My Scaffolding Adventure

Scaffolding 102

In my last post I talked about the importance of scaffolding challenging activities, suggesting that if your child received a holiday gift that was frustratingly difficult you could still rescue the situation by scaffolding the task. I gave some pointers for doing that.

And then I promised you I’d try my own advice and plan an introduction to a difficult task with my grandson. J was to turn 9 last Monday and I bought him a GPS unit for geocaching – which is finding hidden treasure by plotting its location into the machine and then mounting a search. His mother had warned me that J had been given a GPS unit once before and it had been a frustrating experience.

Since I had tried orienteering back in the days when treasure hunting was done with just a compass and a map, I knew that a person could be standing right next to the treasure and still not see it. So I understood how this experience could quickly go bad. How could I make having fun with the new GPS unit a sure-thing? How could I scaffold this experience so it was certain to go well?

Here’s what I did.

First, I opened the box, put some batteries into the GPS unit and tried it out. I am not the most intuitively technological person and it took me much consultation with the manual and pushing of buttons (“oops! I turned it off – drat!”) to get even a basic familiarity with the thing. I was so glad I’d done this. It would’ve been a disaster to have tried this for the first time on J’s birthday.

Next, I hid some treasures and marked their locations into the unit. I knew that a huge issue would be how close the unit gets a person to a treasure – or, rather, how far away a person could be – at the point the unit says “You’ve arrived at your destination.” So the person who was guiding J in using this had to know where the treasures really were hidden, which meant I had to hide some myself.

So I hid some. One in my backyard, one in a flowerpot a yard a block from my house, and one in a tree stump in a park we could walk to. The one in the backyard, which I figured would be the first one we’d look for, was really in plain sight. The flowerpot one was obvious once a person knew what to look for. The stump was the most difficult but not hidden under leaves or anything like that.

And… each of the treasures (Altoid’s containers each sealed in a baggie) was labeled with J’s name and also contained a dollar. I wanted to make certain this activity was rewarding, in every sense of the word.

Then, after he opened the unit and I showed him that there were three locations logged into the unit, I helped him figure out how to find the path to the first one, the one in the backyard. The unit signaled a hit when J was still twelve feet from the treasure. So I told him to look around, to see if he could see it. And he did. It was, as I said, in plain sight.

That was easy and he’d gained a dollar. He was eager to look for the second one.

Now he knew pretty well how to follow the path the unit created and when it signaled a hit, he had an idea how big a radius in which to look. So when got to the second location, I suggested he guess where a grandmother might’ve hidden something. He looked around and guessed “in a flowerpot.” Bingo! Another successful search and another dollar.

The third hunt was put off until the following day. Brain scientists will tell you that this is a good idea, because what was learned on Day One will be solidified during sleep. You’ll awake smarter than when you went to bed.

J completely ran the unit on this final hunt, and found out things about the display that I didn’t know. He was pleased about this and his superior knowledge made the unit really “his.” The treasure in the stump was more difficult, but he correctly guessed where it might be after the unit registered the hit. Another dollar. A happy young man. On the way back from this final adventure, he was talking about entering his home and his school as locations and we talked about how he could play hide and seek with a friend in the park near his house.

So a successful scaffolding of a complex task, one that before was too frustrating. The keys were 1) understanding the equipment first myself; 2) thinking ahead and realizing where the difficulty would be; 3) creating tasks of increasing difficulty so J could do it all himself with a little help; and 4) making sure the whole thing was fun.

If you’re 9 years old, mastering a cool gizmo and finding $3 in the process is great fun. And if you’re an adult, watching a kid have fun is all the reward you need.

How about you? Do you have a scaffolding adventure to share? Please comment!
Photo credit: Ren Caldwell

Solving Holiday Toy Frustration

Scaffolding 101

Did this happen to your child? He received a gift of a nifty toy or gizmo but what seemed like a fun activity ended in tears or in a shrug. Too hard, too complicated, more like work than play. The gift was put away or even given away and disappointment lingers, for your child … and for you too.

This sort of thing happens a lot.

Matching an activity to a child’s growing abilities is not an easy task, especially at a once-a-year gift event like Christmas or a birthday. It’s natural to want to buy a toy or gizmo with staying power, one that the child will enjoy throughout the year. The problem is that entry level engagement with the gift may be too difficult for the child at the moment he receives it. And if it’s too difficult at the beginning, the gift is not likely to be ever revisited later. The first encounter has to be successful.

The key is to success with a just-out-of-reach toy is to introduce it at a level that guarantees success. Your objective is to present the toy within the child’s “Zone of Proximal Development” or ZPD. It has to be challenging enough to be interesting but not so difficult that success is unattainable. The toy has to push the boundaries of a child’s abilities just enough to stretch them, but not enough to snap them back in frustration.

