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.
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.