Giving Education a Personal Touch
Pre-K students lining up for small group rotations.
Here at PCPK, we aim to provide high-quality, individualized education from early childhood to kindergarten.
Why is individualization important?
The first step in understanding individualized education is understanding that each child is unique. Every child learns in their way and at their own pace. This means that an educator can only lump some of their first-grade students into the same reading group. If an educator does this, they will quickly find that “Student A” can’t identify any letters, “Student B” is reading at a fourth-grade level, and “Student C” is right in the middle.
Without the opportunity for individualized education, each of those students may possibly become bored, frustrated, lost, or uninterested in learning.
Whole-group activities, like circle time, can be a good tool in moderation. At PCPK, we balance class-wide activities with data-driven small groups.
Children’s differences should be respected.
As educators, it should be a consistent goal to ensure all learners are heard and their learning styles and abilities are offered validation and respect. There are a variety of methodologies educators can use in the classroom. These include, but are not limited to, inquiry-based learning, problem-based learning, collaborative experiences, student-led play, student-to-student mentoring, and more.
A key component to individualized learning in education is ensuring an educator maintains their growth mindset as well as the ability to receive feedback from their team. This also means that an educator must first get to know their students and build a relationship with each of them. From there, educators can expand their lessons to meet students where they are in their learning progress.
A further component of individualization in education is understanding the expectations of appropriate developmental standards for children. For example, if a child is struggling to learn their colors, requiring students to participate in drills for color recognition will not necessarily lead to a positive association with learning for students. If a student enjoys stickers, an educator can create an interactive game with stickers and color recognition.
A parent works on matching numbers with a small group of preschool students with similar needs.
Differentiation matters.
A teacher can also offer differentiation within their classroom. Differentiation is a deeper analysis of individualization in the classroom. It includes challenging students in an appropriate method that leads to a positive and healthy outcome for their learning accomplishments. If a student struggles to understand the concepts, a teacher cannot force them to suddenly learn the concepts by forcing them to complete the same tasks as other students. Instead, a teacher can offer fun and engaging tasks that allow students to build upon their skills and work up to more challenging concepts.
It is my hope that at PCPK, we regularly make observations of students and communicate as a team and with parents to ensure we are creating the best possible learning environment for all students.
Written by Emily Kavanaugh
Director of PCPK
B.S. in Elementary Education
The Power of Puzzles
Puzzles are more than just busy work.
Walk into any preschool or elementary school classroom, and you’re likely to see children working on a jigsaw puzzle. Teachers often use puzzles as an activity for early finishers, as a transition activity between traditional classwork, or as a fun activity for rainy day recess. But are puzzles just a good way to keep kids busy? Absolutely not. There’s so much more happening than meets the eye.
Improving Focus & Attention Span
Completing a puzzle takes dedicated focus. While attention spans grow naturally as children mature, puzzles offer an excellent space to practice and develop those skills.
In a digital world of constant stimulation, opportunities to practice prolonged concentration are more important than ever.
Perseverance in Problem Solving
As children put together a puzzle, they’re putting their problem solving skills to work. Looking for clues like shape, color, and context, children have to narrow down a multitude of possibilities to find that perfect fit.
This process involves repeated attempts with lots of failed solutions along the way. As children work through these failures to a completed puzzle, they’re learning perseverance in problem-solving.
Social-Emotional Learning
The process of solving a puzzle gives children lots of opportunities to practice social skills and emotional regulation.
What do you do when your friend has the piece you need? How do you handle the dilemma when your section and a classmate’s section need to connect? How do you cope with the frustration of pieces crumbling apart when you try to move a completed section you’ve been working on?
And the worst: how do you overcome the awful feeling when after all that hard work, the final puzzle piece is nowhere to be found? These scenarios offer safe opportunities to practice emotional regulation and social coordination with peers.
Visual-Spatial Skills
Looking at puzzle pieces is more than just seeing. As children process all the visual information involved in puzzle solving, they’re building those visual-spatial skills in ways you might not realize.
Visual analysis - recognizing patterns
Visual memory - seeing the shape of a puzzle piece and keeping it in memory long enough to compare to another possible fit
Visual discrimination - recognizing similarities and differences in shape
Visual closure - identifying an object when you can only see a part of it (like recognizing a dog by seeing only its ear on a puzzle piece)
Motor Skills
Puzzles certainly build fine motor skills. As students work to fit pieces together without breaking or bending them, they’re building fine motor control control and strength in their fingers and hands.
But did you know that puzzles also build gross motor skills? That’s right! Those same skills involved in big movements like running and balancing are also exercised during puzzle building.
Students are often on the floor, naturally pushing students to lean and balance their bodies over the puzzle for prolonged time periods, building strength and control. When grabbing a piece from the right or left, students are encouraged to naturally cross the midline (read more about that here).
Do you have puzzles in your home or classroom? If not, it’s always a good time to start.
