Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Education Friedrich Froebel and Marie Clay Friedrich Froebel and Marie Clay Friedrich August Wilhelm Froebel was born in Oberweissback, Germany in April 21, 1782 (Ransbury, 1995). He was the sixth child of a Lutheran Minister, but lost his mother before his first birthday. As a young boy, he played and explored in the gardens surrounding his home most of the time. His deep love of nature would later influence his educational philosophy. He did not become educated until age eleven. When he was fifteen years old, he was apprenticed to a Forester. He then studied at the University of Jena. He accepted a teaching position at the Frankfurt Model School in Yverdon, Switzerland. This school was based on the teachings of Johann Heirnrich Pestalozzi. Froebel embraced Pestalozzi’s philosophy that children need to be active learners. He left the school to be a private tutor where the children’s parents offered him a small patch of the property to use as a garden. The learning experiences that the children had there made Froebel realize that “action and direct observation were the best ways to educate” (“Friedrich Froebel,” 2000). Froebel continued his education at the Universities of Berlin and Gottingen. In 1813 he served in the Prussian Army against Napoleon. His invention of Gifts might have been shaped while he was an assistant in the Mineralogical Museum in Berlin. His first book, The Education of Man, was published in 1826. In 1837, at the age of fifty-five, Froebel founded his own school in Blankenburg. It was called “Kindergarten,” a garden of children. This would be a place to cultivate a child’s development and socialization because prior to Froebel’s Kindergarten children under the age of seven did not attend school (Sadker and Sadker, 2000). People believed that young children did not have the ability to focus or to develop cognitive and emotional skills, but Froebel stated, “because learning begins when consciousness erupts, education must also” (“Friedrich Froebel”, 2000). Kindergarten acts as a bridge between home play and school life. Froebel expanded on Pestalozzi’s philosophy that school should be an emotionally secure environment. He said the teacher should act as a moral and cultural model for children, a model worthy of emulation. Before this time teachers were considered a disciplinarian. The early years in education are the most critical for forming a foundation to continue. With Froebel’s philosophy that children learn through experiences he created “gifts” and “occupations.” The gifts were toys such as balls, blocks, and cubes. The occupations were tasks that taught skills useful in later life such as weaving, folding paper, stringing beads, perforating paper, modeling with clay, lacing cards, follow the dots, and joint and stick construction (Jalongo and Isenberg, 2000). He also believed children were brought closer to God through song, dance, plays, and games. Froebel called his approach to education “self-activity” and “self-representation” (“Friedrich Froebel”, 2000; Ransbury, 1995). Therefore the teacher’s role is as a guide, not a lecturer (“Friedrich Froebel”, 2000). He was also the first to introduce the “concept of curricula appropriate to a child’s developmental level” (Woodill, 1995). Froebel designed Kindergarten to children’s needs in “physical activity, the development of sensory awareness and physical dexterity, creative expression, exploration of ideas and concepts, the pleasure of singing, the experience of living among others, and satisfaction of the soul” (“Friedrich Froebel”, 2000). Until his death in 1852, he was devoted to making Kindergarten known. The German immigrants brought the idea of Kindergarten to the United States in the nineteenth century. Margaretta Schurz established the first German Kindergarten in Wisconsin in 1855 and Elizabeth Peabody established the first English Kindergarten and training school in Boston in 1860 (Sadker and Sadker, 2000). Like Froebel, Marie Clay a current educational leader uses some hands on activities to help promote reading in low achieving first graders. Marie M. Clay was born in 1926 in Wellington, New Zealand. She earned a primary teacher’s certificate in 1945 from the Wellington College of Education and a Bachelor of Arts degree at the Wellington campus of the University of New Zealand. After her completion of her master’s thesis, “Teaching of Reading to Special Class Children,” she was awarded a Master of Arts degree with honors in 1948. In 1950 Clay went to the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Welfare to study developmental psychology and clinical child development. She then went back to Wanganui in New Zealand to continue teaching in the primary grades. Because of her interest in and expertise with children with special needs, many high-need students were placed in her class (Gaffney and Askew, 1999). For the next twenty-five years, Clay was involved in the training of school psychologists at the University of Auckland. In her doctoral