Developing the Early Learner

As we wrap up our school year, I'm spending a bit of time and mental energy reviewing what we did, how we did, what we liked, what we didn't, and having a lot of fun researching and thinking about and pricing out products for next year.

This is my review of Developing the Early Learner, a perceptual growth curriculum piece we used this year, as part of this curriculum.

DTEL (because typing out "Developing the Early Learner" for the rest of this blog post doesn't sound fun.) was the one thing in the curriculum that I was highly suspicious of when I purchased it. I thought spending $30 for a bunch of silly worksheets might just be a bit dumb, but as it came with the curriculum, and I didn't really have a good feel for piecing together my own curriculum I decided to just take Timberdoodle's word for it this one time, and go with their recommendation. And, I am really glad I did.

DTEL comes in four books, each worksheet in increasing difficulty throughout. The first two books have 60 pages, and the second two have 55. Each worksheet focuses on ONE thing at a time, so no overwhelming pages... I forgot to take a picture of the back of one of the books, but each book lists the skills it works like so, for example:

Book 2:

Motor Skills

L-R tracking

Hand Eye Coordination

Mazes

Visual Skills

Similarities

Memory

Figure Ground

Auditory Skills

Similarities

Memory

Rhyming

Comprehension Skills

Associations

Sequence

Language

We started at the beginning, with page one, and just worked our way through them throughout the year. The goal was 7 pages per week, and every week we did that, or more. The girls loved doing them, so they usually asked to do more.

An answer guide is included in the back. I mostly found this useful as the original publication of this was in 1982, and occasionally the drawings are a little dated. Or, very dated. Like, who uses phone books anymore? Maybe I'm a little extreme, but I throw those things into the recycle bin straight from the mailbox. That's what the internet is for. There's the random strange things like a masked burglar, or a ghost in different descriptions, and they seem to be somewhat obsessed with where our meat comes from... like in a few different exercises, particularly sequencing it starts out with a cow, and ends up with a steak on a plate, and you have to figure out the order that the process happens in, but that actually appeals to me quite a lot due to me personally being a fan of knowing where my food comes from. I can't help it, it's the Portlandia in me, but I suppose some folks might take issue with those types of things.

I've ended up VERY glad we've done these as the year has gone on-it's been really fun to watch them get better at each skill. I've learned SO much about my kids, and how they learn. I've also learned what they're really good at, and what they need to work on, and also, what they're really good at, but do in completely different ways, which is kind of funny.

I've learned I have two perfectionists--they HATE getting even one little thing wrong.

The both have great comprehension, and especially love anything related to rhyming.

I've learned that I have one child who needed help starting out with her fine motor skills-but, I've been able to tailor crafts and subjects to meet that need, and knowing that, she's significantly improved throughout the year. However, she can look at a maze and in 5 seconds flat figure it out and draw a line straight through it, and she can sequence with barely a thought, noticing little details and putting things in order in nothing flat.

My other child has fine motor skills like nobody's business, and no matter how hard I try to distract her and make her forget random number/letter sequences, she's got a mind like a steel trap and can remember them for longer than I can focus to try to distract her from them. Which is odd, because she can't remember people's names to save her life.

And, they both track (see bottom picture) excellently, but one prefers complete silence for this chore, and the other must talk and sing her way through it.

What's more, my kids absolutely LOVE this subject, and when we finished the last worksheet up for the year yesterday, they were quite upset. The age range is sort of vague, they say if a child can hold a crayon they should be able to do this. For focus sake, I'm thinking I wouldn't start much earlier than 4... and I think past 6 or maybe 7 it might be a bit boring.

The scoring system is weird... I took one look at that at the first part of the year, and decided I wasn't going to be uptight enough to score the pages--because, quite frankly it baffled me. That being said, in my defense, I didn't try to hard. I just didn't find it very intuitive. With that disclaimer, it very quickly became evident what worksheets each child was going to do very well at, and which ones were going to present more of a challenge, so unless there's a specific development problem that maybe a medical professional wants a parent to keep track of, I'd just go through the exercises one a time--for the most part we all know our children enough to remember from day to day the little things that they might need more work on, and be excited over as they improve, right? Since I have two perfectionists, I tend to NOT score things too much at this stage, and instead try to be pretty casual about it, I want them to learn it's ok to get a 90%, as long as they do their best. The freak-outs and frantic fixings that occur when I point out errors drive me crazy, in short.

The way the book is set up it seems to indicate that they assume you're going to be copying pages... some worksheets need to be cut out, and as there are other worksheets on the back of those, you'd need to plan ahead and at least copy the ones that need to be cut out.

All in all, this has been a fun subject, one we've all learned from and enjoyed doing. I'm thankful we ended up using it.

Have a great weekend!