n101  2003  18 Jan 80
 
BC-SCHOOL
(STYLE)
(Art en route to picture clients)
By HEIDI LARSON
c. 1980 N.Y. Times News Service
    KIRYAT TIVON, Israel - Two children are rolling a large tire toward
their friend across the yard, who is pretending to ride a discarded
car fender. A girl is stirring make-believe soup of nuts and bolts on
a broken stove, while her playmate is setting spoons on a
three-legged table propped up against a tree.
    Inside, one pupil is sitting at a table, fitting together loose
clock parts, while another is walking around in a doctor's coat with
a stethoscope around her neck, eagerly looking for a patient.
    It is all part of an experimental kindergarten at the Study Center
for Children's Activities just east of Haifa. This is not a
neighborhood school. It has no regional bounds. Instead, the pupils
come from a village of seminomadic Arab Bedouins, a Jewish kibbutz, a
development town for new Jewish immigrants, an Arab city and a Jewish
agricultural settlement.
    The children are not integrated, but come to the center with their
regular classes and teachers for one school day a week for a year -
the Bedouin class on Wednesdays, for example, and a class of kibbutz
children every Thursday. Taking advantage of the mix of cultures in a
small area, the center places the different classes in the same
setting to see if their various backgrounds, rather than
environmental differences, affect their play activity. The center has
found that all children, regardless of background, go through the
same stages in their play activities.
    ''We believe that there are patterns in children's block-building,
drawing, and make-believe play that are universal,'' said Gidon
Levine, the center's director. ''All of the children who come to the
center build similar block structures, imitate many of the same
situations in their play and develop drawing skills in the same
stages over the year.''
    ''For example,'' he continued, ''in the past few years, we have
found that every class of children, at some point during the year,
imitates a wedding. And, for each group, the most important parts of
the ceremony are the bride and the orchestra. In some cases, we were
not even sure who the groom was.
    ''The only difference in the ceremonies reflecting the children's
culture was the style of music. The Bedouin children's orchestra was
all drums. The urban Jewish children pulled out the cassette tape
recorder for their music.''
    Since it opened in 1975, the center, financed by the Bernard Van
Leer Foundation, a worldwide organization that funds research
projects dealing with early childhood education, has been observing
and videotaping the children's play activities. Levine, speaking
recently at the first International Israel Congress on early
childhood education, talked about the three stages that the center
has seen in the play activities of more than 1,500 children. He told
his audience:
    ''The first stage is doing things with and to the object, tools or
equipment. This is the stage of finding out what the object, tool or
material is, how it behaves, if it has a will of its own. In the
second stage, the child tries to explore what he can do with the
tools and the materials.
    ''It is a significant step towards the humanization of the child.
The child learns how to master and handle materials, instead of being
overwhelmed by them. The first significant combinations appear, the
combinations of pieces of equipment, combinations of tools and
materials, combinations of acts, words and sentences.
    ''In the third stage is the more difficult, skillful, practical,
purposeful handling of the tools, objects, ideas and roles in order
to achieve a given goal or in order to carry out some
experimentation. Children, regardless of background, move very
quickly between stages, given encouraging and supportive
environments.''
    The development of drawing skills among the different children who
come to the center appears to support his conclusion. At the center,
he pointed out the difference between the simplistic, one-color
paintings of the Bedouin children and the complex, multicolored
paintings of the kibbutz children done at the beginning of the year.
He then pointed to a group of equally complex and colorful paintings,
which were produced by all of the children at the end of the year. By
that time, the difference between the Bedouin and kibbutz drawings
was virtually indistinguishable.
    Given the materials and the ''supportive, encouraging environment,''
the Bedouin children went through the same stages of experimentation
and showed the same innate creative abilities as the kibbutz
children, who had had access to the paints and encouragement at an
earlier time.
    The play activities of the individual children share a common
pattern, but in the different social organization of the classes the
different cultural and ethnic backgrounds become apparent.
    Children from the more traditional backgrounds, such as the Bedouin,
tend to talk less and use more physical force when they want
something. Children of more modern background, such as the kibbutz,
are more verbal and less physical in their demands.
    ''Here the approach favored is to negotiate, to appeal to rules that
are agreed upon by the group,'' write three of the center's founders,
Shlomo Ariel, Matia Kam and Irene Sever, in one of their studies.
They have concluded that verbal or nonverbal, the children initiate a
system of rules among themselves of ''minilegal'' systems unlike the
rules of the adult world around them.
    
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