The World of Preschoolers and Kindergartners

The World of Preschoolers
and Kindergartners

A significant reward that comes with LiFE is the joy you'll experience as you walk together with your preschool and kindergarten children on a personal journey of faith. You'll get to know each little one in your group—what he is thinking, feeling, imagining, and wondering. Not only will you have an opportunity to influence young minds and hearts, but you'll also be influenced by your children's simple, emerging faith in the God to whom we all belong.
      What follows here is a brief description of some of the characteristics you'll see in the young children you lead and learn from. It leaves much unsaid—and it certainly is no substitute for getting to know your group firsthand. But we do hope it will give you some insight into what you may anticipate from preschoolers and kindergartners—intellectually, socially, and spiritually.

Intellectual Characteristics
Listen to a preschooler for five minutes and you will discover much about the way a young child thinks, learns, and comes to conclusions about God, others, and the world around her. A person who implies that "anyone can teach the little ones" has failed to recognize that young children simply do not act, think, and organize new experiences and new learning in a scaled-down, adultlike way. Preschool and kindergarten children are not miniature models of us—they're different.
      Young children are concrete creatures. They love to taste, touch, move, explore, smell, watch—and wonder. As soon as we recognize these as tools for leading little ones, we're on our way to understanding how young children develop and learn. Preschoolers and kindergartners learn through experiencing,and their discovery can reach only as far as the outer limits of their experiences at home, at school, at the caregiver's, at church. Because young children are not yet capable of reasoning—or organizing abstract faith concepts along logical lines—the leading we do must relate directly, simply, and concretely to experiences our children have had or to new experiences we can share with them. As we teach, lead, and model the Christian life for our little ones, it's important to remember that for them, learning comes through doing.
      Young children are talkative creatures too! Sometimes their emerging ability to use language can lead us to misjudge their understanding and cause us to make unwarranted assumptions about their comprehension. Young children love to use language to please others; they soon learn that right answers bring ready smiles of approval from adults. (That's why in these LiFE materials we tend to emphasize wondering questions—with no right answers.) It's helpful for us to check out the understanding that lies beyond the ready responses of our little ones.
      Watching our own language is important too. It's easy to forget that young children interpret all they experience in a very literal way. Things are as they appear. Consequently, figures of speech, symbolism, and analogies about faith concepts are seldom appropriate for use in conversation with young children.
      Since preschoolers and kindergartners learn with their whole bodies, it's important to structure your session each week so that your little ones have periodic opportunities to move around. Games, stories, and other activities should be kept short, with transitional periods that enable movement from one part of the room to another. Try for a reasonable balance between times of quiet listening and active participation.
      While it may be hard to detect a young child's individual learning style, it's important to recognize that we all learn in multiple ways. Nurture each child's strengths, and encourage everyone to enjoy various ways of expressing the session truths through art, physical activity, music, words, numbers, and group interaction. Fill your time together with variety, color, and many invitations to the children to share their own experiences and feelings with you and the group.

Social Characteristics
Young children also differ greatly from adults socially—in their orientation toward people around them. The social center of a little one's world is himself—he is blissfully egocentric. What distinguishes self-centered preschoolers from adults with the same tendencies is that young children cannotbehave otherwise. They simply view the world through their own eyes and are incapable of making the mental maneuvers necessary to assume another's perspective, to understand another's emotions, to be empathic. It is important for us to understand this tunnel vision our little ones possess and to accept and approve of our children's developing concepts of themselves without judging their apparent egocentrism. LiFE seeks to do this by emphasizing the recurring theme of our specialness to God—we've been created by God, we belong to God, and God loves each of us very much.
      A preschooler's world may center around herself, but it is certainly populated by other people who have a significant influence on her. Take time to watch young children playfully imitating others or listen to their lively conversations and you will recognize immediately the influence of people—particularly parents—on their behavior, feelings, and attitudes. In fact, moms and dads are such significant shapers of their little ones that LiFE regularly suggests using parents as illustrations of what God is like in relationship with us. That's also why LiFE emphasizes your role as a model for your little ones— someone who pictures for them God's love and someone who demonstrates in a concrete way for them the Christian's thankful and faithful response to divine love.
      Preschool and kindergarten children are on the verge of experiencing a wider world of people. This may even be the first time some of the children in your group are a part of a structured setting in which they must share an adult's attention with others. Learning how to play with others, how to cooperate, how to share, how to be a part of a group is a new and sometimes frustrating challenge for little ones, whose main concern remains themselves. It is important for leaders to carefully and lovingly encourage this adjustment, to foster relationships within the group while remaining sensitive to individual needs for self-esteem and recognition. Understanding the self-centered social system of the young child surely helps!

Spiritual Characteristics
LiFE materials begin with the assumption that young children have a very real spiritual nature—a deep sense of who God is. Sofia Cavalletti, an internationally known religious educator, makes a strong case for this "mysterious bond between God and the child" (see p. 25 of her book, The Religious Potential of the Child: The Description of an Experience with Children from Ages Three to Six). In her work with preschool children, Cavalletti experienced this "sense of God" even in children who had not been born into Christian homes. For example, she tells of a three-year-old child who was growing up without a trace of religious influence:
      The child did not go to nursery school; no one at home, not even her grandmother, who was herself an atheist, had ever spoken of God; the child had never gone to church. One day she questioned her father about the origin of the world: "Where does the world come from?" Her father replied, in a manner consistent with his ideas, with a discourse that was materialistic in nature; then he added: "However, there are those who say that all this comes from a very powerful being, and they call him God." At this point the little girl began to run like a whirlwind around the room in a burst of joy, and exclaimed: "I knew what you told me wasn't true; it is Him, it is Him!" (p. 32).
      But who is God to a young child? What is a preschooler's concept of God? Because, as we've already mentioned, little ones think so concretely and interpret their experiences so literally, their concept of God follows this pattern too. Young children typically describe God in terms of a physical identity with human characteristics. This tendency, paired with the child's eager readiness to accept what he is told, makes your task as a leader and nurturer of faith a serious one. It will be essential for you to focus more on attitudes and actions that exhibit faith than on teaching complex religious concepts.
      Though understanding biblical and doctrinal concepts is certainly a goal of LiFE, at this level we seek first of all to instill in our children a sense of God's love and our response—within the context of common childhood experiences with which preschoolers and kindergartners can identify. The language of faith, as captured in the Q&Adocument studied by fifth and sixth graders in LiFE, is simply too abstract to teach our little ones without confusing them and necessitating unlearning and relearning at a later time. But positive, uncomplicated attitudes like trust and love are not out of reach for young children. In keeping with preschoolers' limited concepts of themselves and their world, LiFE seeks only to nurture faith by giving children a love for the stories of Scripture and by laying attitudinal foundations for later understanding of Scripture's great truths.
      A final word about attitudes. It is helpful for us adults who nurture faith in little ones to realize that young children differ from us—intellectually, socially, and morally. Preschoolers and kindergartners simply do not think in terms of right and wrong. They do not (yet!) have a built-in control on their own emotions that nudges them toward right behavior for its own sake. To avoid punishment? Yes! To win approval? Often! But conscience, as we know and experience it in our own moral choice-making, does not become a fixed part of a child's personality until he is nine or ten. Again, by focusing on attitudes rather than abstract concepts, LiFE seeks to encourage and instill those attitudes that will help young children develop judgment and responsibility as they grow in faith and mature as God's children.

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