The Fred Rogers Center is committed to exploring how digital media benefits and supports the development of young children, and part of the work it does is to create resources that help parents to best use digital media tools. Their latest tool, the Fred Rogers Center Early Learning Environment, or Ele for short, is one of the best quality resources on digital media literacy for young children that I have seen.
Over at the GeekDad Community there have been some questions about raising toddlers and younger children in geeky ways. I think for young children, this is less about putting them in Star Wars baby clothes and trying to work out when they can begin to use a soldering iron, and more about teaching our children the geek approach to the world. How do we foster our children to be open, to be questioning and engaging with the world in a way that is exploratory and full of wonder? We can begin to instil this in our children from the moment they are born. We can give them the values of testing assumptions that we see in shows like Mythbusters. We can give them a love of knowledge and language and improve their vocabulary by reading them books when they are still in the cradle. We can not shut them down when they begin to ask “why?”, but encourage them to keep asking “why?” every single day. We can count with them, and take them outside when they are 18 months old and show them the stars and the universe and get them thinking about what might be beyond, and then beyond that. We can do so much.
But, when we feel stuck, or would like to know how to better engage our children in quality tools, then the Fred Rogers Center’s new Ele portal is an excellent place to start. You would visit Ele for a whole host of reasons. It may look like just another place that has digital books and games for young children, but the difference here is that the people responsible for curating and creating this content have a wealth of early childhood development knowledge and are interested in how that supports not just children’s skills and knowledge, but their health and well being.