A baby swan is called a cygnet

There is a big book that I read to my preschool classes about animal babies. It tells about different baby animals and their mothers. The children are familiar with many of the animals in the book. The pictures of the cygnet and the mother swan usually throw them. They want to call it a duck. Makes the most sense in their mental schema and vocabulary knowledge. And, while I acknowledge that it does sort of look like a duck, I emphasize that a baby swan is a cygnet. I ask them to say that word. And we revisit that picture and word a number of times over the course of a week.

What difference does any of that make? Isn't that kind of a hard word for a preschooler? Wouldn't it be okay to accept the label "duck", at least for now? I have to tell you I grew up in a family of "look it ups". We discussed and debated facts and ideas in many different realms, often at the dinner table, and whenever there was a challenge, the judgement came down from my dad to "look it up". Meant the 1960 World Book Encyclopedia set that we kept on a bookshelf in the dining room. Somebody went to get it, found the topic we were discussing, and the right answer. Boom! Somebody found the answer and shared it with the rest of us!

I grew up believing that if you didn't know something, you could find an answer to it, or find someone who knew the answer to it. I grew up having $10  words used around me, with the belief that children develop vocabulary by hearing it, hearing it in context and hearing it, again.  I grew up with the Grammar Police Force, my mom and dad.
None of these things hurt me, in fact I believe that have helped me tremendously and given me the foundation for some of my theories and practices of teaching children, to always seek knowledge and understanding.

When my son, Joel, was in elementary school, he saw a flock of geese fly over us as we drove through the country. He was a reader and a lover of all kinds of animals. His question from the back seat took me by surprise, when I heard, "Mama, do swans fly south for the winter and do they fly in a V formation?" Swans aren't normally seen in our part of the country and I had to tell him I didn't know the answer to his question. But, I also told him it was a really good question and we could find out the answer. We found it in the encyclopedia. Together. And the answer is yes, they do both of those things and they also honk.
I learned something that day about swans and I learned somethings about teaching and learning. If a teacher can teach a learner to seek out answers to questions he doesn't know, about anything he wants to know,  the learner is well on his way to becoming an autonomic. life-long learner. Those are terms we like to throw around in the pedagogy of educational training. Technical jargon for a simple idea: If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach him to fish, he can feed himself for life.

To teach a child to seek out knowledge, you have to create within them a desire to learn. A love for words and ideas. They have to explore and discover things in their environment. You have to talk to them, listen to them, read to them, explain things to them. Use the word "cygnet" for a baby swan. That's it's name. A child can learn to say that, as well as a plethora of other rich, descriptive vocabulary words, if they hear them often and in context.

When my boys were under 7 years old, they used to lose the privilege of playing with a toy for a few days if they didn't follow the rules. They were placed on restriction from that item. It was usually put on top of the refrigerator. That was the "no touch-no play zone! Someone would come through the kitchen and ask one of them why their toy sword or nerf gun was on the refrigerator. The honest answer would come back, "I am on restriction from it for hitting my brother in the head with it." Did they know what "restriction" was? I think so. They lived with the working definition of it on an almost weekly basis.

I have some Pre-K students right now who are not careful play-dough players. There are pretty strict rules when it comes to the use of playdough. Especially over carpet! They had been reminded and warned about appropriate use, clean up and patrolling of the floor for renegade pieces. There was no improvement in their behavior, so the playdough was put up on a high shelf and the term "playdough restriction" was introduced to them. A week or so later, I heard one 5 year old ask another one if he wanted to play with playdough. The second child said, "No, we can't. The teacher said we're on playdough destriction."   The word rendering was close enough for his purposes.

As adults working and living with children, we're called on to facilitate their development in a number of areas. We help them develop in to growing and then grown people. A great gift we can give them is to teach them to seek and find knowledge. For Heaven's sake, we can now google just about anything in the world! And if someone is too lazy to google, send them the link through Let me just google that for you (lmjgtfy.com)! But seriously, teach children to find answers to their questions (when they get older, it will be called research). It will increase their learning potential and their thirst for knowledge. And by all means, teach them that a baby swam is called a cygnet!