Week Eight: Thoughts About Child Development

The video above is of my son and daughter playing an organ when they were 3 and 1. I love to watch this from time to time to see how their play has evolved as well as the developmental differences between their ages/stages; I especially love the part where my daughter experiments with with the sounds that she can make by sitting on the keys with her bottom and her knees. My son, who was older and more "mature", sang a silly song but played the organ appropriately with his fingers.



More thoughts through quotes:



"All children accomplish milestones in their own way, in their own time." - Magda Gerber


"For children, play is as natural as breathing—and as necessary" -Mimi Brodsky Chenfeld

Week Six: Testing for Intelligence

When testing for intelligence, professionals should look at the whole child. This does not mean altogether abandoning traditional methods of testing for intelligence as that may be a valid measure for some children. What it does mean, though, is also including opportunities for other kinds of intelligence to be explored and measured. What I would like to see is a system that is as responsive and accommodating as the Response to Intervention (RTI) technique being used in special education. In RTI, every student who is determined to be below average in achievement receives special assistance of some sort; at times, this can be as much as half of the classroom (Berger, 2012). If students were to receive these services, regardless of their level of academic achievement, each child's individual strengths and weaknesses could be uncovered and/or supported. If talents are not uncovered or not fostered, they may forever go unknown, grow stagnant, and disappear.

Finland does not have "high-stakes national standardized tests" (Gross-Loh, 2014, para. 2). They individualize instruction based on the strengths of both the teachers and the students. When they do test intelligence, they have standard intelligence tests such as the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler as well as tests for musical giftedness, prosocial behavior, and creative and divergent thinking. Input and observations from parents and teachers, and student portfolios are also used as part of the assessment process and are of as much if not more importance in determining giftedness than actual testing (Roukonen, 2005).


References

Berger, K. S. (2012). The developing person through childhood. New York, NY: Worth Publishers.

Gross-Loh, C. (2014, March 17). Finnish education chief: 'we created a school system based on equality'. The Atlantic. Retrieved April 11, 2014, from http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/finnish-education-chief-we-created-a-school-system-based-on-equality/284427/

Ruokonen, I. (2005) Estonian and Finnish gifted children in their learning environments. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/20047/estonian.pdf?sequence=1