage in the same activities with our children;
• add increasing levels of difficulty to games that we play with our preschooler.
REPETITION, A.K.A. THE WARM AND FUZZY ROUTINE
One of the reasons repetition is so successful as a strategy with young children is that it is grounded in the familiar. The familiar ensures that kids feel safe and secure. And—no surprise here—when kids feel safe and secure, they are primed to learn. I’ve taken this aspect of child development to heart by creating “routines” for all of my shows, which means they follow a specific format so kids know what to expect. And that’s critical for our young audience, because once preschoolers know what to expect and, even more important, what is expected of them, they can relax and just play our games, interact, and learn.
We honor this understanding of preschool development in our shows by creating formal features that open every series, and every episode within a series, in the same familiar place. Our show opens with the camera slowly panning, as if a preschooler is walking up a pathway to a house, replicating a familiar activity. Then, our main character greets the home viewer: “Hi out there, it’s me, Steve!” (or “. . . Daniel Tiger!” or “. . . Arty!”). The character then invites the viewer in to get the adventure started.
This repetition is deliberate and purposeful. We want kids to come to the media, ready to play, so we ground them in a familiar setting and create a format for repetition. Here’s a summation of an episode of Blue’s Clues:
• We open a book called Blue’s Clues.
• We dive inside the book and walk up the pathway to the Blue’s Clues house.
• Blue has a problem and shows she wants to play Blue’s Clues to figure out a solution by “paw printing” the screen.
• We sing the Blue’s Clues song.
• We find three clues.
• We play three games, each with three layers of game play.
• We skidoo through something and go somewhere even more preschool fantastical (inside a chalkboard, inside a picture frame, inside a game board!).
• We have “mail time” at some point in every show, and it’s so exciting that we sing about it.
• We end by sitting in the Thinking Chair and figuring out Blue’s Clues.
• We celebrate and sing.
• We say good-bye and sing our closing song.
• We end in the living room, open the door to the house, and the camera pans out.
• We close the book.
Take the time to view a variety of preschool programming and you’ll find most employ this technique of simple, familiar routines to help viewers easily connect with the show, the characters, and the learning.
At home, we can take clues from our preschooler’s favorite shows and create routines that are simple, short, and easy to follow. Since familiar, repetitive routines help preschoolers know what is expected of them, their use tends to help them become more compliant, understanding, and helpful. Just as they love the repetitive format of our shows, preschoolers take pleasure in these little routines at home, and for the same reason: they love the feeling of control. Ask any preschool teacher how they get an entire classroom cooperating, and they will invariably respond it is their adherence to a consistent and repetitive routine. That’s because when preschoolers understand the rules of the day, they feel more in control and safe. And when we can help them feel safe and secure, we’ve just eliminated one of the biggest triggers for meltdowns.
Lest you think you’ve got to create a ten-step routine à la Blue’s Clues involving games and several musical interludes, fear not. In real life, even the simplest of routines can be extremely effective. For example, the simple morning routine: we get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, shoes on, and off to school! And the evening routine: we eat dinner, put pajamas on, brush teeth, read a story, and off to sleep! Want to up the ante? Sing your routine! Songs help preschoolers do anything. (More on that later.)
Another simple routine could be a weekly routine centered around dinners. Taco Tuesdays and Meatball Mondays and sundaes on Sunday will be a hit! Again, these simple routines make it easier all around, for us and for them.
My friend Becky found solace in creating a new repeated element to her bath time routine. Ever since her twenty-month-old daughter was born, she has loved her bath, but as joyful as bath time is, getting out of the bath was inevitably a nightmare. Meadow would cry, thrash, and refuse to get out—even stomping, splashing, and flattening herself in the tub. Sometimes the crying lasts through pajama time. Fun times. After asking herself what was going on (too cold? scruffy towel? wet hair?), Becky realized the problem was the transition. By adding a new repeated routine, she could give her daughter a new sense of control over the situation. So she invented the “Bye-bye bath time” song (sung to the tune of the old folk song “Goodnight Ladies”), whereby she lets her daughter sit in the tub until it drains entirely (natural consequence) while they sing “Bye-bye water, bye-bye soap, bye-bye bath time, thanks for getting me clean.” Then Becky pulls out the towel and sings “Hello towel, it’s time to get dry.” By this point, Meadow is happy to be lifted out of the tub to be dried off. Becky spends an extra two minutes doing the bath time song routine, but the rest of the night is infinitely easier. A new repeated routine with respect for her daughter’s feelings (loves the bath!), plus a natural consequence (no more water in the tub), plus a repeated song routine (bye-bye bath, hello towel) equals parenting win.
CONSISTENCY: A FANCY WORD FOR REPETITION
We hear a lot about the importance of being consistent in our parenting, and it makes sense because, at the end of the day, being consistent is all about following through on our routines and sticking to our overall parenting point of view. Easier said than done, I know, but repetition in the form of consistency has a major payoff for parents. Because when we’re consistent, repetitious, and yes, perhaps as a result “boring,” our preschoolers will be less resistant and grow up grounded in who they are and where they belong. They’ll know how Dad would feel in this specific situation; they’ll know how Mom would react. That means if we create a rule, as in “No soda,” we need to follow through, no exceptions. This no-exceptions rule can be tough to get behind, but ultimately it ends up being both easier on us and our kids when we don’t give in. Because once preschoolers know there is a hard-and-fast rule, a line that can’t be crossed, they relax into it. The routines we set up—the aspects of our parenting philosophy we are consistent with—helped when they were toddlers and build a foundation that will come in handy as our kids get older.