dissertation, Emergent Reading Behaviors, Clay asked the question, ”Can we see the process of learning to read going off-course close to the onset of instruction?” (Reading Recovery in North America, 2000). She described the week-by week progress of one hundred children during their first year of school. From her research she was able to write An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement, which includes reliable observation tolls for the assessment and analysis of consequential changes over time in children’s early literacy learning (Gaffney and Askew, 1999). “If children are apparently unable to learn, we should assume that we have not yet found the right way to teach them (Reading Recovery in North America, 2000). It is through this principle that Marie Clay developed Reading Recovery, an early intervention program to help low-achieving six year olds learn to read (Thomas, 1992). It was first implemented in five Auckland schools in 1978. The program then expanded to 48 Auckland schools by the end of the first year. With strong success, the program was implemented across New Zealand in the 80’s. By 1990, it had spread to Australia, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom (Reading Recovery in North America, 2000). Reading Recovery is used as a supplement to good classroom teaching. Individual students receive a half-hour lesson each school day for 12 to 20 weeks with a trained Reading Recovery teacher. As soon as students can read within the average range of their class and demonstrate that they can continue to achieve, their lessons are discontinued, and new students begin individual instruction. Using Clay’s An Observational Survey of Early Literacy Achievement, the teacher can assess each child’s strengths and confusions. The teacher continues to assess the child’s progress each day with a running record and uses the data to plan future lessons. Each lesson consists of reading familiar stories, reading a story that was read for the first time the day before, working with letters and words using magnetic letters, writing a story, assembling a cut-up story, and reading a new book. Problem-solving strategies are taught and demonstrated to help encourage comprehension and decoding for reading fluency. Letter-sound relationships are also incorporated into the lessons. Running Records are used to determine what information the child is using to decode the words in reading. They are analyzed for meaning, structure, and visual information. Teachers focus on each student’s strengths to learn strategies to become independent readers. Marie Clay is now a Visiting Professor at Ohio State University, University of Illinois, Texas Women’s University, Oxford University, and the Institute of Education at the University of London. Reading Recovery is now in 10,664 schools in the United States alone (Clay, 1998). I was interested in Froebel because I too believe children learn through play and I wanted to research how it all got started. Kindergarten was designed to be a transition between home and school and some kindergarten teachers have forgotten that idea. I was interested in Marie Clay because I know a Reading Recovery teacher and the Reading Recovery teacher leader for TISD. They have told me so many wonderful things about the program I was interest in how it all got started. It is amazing to me that both kindergarten and Reading Recovery were started many years ago and they are still helping children learn all around the world. Bibliography: (2000). Friedrich Froebel: Founder, First Kindergarten. Early Childhood Today, 15, 1. (2000). Reading Recovery in North America: An Illustrated History. Reading Recovery Council of North America. (2001). Reading Recovery Council of North America. Retrieved October 17, 2001, from http://www.readingrecovery.org/ Clay, M. (1998). By Different Paths to Common Outcomes. York, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers. Corbett, B. Friedrich Froebel. Retrieved October 17, 2001, from http://www.froebel.com/Philosophy/About%20Froebels.htm Gaffney, J., & Askew, B. (Eds.). (1999). Stirring the Waters: The Influence of Marie Clay. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Jalongo, M. & Isenberg, J. (2000). Exploring Your Role: A Practitioner’s Introduction to Early Childhood Education. Columbus, Ohio: Merrill. Ransbury, M. (1995). Friedrich Froebel. In M. A. Johnson & G. F. Roberson. (Eds.), A Century of Early Childhood (pp. 15-17). Needham Heights, MA: Simon & Schuster Custom Pub. Sadker, M. & Sadker, D. (2000). Teachers, Schools, and Society. Burr Ridge, IL: McGraw Hill. (Original Work Published in 1988). Thomas, R. (1992). Reading Recovery. Retrieved October 17, 2001, from http://www.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/readrec.html Woodill, G. (1995). The European Roots of Early Childhood Education in North America. In M. A. Johnson & G. F. Roberson. (Eds.), A Century of Early Childhood (pp.4-11). Needham Heights, MA: Simon & Schuster Custom Pub. Word Count: 1330
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