The Plans...graphic metaphors

From the moment your child entered the world they became "readers" of the world around. Your child began to "read" images and connect those images with words spoken. From the moment he/she was born, your child began decoding facial expressions. This decoding process allowed your child to interpret your body language and its meaning in relationship to self and others.

We find this process of decoding soon transferred to their play, as children make a shift into the symbolic representations of objects such as a stick becomes a cane or a fishing pole. Or when children use images in their drawings in making their thinking visible to us. As children develop we find them shifting from drawing to using the inventive spelling of words, writing words and short sentences.

Within this whole cycle or process, children pass through multiple layers of languages -- writing, drawings, symbolic objects, mediums (e.g.,clay, wire, paper) gestures, movement, etc. Each layer strengthens the child's pathway to literacy and his/her understanding of the "written" word.

Too often adults want to hurry children ahead, moving them quickly to the written word by pouring words into the children without allowing them to process meaning through a symbolic hierarchy of thought. In this rush to push children to the written word, an important layer in the thought process known as "encoding" isn't allowed to percolate within the child long enough. One of the most known uses of encoding comes when children learn to write words. They are given a verbal word and then "taught" using prescribed lessons or methods on how to internalize or encode the sounds or knowing how to write the word.

What happens to the process if we slow it down and provide the child with a tool for ownership and the time to work in the encoding process? 

Research suggests that all learning methods that proceed by discovery and active construction must necessarily undergo error. Simply put, children must and need to make mistakes. Within a learning community, errors are points for dialogue and exchange of ideas. Errors set the stage for debate and disequilibrium that causes the child to think and often rethink their theories and ideas, even around words and symbols. This in turn pushes them into the realms of meta-cognition or critical thinking.

One of the purest and most important levels is through the use of symbols. For the child, the world is full of symbols.

Symbols and the children's use of them provide a level of communication that transcends cultural and language barriers. It allows for children to "mess" about with their use and to undergo a transformation of thinking as the child makes the symbol readable to others. Symbols provide rich contexts for the children to toss about and edit graphic metaphors for which they are the authors and owners.

This freedom to invent symbols provides a rich context for us to see the child's thinking as it unfolds. It can provide us a graphic record of his/her cognitive growth.

Working within the context and freedom in the invention of symbols, the child thinks about his thinking and how it is readable or understandable to the viewer. He learns how to make a symbol which makes sense to the child and to the viewer. Our Daily Plans is a tool in the process that brings all of this together for the child.

Let us look at some of the children's  work with symbols. Let look as they become authors in the invention of  "graphic metaphors" through the Plan.                                           

Click here to view their work.

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