My experience at Asian Festival of Children's Content 2015

I was very fortunate to receive a sponsorship by the Association of Early Childhood Educators of Singapore (AECES) to attend this year's Asian Festival of Children's Content (AFCC). Well, it is my first official professional development workshop since my appointment as a full-pledged early childhood educator. And, despite just completing five years of tertiary education in the early childhood field, I gained several new insights, from both international speakers and local speakers, that are tremendously useful for my teachings.

The keynote speakers at this year's event were Dr Rosemary Johnston on "The Significance of Children's Book in Language and Literacy Education" and Dr Dylan Yamada-Rice presented on "Digital Technologies to aid Children's Learning". 

Learning Points

Dr Rosemary Johnston 

Dr Rosemary talked about the history and importance of language, literacy and literature for our children and how these 3 'L's affects the country's social, economic and sustainability. Throughout history, education is a political tool where only the rich/not-so-poor could attain and whoever is educated is powerful. For instance, Japan has evolved from an illiterate nation to a country with high literacy rate and an economic powerhouse. Bottom-line, children's books help children to grow (up) and there should be more emphasis on smaller, indigenous cultures than just popular culture.  

Recommended authors and books: Shawn Tan's "The Red Tree", Pat Hutchins's "Rosie's Walk", Jeanine Barker's "Mirror", Anthony Browne's "Zoo".

Dr Dylan Yamada-Rice on the relationship of adults, plays and apps in the life of young children

Dr Dylan highlighted that modern communication is taking place through images than words. Early environmental print research indicated that young children's first understandings of reading and writing is based on their exposure to print in early life. For instance, children in Japan are exposed to big, colorful billboard images while children in London are exposed to more visual text than images. 

She reminded us that technology has a role in children's learning and the future of education is multi-modal. She envisions the future of learning is the perfect combination of knowledge and skills with apps through a collaboration with educators and apps-makers.

Dr Sandra Williams on Singapore Children's Books

Another memorable speaker was Dr Sandra Williams. She shared on "Reading Children's Books in Schools: What it means to Pupils". She talked about using local literature within our curriculum and to facilitate inter-domain extension activities after each book (e.g. environmental awareness and literacy). And, children loves to read about their own culture! It emphasis the role of the early educators to facilitate children to make sense of local children's literature and highly encouraged us to invite local authors into the classrooms. 

There are two kinds of books: books that are supposedly for readers to learn English and books written based on what writers want readers to know. There should be a good balance of both kind of genre in classrooms for a holistic approach. Examples of local  books: "The Naughty Myah", "Farrer Park", "The Mudskipper", "Near & Dear", "Prince Bear and the Pauper Bear", "The Red Helicopter".

Mind blown moments

As shared by Dr Rosemary, the magic of reading is amazing. It takes only 1 author to write an entire series of Harry Potter while it took a production team to make it into a movie adaption. Despite visual effects and superb acting, a reader's own imagination and perception of the book was way better than the show. 

Do you know that Harry Potter is a fairy tale? It is considered as a contemporary fairy tale with strong elements of a typical fairy tale (e.g. rivalry, good people are nice looking, woman's dependence of man, meek and submissive obedience is best). Compare Harry and Cinderalla, they are the same kind of "victims" who suffered and triumphed at the end with some help from powerful people who believes in them. 

Dr Dylan mentioned that culture makes a huge difference in interpreting pictorials. In Japan, images are emotion-sharing (e.g. pain) while in Western countries, images consists the strong meaning of "I" (e.g. I am in pain). 

Ms Lavina, captivating as always!

I learnt from Ms Lavina Chong ("A Musical Learning Journey with Children's Literature") that clapping is a relatively challenging task for young children to perform (e.g. hand-hand coordination, hand-eye coordination, hands to coincide mid-way of the body). Instead of clapping their hands, educators can encourage children to clap their hands onto their laps. This is easier as their thighs are not moving, harder to miss with their hands. Recommended music & rhymes: Doctor Foster, The Dancing Princess, Ten little fingers and ten little toes, Driving my Tractor

Reflections

There was so much learning taking place during the event and I wish I could attend them all! I had the opportunities to mingle with very talented local authors and dedicated teachers, they truly are inspiring. Furthermore, I learnt new questioning techniques for story-reading with young children. In addition to "How do you think he feels?", it can be"whose ears are these sentences for?", "who would be happy to know this?". It encourages children to see and hear in a multi-perspective. 

Michael Heyman encourages children to write in nonsensical language

The extremely whimsical Mr Michael Heyman presented on "Making Sense out of Nonsense Literature for Young People". I learnt that nonsense is a form of playful language between 'sense' and 'nonsense' and it teases readers. It provides endless possibilities and alternative realities.  A very interesting learning point! Recommended Authors: Calef Brown, Edward Goey, Michael Rosen.

In addition, I would like to implement "Slow Teaching" in my classrooms; to spend time to learn with children well, in depth than to rush through academia. Multiple papers has proved than "Slow Teaching" enables children to learn more effectively in a holistic manner. It reminds me to take cues from children's interest and learning progress than to force feed/rush chunks of academia down their throat. 

To me, the ideology of using technology with young children is highly debatable. Screen-based learning could take over hard copies of books in the generations to come. However, technology for young children should be time-limited and carefully selected by adults. Thus, i believe that there should be a good balance between playing with toys, reading books and screen time. I strongly believe that the human interaction and 'live' engagement of an actual story-reading beats swiping an interactive iPad.

It was a fruitful learning experience and I look forward to next year's AFCC!