THE ROLE OF POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT
Because preschoolers are essentially active “sieves”—regularly sifting through information to make sense of their world—they utilize repetition by doing. Every time they find something they love and repeat it, they’re looking to us for feedback. By giving positive feedback in the form of reinforcement—such as smiling, nodding, or asking a related question—we are setting the foundation for motivated learning, a.k.a. resilience, self-confidence, and, ultimately, mastery.
During play, preschoolers are increasing the level of complexity and scaffolding naturally, through imaginary play and storytelling. And when we allow time for play and are involved in their play, we are also providing positive reinforcement. For example, when my sister’s daughter Bella was a preschooler and her son Aidan was just a newborn, she was noticing repetitive play. Bella was playing that she was the baby, with wanting to be swaddled, rocked, and given a pacifier. Jenn sat with her for a bit and played as she guided her to see what was going on. As they played together, Jenn rocked her as the baby. Suddenly, Bella changed up her play. Feeling in control again, she was back to being the big sister, and the new baby was crying and crying and crying. Jenn, seeing what was going on, scaffolded the play to show her all of the things she can do, talked about why babies cry, and explained how Bella can help. Loving that she was part of her mom’s team, she happily complied. We all know it isn’t always sunshine and rainbows, so for those times when she didn’t want to help, and the crying was too loud, Bella put on a pair of headphones.
If we see our preschoolers getting stuck in their play by acting out the same exact story script over and over, that’s our cue that they’re struggling to make sense of something in their world such as, using the above example, dealing with a new baby sibling who cries a lot. This is where we as parents, caregivers, and teachers can step in, offer positive reinforcement, and scaffold. Because we’re involved and know what they are playing, we smile and offer ways to add to the play. Perhaps the new baby is hungry, or sleepy, or needs his big sister to read him a story? And off they’ll go in a new direction to solve the problem they are struggling to comprehend.
The use of positive reinforcement can also build up a preschooler’s self-confidence by encouraging her to be persistent as she tries things that may initially feel challenging or push her outside her comfort zone. When Daniel wanted to learn how to ride a bicycle, we showed him trying over two episodes as he dug deep with resilience. Dad Tiger affirmed his interest, added encouragement, and sang a musical strategy: “Grr, grr, grr out loud, keep on trying and you’ll feel proud.” Daniel sings the strategy to himself and then continues to use it over and over again as it gets hard to pedal and steer the bicycle. In the end, he even teaches his friends the strategy as he continues to master riding a bike.
We can use positive reinforcement to build self-confidence in the same way with our preschoolers. Consider a preschooler who’s nervous about going down the big slide by herself. Through an adult’s thoughtful positive reinforcement repeated over time—I noticed you’re showing a lot of courage by climbing up the ladder with me and sliding down while sitting on my lap. I can see that you’re becoming less nervous about how high we are—the child will slowly build up her self-confidence and eventually (and on her own timeline) become comfortable enough to tackle the high slide all by herself.
A quick reminder: positive reinforcement isn’t the same thing as “praise” without purpose. In fact, Carol Dweck, an author and prominent researcher in the field of motivation known for her work surrounding mindset, found that repeatedly telling a preschooler they are great at doing something can actually inhibit growth and result in an eventual hit in self-confidence when a child is suddenly faced with a task or activity they aren’t already “great” at. Focus on reinforcing the effort rather than the result.6
DRILL AND SKILL: THE ANTI-MASTERY
When we talk about preschoolers’ level of interactive learning, what comes to mind are flashcards and “drill and skill” worksheets. Sure, they are interactive in that preschoolers are filling them out. Sure, they are steeped in repetition, which is why they are called “drill and skill.” So, what’s the missing ingredient? The fact that kids are not learning experientially and with spark, purpose, and motivation. Drill and skill will work, in the short term, to learn a particular skill. What it won’t do is motivate kids to love to learn as well as learn within different contexts, which is the key to promoting mastery of the concept.
Angela’s Clues
One of the things I love most about preschoolers is how passionate they are about everything they do. This passion is easy to recognize because it will cause them to jump into an activity they love with gusto and repeat, repeat, repeat. It also gives us as parents, caregivers, and teachers a powerful tool to help them learn. The key is harnessing their natural inclination for repetition in a thoughtful, scaffolded, purposeful way by repeating positive words, actions, and strategies they’ll want to emulate. We know that when given something they can do, they will jump in, feel proud, and do it. Using that excitement and pride, we, as the involved guide, gently add another level, “plussing up” the learning. Attempting this next level, we then “plus it up” once more and continue until our preschoolers max out. Similar to a game of Jenga, you never know how high your preschoolers will get unless they try—with you as the gentle guide at their side, creating a strong and safe foundation for their learning.
• Be Involved by finding opportunities to be an “involved guide.”
• Ask Questions and offer positive reinforcement as a way to encourage mastery and growth.
• See the Spark and scaffold concepts with increasing levels of difficulty.
YOUR MEDIA “YES” LIST
The show promotes purposeful repetition and scaffolding.
The skills in the show are taught in a way that promotes mastery.
The vocabulary is defined and used repetitively across different scenarios.
Clue Takeaways
• Repetition thickens neural pathways and allows learning to be reinforced and retained.
• Repetition is the key to full comprehension, practicing skills, building mastery, boosting confidence, and increasing a preschooler’s love of learning.
• Scaffolding uses a trusted guide and hands-on activities that are repeated in layers of increased difficulty.
• Creating simple and predictable routines for everyday aspects of home life helps preschoolers know what is expected of them and results in their becoming more compliant, understanding, and helpful.
