age appropriate development

[Kent Loobey]

I don't know where to post this.

I have spent the last little while reading articles and papers on the web on 
child development.  I am interested in developing activities for early 
childhood learning.  If the OLPC XO-1s are aimed at 6 to 12 year olds then I 
am interested in the 6-7-8 year end of the continuum.  I started my search on 
the web because I was uncertain what children in this age group are able to 
grasp.  I am also uncertain about the developmental readiness of the 9-12 age 
group as well.  In fact maybe the 6-8 age is too big of a span.  Maybe I 
should focus on 6 and 7 year olds.  I just don't know at this point what the 
jump in child development is between 6 and 8.

In any event it must be true that if we are successful there will be a jump in 
child development between 6 year olds and 8 year olds.

So I am thinking that it would be helpful to me if there was a listserve set 
up for age differentiated activity development.  This listserve would focus 
not on the technicalities of code development but instead on age appropriate 
activity design.  It could also facilitate activity collaboration.

I can also see the benefit of activities that are set up to work together.  
Specifically a drawing program that is developed to produce images that are 
for the use of other activities.  Or a word processing activity that is 
developed to produce text for use by other activities.  The same with audio, 
video and photo clips.  Then a scrapbook activity could pull easily from 
these other activities, or a story creator, or a trip reporter or a history 
recorder.  So rather then create monolithic highly structured activities we 
(also) develop a set of module (activities) that can be glued together on the 
fly by the student.