1/21/2015 Casa Latina Workshop Klarissa

Location: Casa Latina

Date: 1/21/2015

Time: 5pm

Today was an interesting day with the children. Will and I were with them. We just received mini-iPads, along with Tiggly counts and Osmo, some interactive attachments to the tablets. Luckily, there were three iPads and three children. We will have to workout a sharing strategy for times when this is not the case. We did not focus on any VIEWS2 skills. The kids were incredibly, and almost solely, interested in playing on the tablets. We did not have any infants or toddlers this week, which allowed us to be focused on helping them learn the games and engage in conversation with the kids.

Having just received them before the workshop, we didn’t have time to play with them ourselves beforehand and become familiar with Osmo or Tiggly. But its usually my experience that children are very fast at figuring out how things work. I didn’t get to see them play with Tiggly, but my impression is that it didn’t work terribly well. There are magnets which the screen is supposed to respond to, and it seemed like that didn’t happen always. The word game on Osmo was the biggest hit and I’ll have to admit that it was actually a bit difficult as you got further into the game. (a picture of a tree house was supposed to give us a clue to the word ‘door,’ which was not any of our guesses). The word game can be played with a couple people, which is great, because there is only one Osmo device. Still, three people is a bit much, so one is left out. Another complication to the sharing strategy.

At some point they asked about downloading other apps, especially Candy Crush and one that has to do with makeup. Intially we agreed to these, as age-appropriate, but they are not really learning apps. So we told them that next week we would have to stick to apps that are educational. I was a bit surprised that rather than being upset by this or trying to argue that these apps could be educational, they started to show up the apps they use at school. We had some trouble getting them set up on the math app their school uses, as it asks for school IDs but one of the kids figured it out and helped his sister. By the time they were about to leave, they were writing math problems on the white board.

Before next week, we should look up and vet educational apps, to have ready. 

We also did not plan a craft this week, so we tried origami because we had the paper and some instruction books with us. But we didn’t try this out before, either, so we had a few frustrations. I did manage to make a penguin. The kids glued googly eyes to their penguins, so cute! 

So I learned that some planning is important, even with the goal of flexibility.