Kids' wishes for a better planet

I took these photos of five- and six-year-olds' wishes for the Earth.

[#1 posted by scottfree , May 22, 2008 9:49 AM]

Aww. That's pretty awesome. I don't care much for kids, but every once in a while they'll blow your mind.

[#2 posted by TeenageMutantNinjaLincoln , May 22, 2008 9:55 AM]

Isn't that cute? These little geniuses learnt everything their parents taught them!

[#3 posted by jimh , May 22, 2008 9:59 AM]

I care much for kids!

These were actually written by high school freshmen, however. The prevalence of texting, instant messages, and forum-speak has really eroded their written language skills. Also, art classes are the first to go as educational funding is cut...

[#4 posted by freshfr0mdet0x , May 22, 2008 10:00 AM]

If nothing else (not that I am saying they are nothing else), these are a fascinating study of the development of language. Look at how they decide to spell words. I particularly like the way the kid who did the fourth one from the top wrote the word "is" in mirror image.

@ #1: I think I know what you mean when you say you don't care for kids, they can be annoying, sure. But I am wary of disparaging children in general. I came across a saying once that has always stuck with me: "Beware of any power that does not bow to children," and I think this is valid. Yes we're all tired of the trite and hokey "the children are the future," but it's actually true. I have high hopes for some of these kids that are growing up in the information saturated environment that the internet is fostering.

[#5 posted by Kibble , May 22, 2008 10:05 AM]

There are people in my area--I know this for a fact, because of a recent school board meeting--who would look at those drawings and go on a long rant about how the schools are brainwashing our kids with the Al Gore hippy daydream conspiracy. Teach kids to recycle and the next thing you know, they're fomenting a green terrorist state. Recycling is a gateway drug.

It's a pleasure to see that such an attitude isn't yet universal.

[#6 posted by scottfree , May 22, 2008 10:05 AM]

I can't make out the 'sitipro' or 'wrdxorusico'.

But no, I think the point is kids have a cool sense of aesthetics. c.f. these examples of people reconstructing kid's drawings.

I wonder why 'is' is written in mirror letters.

[#7 posted by MarlboroTestMonkey7 , May 22, 2008 10:06 AM]

Their moderated commentaries are kwel

[#8 posted by acb , May 22, 2008 10:09 AM]

LOLKIDS!

[#9 posted by Jake0748 , May 22, 2008 10:10 AM]

I'm not being mean and this is a serious question. Are all kids a little bit dyslexic when they are first learning to write? I understand them not knowing how to spell the longer words yet. But why do the backwards "e" and "s" and the transposition of letters in smaller words (eg. si instead of is) seem so prevalent? Any early educators out there?

BTW - I generally like kids, at least the ones who haven't been turned into disrespectful brats by their horrible parents. And... cute pictures too.

[#10 posted by pepsi_max2k , May 22, 2008 10:11 AM]

what is this "resikl" they speak of? i feel i am missing out :o(

[#11 posted by Kibble , May 22, 2008 10:11 AM]

#6, "wrdtorusico" = "world to recycle"

"sitipro" has me stumped as to exact words, but I'm pretty sure the kid is saying, "I want to play professional baseball."

[#12 posted by scottfree , May 22, 2008 10:12 AM]

I keep messing up html links. This: http://fishki.net/comment.php?id=32304 is what I was trying to link to.

And that comment was directed at #2.

Freshfromdetox: fair shakes. I probably have better conversations with a higher proportion of kids than adults. Still, I wouldn't want to spend too much time hanging out with them. They're so bloody moral!

[#13 posted by scottfree , May 22, 2008 10:24 AM]

Jake0748,

Language acquisition is one of my favourite subjects, and although I know more about spoken language acquisition than written language, it might be analogous.

Kids start understanding language quite early on--sort of the same way a pet will. There's a period--couldn't tell you exactly how long--where they lack the physical ability to enunciate letter sounds. Afterwards, there's a period where kids basically guess and check: people like Chomsky argue that there's essentially several hard-wired grammars in a child's brain, and they try out different grammar until they determine which one is appropriate to the language of their surroundings.

