Learning From Mistakes - Our Observations In Our Online Preschool Sessions

 

Thought process and learning typically has two aspects -

1. The concrete - for an early learner, these would include concepts like alphabet, number, colour and shape

2. The abstract - this involves developing a thought process. Linking the concrete with our environment, creative thought process, and the like

The concrete, like the name suggests, is pretty much set in stone. A will always be A, 1 will always be one (as will the quantity associated with it), red will be red, and square will be square. 

As is the case with learning at any age, the children could well falter in the initial stages. They may make a mistake in identification, call out the wrong animal in the pictures, count 7 while calling 5, and so on. We have been conducting online preschool sessions pan India since May 2020, and have observed two things 

1. It is natural for kids to make mistakes in the beginning

2. As adults and parents particularly, we have a tendency to immediately check those mistakes and prompt the right response in our kids.

As teachers, we have learnt a very important lesson over years of experience, and especially now, when parents are also an equal party in online preschool sessions, which we are conducting across India, and we are able to observe those interactions. 

IT IS IMPORTANT FOR CHILDREN TO MAKE AND LEARN FROM MISTAKES

Please don't give your children all the answers, at least as a first up response. The reason for this is three-fold

A. It makes the children independent

B. They learn to think for themselves

C. Correcting their own mistakes gives them a great sense of accomplishment and gives them confidence in their own abilities

This is true of children as young as two years. Of course, if you feel like they are genuinely stuck, you must help them out, but first give them the chance to do it themselves.

Which brings me to the second aspect - abstract learning. As I mentioned earlier, this involves developing a way of think - the thought process could be creative, or logical, but typically, a child will think as per what they observe. So it is unlikely that there can be a right or wrong in this matter.

Let me give you a quick example to demonstrate. In our pan-India online preschool sessions, we do a lot of cross linking of vocabulary. For instance - what is the colour of cloud? White. What else is white? Milk. Now if you ask where does milk come from, as adults, our instinctive response is - from cows. But is it wrong if a child says that milk comes from the market/shop? (FYI, this is something which has actually happened in our online preschool sessions). 

The child is thinking very logically here. They have seen milk coming in packets. Some of them will be going to the shop to buy milk, and yet another child could just as well feel that bhaiya delivers milk at the doorstep. So long as we did not ask the child what the original source of milk is, none of these answers is wrong. So when we are intervening and providing them with an answer which we feel is right, we are actually disrupting a child's thought process, which could do more harm to their learning process.

To sum up, independent thinking is a very important aspect of early learning - this also helps children develop problem solving skills. Let us raise our children to know that it is not only ok, but important to make mistakes. The crucial element here is how we react to those mistakes, and how we teach our children to deal with them. That is the most important life lesson we can give them.