If your child was frustrated by a too-difficult gift, there’s still time to rescue the situation. Here’s how…

Become familiar with the gizmo yourself. Some evening after your child is in bed, get the toy out and work with it. Notice the sorts of skills it requires just to interact with it. Consider how this gizmo might work in actual practice and where the pitfalls might lie for your child. If you already know where the pitfalls were for your kid in her first attempts with this thing, think about what went wrong at that point. Forget following the directions right now. Just examine the toy and think about it and your kid.

Then figure out how to simplify the interaction. It might be that putting the entire Lego castle together following the pictured directions is where your child will get to six months from today. Right now she might need to understand how the bricks go together and come apart. A child may be overwhelmed by all sixteen paints in an artist’s kit. Think about presenting just one color of paint and playing with using the brush, different amounts of water, and different kinds of paper. If there is danger that the gizmo might break or your child might be hurt, simplify to a low enough level that these things can’t happen. Think ahead.

Re-introduce the activity as something that’s shared by the two of you. Take on the role of big kid instead of a teacher role. Play alongside your child and share in the fun and the challenges. Do not correct his attempts or enforce a “one right way” method. Puzzle along with your child and if things seem very hard, simplify more on the spot. The objective is to engage your child in figuring things out, not in reaching some predetermined outcome.

And, of course, you’ll want to follow these steps before you next give your child a gift that you hope he’ll “grow into.” In the next post in this series, I’ll let you look over my shoulder as I try to do just that.


Please add a comment: Did your child experience any frustration with a holiday gift this year? What happened? Do include your child’s age too…

Children's Eating: Whose Responsibility Is It?

This morning two Facebook posts on children’s eating caught my attention. These bring to mind the question of responsibility. Who is responsible for deciding when a child is hungry enough to eat? Who is responsible for what that child eats when she is hungry?

The answer to the first question is clear: only the child can tell when he’s hungry. We parents might like kids to be hungry on our schedule and we might want them to eat when the family sits down at the table but we can’t legislate hunger.

So for very small people, just learning to eat solid foods, we pretty much have to respect the child who says “no thanks” by turning away and clamping his lips shut. Wheedling, cajoling, and insisting are counter-productive, since they distort what eating is all about: hunger. For older children, creating a routine around three meals each day and maybe two or three snacks makes sense and ensures that the kid who is not hungry at one feeding doesn’t have to wait too long for the next. The child is encouraged to rate his own hunger levels and take responsibility for eating at a meal or waiting for the next. The parents’ responsibility is to set food before the child at reasonable intervals. The child’s responsibility is to decide to eat or not.

The question of what to eat starts with the parents but should as quickly as possible be transferred to the child. Certainly, at mealtimes children should eat what the family eats and the family should eat what children might enjoy. But snack time is a different matter. As we all know from our own eating patterns (especially now, before Halloween), what is in the house gets eaten (you haven’t bought a bag of miniature candy bars yet, have you?). So whoever shops for groceries has responsibility to buy only the stuff kids should eat. Believe me, it’s much easier to commiserate (“Oh, that would be nice! Too bad we don’t have any of that!”) than to refuse (“No. No cookies! No Fritos! No!”).

But as soon as you can (age three is not too young), get kids involved in making their own snack choices. One clever mother of two posted on the fridge (and as a picture on Facebook) a little magnetic board with a list of the acceptable choices for afternoon snacks. Only healthy choices are offered but the kids are free to pick whatever they like. In fact, they can pick one of each if they’re that hungry. Each selection is marked by putting a magnet in the corresponding box so kids (and Mom) can keep track of what’s been eaten. Doing this puts the responsibility for food choices – and for dealing with hunger – right where it should be: with the kids. Mom’s responsibility for keeping a supply of acceptable snacks gets her children in the habit of choosing what’s healthful.

What strategies have you used to help kids take responsibility for their own eating? How has that worked for you?

Photo credit: Ren Caldwell

Building Memories

When you think back to your childhood, what memories stand out? For me – admittedly a child of an antique era – my best memories are outdoor ones, especially memories of playing pirates among the branches of a huge willow tree that leaned out over a pond. I recall the challenge of finding solid footing as I climbed higher, the rustle of the willow leaves and the sharp wet smell of the water.

What do you remember?

A student of mine recently commented that kids today aren't building the sort of evocative, sensory-rich memories that their grandparents and parents have. Kids these days, she said, seem to live in more manicured surroundings and to have less freedom to poke around and explore. When kids play with electronic media – something not even imagined in my day - engagement with their senses is limited and as virtual as the games themselves.

This is not necessarily a problem, of course. Different childhood experiences are not immediately better or worse. But the sorts of experiences our children have and the kinds of memories these build are things we might want to consider. It’s possible we’re losing something important.