Probably they're still in this phase when they start learning to write; they just haven't worked out all the different rules, or what variations are acceptable.

I seem to remember doing similar things with 'S' words: I would do the s first, because they're fun to write, and then if I did it wrong I would suit the word to match.

[#14 posted by melissag , May 22, 2008 10:25 AM]

#9 - in my experience, yes, a lot of kids are somewhat dyslexic when first learning to write. I freaked out a bit about it with one of my kids, and did some reading. Its common, and is not a concern until they reach 9 or so.

[#15 posted by SamF , May 22, 2008 10:27 AM]

I wonder if these paintings were done on recycled paper with eco-friendly paint?

Oh, and Jake0748: Yeah, it's pretty common for kids just learning to write to get letters and/or words backwards. I have two who are writing now, and they both started out that way. Of course, for my oldest, this was at about 4 1/2, and not 6. But he's a genius (just like his daddy.) ;)

[#16 posted by lectroid , May 22, 2008 10:28 AM]

@ #4:

I asked the same question when my daughter was learning to write. According to her teacher, reversal is a common mistake in almost every child, and it comes from trying to reproduce a letter or a word as a whole, abstract picture, and simply getting mixed up. The same way you might accidently put the wrong arm under "The Thinker"'s chin if you were asked to reproduce a quick copy of it without reference. They remember the symbol 'is' as a picture with a line, a dot, and a squiggle, but aren't quite sure how the elements fit together.

and the 'creative spelling' is also a pretty regular phenomenon. Phonics-type education encourages mastering the act of writing before worrying about the niceties of spelling and punctuation. And it encourages vocabulary. If a 5 year old wants to use the world 'recycle' or 'everyone', I'm going to encourage them to do so without fretting about their lack of mastery over the tremendously arbitrary spelling of english.

[#17 posted by melissag , May 22, 2008 10:30 AM]

#6 having thought much about this... I think sitipro may be "it is pro", and the sentence is "my wish is for it is pro".

[#18 posted by Maurik , May 22, 2008 10:34 AM]

I can has bukits for resikl?

[#19 posted by azmanon , May 22, 2008 10:37 AM]

When I was a kid I wanted to save the planet as well. Then I learned about the great forces that resist progressive change at all costs (conservative governments, police and military forces, hedge fund managers, religions). Oh, what a wonderful world...

[#20 posted by scottfree , May 22, 2008 10:46 AM]

MelissaG,

I don't know. The picture seems to me like one fellow with a sword and shield, and another with a sword. Maybe tennis, given the line? Pro tennis?

but figured out the last one 'wrdxorusico' = world to recycle. No worries there: in some countries scrapping is the best living you're likely to get.

[#21 posted by holtt , May 22, 2008 10:46 AM]

When I was a kid I wanted to save the planet as well. Then I learned about the great forces that resist progressive change at all costs (conservative governments, police and military forces, hedge fund managers, religions). Oh, what a wonderful world..

You didn't grow up, you just got cynical :^)

[#22 posted by pendraphen , May 22, 2008 10:48 AM]

Man, if these kids watched Rocko's Modern Life, they'd know how to spell "recycle."

Come on, everyone sing along! "R-E-C-Y-C-L-E, recycle...."

[#23 posted by RevelryByNight , May 22, 2008 10:52 AM]

I think the fourth one is wishing for a "stripper pole"

[#24 posted by Bugs , May 22, 2008 11:03 AM]

@Jake:

This isn't my area at all, but my mum is a primary (elementary) school teacher and I've talked about this with her before.

A lot of modern literacy teaching, especially in the UK but in some parts of the US too, is based around "(synthetic) phonics". This system teaches kids to break words down into their constituent sounds (phonemes), then to try spelling each one separately to build up the whole word. The irregularities of English make this tricky, but it seems to work better than teaching kids through the more traditional combination of learning by rote and recognising the shapes of words.

Because they're thinking about the sound rather than the shape of words, kids who've been taught by this method can be especially prone to spelling things phonetically.

Letter reversals are very common in children up to a certain age. Interestingly, I've read (although can't provide a citation) that children all around the world tend to stop reversing their characters at roughly the same age irrespective of education, indicating that some developmental change in the brain could be responsible.

