What are the educational benefits for children participating in a multi-aged preschool classroom?

Question

Early childhood classrooms with children 3 - 5 years old

Answer 1

The younger children will model the behavior of the older children, which could help them to learn faster.  All the children will also learn to interact with a variety of ages.

Answer 2

I know when it is a home child care you can have many ages.  My roommate and I plan to have ages 6 months to about 5 years, but we can only have 5 kids at a time and a certin amount of kids under 3 and under 2.  So we'll have 1 baby at the most.  Anyway with different ages yes the younger kids will follow the older ones.  We took 4 boys who are cousins (ages 11 months, 4, 6 & 8) to the park and noticed the 4 year old copying and following his 6 year old cousin, but not caring what his 8 year old brother did.  He usually wants to have or do the same things as his brother when they are alone and even not eat foods that he usually eats just because his brother says they are gross.  But that day at the park he hung on every word and move of his cousin.  Of course when the older boys played with a soccer ball by kicking it to each other in a circle and did a scavenger hunt the 11 month old just hung out with us and I put him on the swings.  But the neat part about having different ages is that there is a lot of activities that each age can get involved in some how.  With the kids we get in our child care we will do circle time and when the kids dance or move around we will have the youngest one in one of our laps and move there arms or whatever.  Also when we ask questions and that we'll ask the other kids what they think baby so and so thinks or how they might feel.  Of course if we ask what colour or shape or letter is something then we'll ask the older kids who know to let the toddlers try and think for themselves before helping them.  If we have some kindergarten kids of course they are going to know a lot more from school, but a lot of the letter and number learning and other things like that we'd do a lot of with the 1-3/4 year olds during the time the others are in school.  I think there is a lot of benefits because the children learn to interact with people there age and people of different ages.

Answer 3

I wrote about this in my blog recently.  My answer has a Montessori slant to it at points, since it is a blog about Montessori.  Hope you can get good ideas from it and it prompts you to look for more information:

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            "The five-year-olds in Montessori classes often help the younger children with their work, actually teaching lessons or correcting errors.  Anyone who has ever had to teach a skill to someone else may recall that the very process of explaining a new concept or helping someone practice a new skill leads the teacher to learn as much, if not more, than the pupil."[8]



            Montessori offers a unique benefit many other educational models do not offer.  The children are easily able to learn from each other.  The effects of this have been well researched and documented.  The Montessori child learning a concept often begins with observing other children and the adults in the classroom.

            Bandura, Ross, and Ross (1963) observed that children learn behaviors from adults.  Children learned how to behave towards a doll after watching adults behave similarly.[9]  

            Want and Harris (2001) show that 2-year olds can imitate ways to use special tools after observation.[10]

            In Montessori, the lessons provided to the children are done so carefully that the child has a clear concept of how to carry out the work on his or her own.  Variation may happen, but we often see the exact way a teacher does her instruction carried out by the child.  Montessori believed that people learn not from words, but from observation and action.  To carry out presentations, Montessori believed we must present the materials in a way that is clear to the child and avoids cluttering and talking.  As Lillard points out (based on a study by Markman, 1977), "Children are notoriously poor at requesting clarification, so adults who are unclear might not realize it.  The best teaching, Dr. Montessori maintained, was done by showing children how to use the materials without saying more than was necessary."[11]

            Individualized instruction has been shown to provide more effective learning than large group instruction.[12]  This is where Montessori shines.  It also provides excellent opportunities for peer tutoring, as noted above by Seldin and Epstein.  Greenwood’s study (1987) shows that classrooms with peer tutoring earned higher scores on spelling tests than those that replaced peer tutoring with more practice. A follow up study provided similar results in other areas besides spelling.[13]

            Brown and Kane (1988) looked at 3-year-olds and the effects they have on learning something when they must teach it.  The students were presented with stories that had a problem that must be solved.  The students who were told they will teach it to a Kermit the Frog puppet came up with the solution to the story twice as frequently as those students that did not have to teach the story.[14]