What to show and why to tell
Pradita Nambiar
A child (age 5 years): Teacher, is it my turn for show and tell tomorrow?
Another child: Heeeey, it is mine today (looking at the show and tell calendar which is hung on the wall of the class). Yours is over tomorrow.
Teacher to the first child: Your turn was yesterday, but you can still bring it tomorrow.
One of the obvious reasons that ‘Show and Tell’ (S&T) is considered an important activity for children in the pre-primary is to help them express their thoughts and ideas clearly and also to gain confidence in speaking to a group of children. Many teachers would add that children build a vocabulary by regular participation in S&T. My observation of the activity has drawn my attention to many other things that occur during this precious hour of S&T. My class of 20 children are divided into four groups with five children in each group spread over four days of the week. The children check with the S&T calendar to find out when it will be their turn. However, if a child forgets or is unable to bring it on the scheduled day, she has the flexibility of bringing it another day. I remind the children one day before about the activity. I also decide on some themes like water, birds, animals, trees and so on. Here again, the child can decide on any other topic that she finds very compelling to share with the group.
A student of education who had come to the school asked me what kind of homework I give the children. S&T is one of the things that I consider as work done at home and brought to school. Why? The child is encouraged to remember the instructions and the work the teacher gives. There are no messages written in the diary by the teacher for the parent in this case. Remembering something that a teacher has said in school is by itself a significant achievement and a sign of development. To work on a task given requires us to hold the information in our working memory. This ability increases as we learn to organize tasks into categories or chunk them. So what seems simple for us like remembering what somebody told us long after the time has lapsed is cognitively demanding for children as they have limited experience and are yet to devise strategies to remember. (Taylor, 2005) One of the strategies that children and parents use is recounting the happenings of the school and this helps them to remember what they have to prepare for the next day.
As teachers there are times when we ask whether a child can pick up any toy that she has bought from the market for S&T. What qualifies an object for S&T? Children at times bring accessories like a fancy hair band or a miniature car and say that it is for their S&T. I actively discourage them from bringing these things by talking about all the things that we can make with our hands or even refer to examples that their classmates have brought for S&T. But why do I insist on things made by hand? Vasily Sukhomlinsky, the Russian educationist, in his book, To Children I give my heart, talks of how the dexterity of the hand allows for a better interaction between the hands, mind and the activity of labour in children making them more astute and attentive. Children begin to pay attention to details. Children develop the ability to reason as they perfect the skill by hand. A child who brought a kite made by her or a model of the weighing scale is able to understand its workings better. A combination of thinking and working with one’s hands is primary for the intellectual development of the child.
Most of the times, what is paid attention to in children at this stage is the communication skills which refers to the ability to speak with clarity and coherence, reading and writing. There is often a tendency to ignore the important ability of listening. Just as it is important to articulate one’s thoughts clearly, it is also necessary to develop listening skills. Children often prepare a few simple sentences with the support of their parents or older siblings to speak about a certain object. When the child who is speaking is trying to recollect the sentences that she has come prepared with, the others learn to wait patiently allowing the speaker ample time. The teacher prompts the child with some leading questions like, ‘Who helped you with making this? Where did you get this idea from? Where do you find this animal? What does it eat? etc.
There are children who speak softly and then the friends demand that they speak louder. I then remind the children that if the audience remains quiet, it is possible to listen even to the softest voice.
Children invent various interactive strategies in their S&T like asking a question to the audience ‘Have you ever seen this bird?’ or ‘This is very soft, do you want to touch it? The use of kinaesthetic and tactile resources make the S&T engaging. A child brought a drawing of an eagle which he made with his mother’s help. He used his artistic imagination to make it interactive. He said, ‘Eagle flies up into space and swoops dowwwwn and picks up children.’ At this the children screamed ‘NOOOOOOOOOOOO’. He said quite convincingly, ‘It cannot pick children like me as I am tall and big, but it can pick up those who are thin and small.’ He even corrected his friends who used the word paws instead of talons and explained the term to his peers. S&T allowed this child to use gestures with his hands as a cognitive resource and bring about an interaction between the visual, tactile and kinaesthetic expressions when he used words like ‘swoop’ and ‘flies up to space’.
A little girl brought a drawing of an owl perched on the branch of a tree and she was explaining to the group about how she coloured and the different colours she used for the various parts of the body. The children were critical of her using pink for the feet of the owl, orange for the eyes and blue for the body. She listened to the criticisms and with the mediation of the teacher responded that this was an owl from her imagination. Children learn to give constructive feedback and also appreciate the efforts of their classmates. The speaker on her part takes both in her stride.
Some of the things that children bring for S&T spark off ideas for the teacher to develop into learning material for the classroom. A child brought a rudimentary model of a weighing scale to class which she made with help from her grandmother. I used this opportunity to arouse children’s curiosity and placed different weights on either side and checked with the children which side would tilt. I further extended this activity by bringing various types of weighing scales from the maths activity room. Children started figuring that the side that is heavier tilts more. They also told me that they have seen this scale being used by shopkeepers.
I observed that children have a fascination to deal with objects that seem to be used by older children or adults. There was extraordinary interest when a child brought a piggy bank made of clay and dropped in coins and told the group that they could save money this way. Another interesting S&T was when a child demonstrated how to punch holes in a paper to allow for easy filing. Children rushed close to her to see the live demonstration she did in front of the class. She told the class that everybody could file all their drawings neatly this way. The entire group decided that they would go home and do it.
As part of the class, I also bring things for S&T and the children are very excited and amused by my participation. During one such instance, I brought a number of shells that I collected on my visit to the beaches in Kerala. All of us discussed the various shapes and colours of the shells and counted the number of shells that I had collected. This sharing brought out their own stories and was a stimulant for many children, who were not regular, to bring something including things that they picked up like feathers of birds or different coloured leaves; things that meant something to them personally. Such things invariably come with their own stories and contexts, thus making it easier for children to communicate and express.
So would I say that S&T is only about speaking confidently to a group? Can it be confined to any particular subject? S&T is a space where children ask questions to clarify and construct meanings, dealing with disagreements, share ideas, stories, experiences, experiment with new ideas and materials and to speak clearly to be understood by others in the group. This probably is an activity that needs to be continued when they go into formal schooling as the hidden learnings are more valuable than the tangible ones of confidence and vocabulary building to name a few. S&T is aimed more at the development of appropriate attitudes and dispositions rather than be confined to the narrow goals of literacy and numeracy alone (Winch, 2008).
References
- Taylor, L. (2005). Thinking and Reasoning. In L. Taylor, Introducing Cognitive Development (pp. 93-119). Taylor & Francis, Psychology Press.
- Winch, C. (2008). Learning How to Learn: A Critique. Journal of Philosophy of Education.
The author is a teacher at Vidyaranya High School, Hyderabad. She is keen to make teaching joyous and looks for ways to meet children at the level they are at and build on what they know. Her other interests include connecting research to practice. She can be reached at pradita_n@yahoo.com.
