Connecting Animals and Children in Early Childhood by Selly Patty Born;Selly Patty Born;

Author:Selly, Patty Born;Selly, Patty Born; [Selly, Patty Born]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Redleaf Press

You’ve likely been thinking a great deal about how your program offers children experiences with animals. You may be considering classroom pets, but for whatever reason, you aren’t yet ready. Perhaps you want to approach animal-based field trips in different ways. Maybe you’re interested in some meaningful long-term projects to introduce and develop with your class or your own children. Maybe you’re still mulling over the many ways that you can create animal connections for children. The good news is that there are easy, thoughtful ways to bring children and animals together. Through scientific inquiry, intentionally planned field trips, and opportunities for creative expression, you can provide ways for children to think about animals that will help them develop empathy, compassion, and an awareness of species other than themselves.

This chapter looks at the many different ways you can help children form strong, meaningful bonds with animals—what I call “authentic experiences.” Through authentic animal experiences, children are developing certain thinking skills and deepening their knowledge across the scope of disciplines: language and literacy, the arts, science, math, even social studies. Following this chapter, chapter 6 explores the dimensions of bringing animals into the classroom. But whether or not you choose to host an animal in your classroom, you can help children develop special relationships with animals in a variety of ways.

Throughout this book, and in this chapter especially, I use the term authentic experiences to refer to experiences that portray animals in ways that are as genuine and realistic as possible. Authentic materials—say, a picture of a real dog as opposed to a picture of a cartoon dog—offer children a sense of an animal’s actual size, shape, color, and texture. They may hint at the animal’s behavior or habitat. Authentic experiences, such as observing actual insects, which eat, move, and pupate, engage children in using their hands and all of their senses, in ways that passive experiences, such as worksheets, lectures, demonstrations, or even a plastic “life cycle set” of insect replicas, cannot.

The activity ideas in this chapter are springboards for you to use to think about bringing authentic experiences to children. The chapter outlines several approaches, some more scientifically or creatively focused, to bringing animals into children’s lives. As your authentic animal experiences develop with the children’s interests, you may explore animals in ways that are brand new to you, too! The ideas in this chapter will help children do the following:

•practice scientific inquiry, through involving them in developmentally appropriate research that strengthens their observation, analysis, and questioning skills and gives them practice synthesizing information and drawing conclusions

•learn math skills, through counting and grouping animals, measuring them, and creating structures for them

•practice language and literacy, through reading, writing, and storytelling

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