WF, 2/8/2019 | Wee Friends Early Childhood Program LLC

Good Afternoon!

Reading stories is a pretty basis and easily understood early childhood activity. Right?

Wrong. It’s not just books that we have available to use. It’s books, books on tape, and the never ending options of technology based activities. The article that I’ve attached below is a scientific study done by Dr. John Hutton, on 27 children around the age of 4. They presented stories to these children in three conditions: audio only, the illustrated pages of a story time book with a human audio voice-over, and an animated cartoon.

They looked at scans of these children’s brains while being read each of the three ways and the results were not all that surprising. Using the ‘Goldilocks method’, the results were as follows:

“The audio-only condition was TOO COLD! There was evidence the children were straining to understand what was happening.
The kid’s overall comprehension of the story suffered the worst in the animated condition aka TOO HOT.
The illustration condition was what Dr. Hutton called JUST RIGHT.”

It’s quite an interesting article that focuses on the type of reading that is best for the development of children.

https://deeprootsathome.com/storytime-science/

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We spent our morning conducting a science experiment. We taped a long piece of white paper to the ground. Each friend got to test our different items. They picked an item (button, pom pom ball, wood tile, glass bead, etc.) and placed it on the catapult before letting go to see how far the item went. Once it landed, we marked on the white paper how far it went. After a few friends tried it out, we were able to start making educated guesses about what would happen to each item and how long it would go based on what had happened previously.