You seem to have the goal of exposing your child to ideas. Will you be expecting these ideas to take root? Your child might not get it, and your child might get it but not care as you do. If either of these outcomes happens, do not be discouraged. Memories that you spent time together matter most.
I encourage you to read Piaget theories of childhood development. Two sentences for you to consider: “At about two to four years of age, children cannot yet manipulate and transform information in a logical way. However, they now can think in images and symbols.”
You seem to have the goal of exposing your child to ideas. Will you be expecting these ideas to take root?
Nah, it’s more a strategy of “try a lot of things and see what sticks”—and also, I want to get better at teaching those kinds of ideas; if they don’t stick now, they might later when the kid has grown and my teaching ability has as well.
(I’ve read about Piaget—though not from Piaget himself; more in Psychology textbooks and Wikipedia—and have been reading up more generally on psychology of development and learning; I know that at that age plenty of parts of the brain aren’t fully developed yet, so I don’t have high hopes for teaching everything at a young age)
You’ve already seen other responses from people who tell what they do OTHER than stories. I would go with that. For my kids, I ALWAYS tried to answer any queries in a very informative way, and give both sides when it was an opinion question. I talked about origins of racism, why we like to buy things we get (the people selling/making it deserve money so they can buy things, an econ lesson). I would constantly tell them relatively ridiculous things and get them used to challenging me. One of my proudest moments was when my 4 year old accused me of clapping twice after I tried to explain an echo as sound bouncing off the houses across the street.
For stories at that young age, I just admired their concentration, their commitment to the stories. I would tell some stories where the characters were essentially version of their aunt their mom their cousins. There would usually be hidden stuff underground, but I wasn’t too concerned about loading “real” teaching in to these, I just loved watching their concentration. The nice thing about telling kids stories is they LIKE it if you repeat yourself, if you like the story. SO I could tell very similar stories each night and only vary them slightly to keep myself a little amused and to explore what might work with the kids. I found making up stories to be more taxing than reading stories, but it was fun some of the time.
consider: “At about two to four years of age, children cannot yet manipulate and transform information in a logical way. However, they now can think in images and symbols.”
Tangent: I remember, and remember remembering, and have evidence of remembering at least one situation to which I applied what passed for rational thought at the time, which I later found out matched with an event when I had just turned two (I had been assuming throughout elementary school that I had been around four at the time, but a serendipidously found video that corrected me; I definitely didn’t start ordering memories chronologically until at least age 5). It stuck with me because I made a couple predictions based on experience, decided to act on one (my parents’ fears about me falling in the lake overestimated the risk), and acknowledged and ignored the other (if I ignored them and ran toward the water I’d inevitably get caught and called back, but it didn’t matter because I was right). (It turned out that I was right about the second prediction, and subsequently failed to test the first one.)
This always gave me issues with developmental psychology literature, until I got to LW, admitted to myself that the literature probably knows what it’s talking about, and I was probably just weird.
You seem to have the goal of exposing your child to ideas. Will you be expecting these ideas to take root? Your child might not get it, and your child might get it but not care as you do. If either of these outcomes happens, do not be discouraged. Memories that you spent time together matter most.
I encourage you to read Piaget theories of childhood development. Two sentences for you to consider: “At about two to four years of age, children cannot yet manipulate and transform information in a logical way. However, they now can think in images and symbols.”
Nah, it’s more a strategy of “try a lot of things and see what sticks”—and also, I want to get better at teaching those kinds of ideas; if they don’t stick now, they might later when the kid has grown and my teaching ability has as well.
(I’ve read about Piaget—though not from Piaget himself; more in Psychology textbooks and Wikipedia—and have been reading up more generally on psychology of development and learning; I know that at that age plenty of parts of the brain aren’t fully developed yet, so I don’t have high hopes for teaching everything at a young age)
You’ve already seen other responses from people who tell what they do OTHER than stories. I would go with that. For my kids, I ALWAYS tried to answer any queries in a very informative way, and give both sides when it was an opinion question. I talked about origins of racism, why we like to buy things we get (the people selling/making it deserve money so they can buy things, an econ lesson). I would constantly tell them relatively ridiculous things and get them used to challenging me. One of my proudest moments was when my 4 year old accused me of clapping twice after I tried to explain an echo as sound bouncing off the houses across the street.
For stories at that young age, I just admired their concentration, their commitment to the stories. I would tell some stories where the characters were essentially version of their aunt their mom their cousins. There would usually be hidden stuff underground, but I wasn’t too concerned about loading “real” teaching in to these, I just loved watching their concentration. The nice thing about telling kids stories is they LIKE it if you repeat yourself, if you like the story. SO I could tell very similar stories each night and only vary them slightly to keep myself a little amused and to explore what might work with the kids. I found making up stories to be more taxing than reading stories, but it was fun some of the time.
Tangent: I remember, and remember remembering, and have evidence of remembering at least one situation to which I applied what passed for rational thought at the time, which I later found out matched with an event when I had just turned two (I had been assuming throughout elementary school that I had been around four at the time, but a serendipidously found video that corrected me; I definitely didn’t start ordering memories chronologically until at least age 5). It stuck with me because I made a couple predictions based on experience, decided to act on one (my parents’ fears about me falling in the lake overestimated the risk), and acknowledged and ignored the other (if I ignored them and ran toward the water I’d inevitably get caught and called back, but it didn’t matter because I was right). (It turned out that I was right about the second prediction, and subsequently failed to test the first one.)
This always gave me issues with developmental psychology literature, until I got to LW, admitted to myself that the literature probably knows what it’s talking about, and I was probably just weird.