But yes, they do look like a dyslexic's output. My very dyslexic uncle once found some of his old schoolbooks in an attic. There were some crackers in there: one rather sweet story he'd written about about a ball game of some sort consistently misspelled "catch it" as "cat sh*t".

(Incidentally: if anyone out there still associates dyslexia with low intelligence, you're wrong. Anecdotes =/= evidence and all that, but my immediate family includes several strongly dyslexic people, all of whom have at least one academic postgraduate qualification. "Dyslexia" covers a wide range of symptoms, sharing the same root cause but not all exhibiting the best-known problems with reading and writing.)

[#25 posted by scottfree , May 22, 2008 11:16 AM]

revelbynight,

kind of in contrast to the one below: no whores? Given the picture, even if that's intended as a statement against violence against women, pretty mixed message there.

[#26 posted by schwal , May 22, 2008 11:21 AM]

I love the text messaging version of people (PPL) in the first one.

[#27 posted by Mikey Likes BoingBoing , May 22, 2008 11:41 AM]

Great post. I care a lot about kids, it's cranky, crotchety old people I have zero patience for.

[#28 posted by trr , May 22, 2008 11:48 AM]

"... learnt everything their parents taught them!"

I was thinking that these paintings were actually done by an adult. They all look like they were done by one person trying very hard to make spelling errors that 5 year olds would make. Guess I'm a little cynical.

[#29 posted by Camillo Miller , May 22, 2008 12:15 PM]

Put zome catz in there, and u has a lot of exampoles of a very famous Internet mem

[#30 posted by anthony , May 22, 2008 12:34 PM]

No. Dyslexia is a decoding problem. It doesn't have to do with a slow down or breakdown in physical brain development.

WIKI:
Evidence suggests that dyslexia results from differences in how the brain processes written and/or spoken language. Although dyslexia is the result of a neurological difference, it is not an intellectual disability. Dyslexia occurs at all levels of intelligence; sub-average, average, above average, and highly gifted.

(my wife is a special ed teacher)

[#31 posted by DataWhat , May 22, 2008 12:51 PM]

I think the fourth one is wishing for a "stripper pole"

WHEW! I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that.

[#32 posted by bardfinn , May 22, 2008 2:03 PM]

I have to go home and hug my four-year-old now.

*sniffffff*

[#33 posted by Evil Jim , May 22, 2008 3:12 PM]

Man, I'm used to reading poor spelling in forums & blogs but that was abysmal. And these are six-year-olds? What are they teaching these kids?

Still, their hearts are in the right place. I hope they remember these dreams when they are old enough to act on them.

[#34 posted by Antinous , May 22, 2008 3:19 PM]

What's with the hating on how five-year-olds spell? Maybe I'm wrong, but I always had the idea that children went to school to learn how to do things like spell. Are we just expecting them to come out of the womb able to read and write? They're children, not computers. You can't just install spell-check. You actually have to teach them, and it takes a while.

[#35 posted by Evil Jim , May 22, 2008 3:40 PM]

@ #35 Antinous
When I entered kindergarten in '82 I already knew my numbers & letters & could even read a little. It was a prerequisite. This was just at a standard public school. I may not have known how to spell "recycle" yet but I certainly knew that 'I' comes before 'S' in the word "is."

Perhaps school standards have changed since then. That would be very sad.

[#36 posted by arkizzle , May 22, 2008 3:42 PM]

TRR @ 29, that was my immediate thought too, they look like the kind of drawings an ad agency would labour over for days, getting them just-the-right-shade-of-naive for their upcoming "won't someone please think of the children" campaign.

[#37 posted by Tenn , May 22, 2008 3:42 PM]

When I entered kindergarten in '82 I already knew my numbers & letters & could even read a little. It was a prerequisite. This was just at a standard public school. I may not have known how to spell "recycle" yet but I certainly knew that 'I' comes before 'S' in the word "is."

Your modesty floors me.

[#38 posted by tp1024 , May 22, 2008 3:56 PM]

What is the easiest way to tell the native English speakers from non-native speakers? Easy: those with the worst spelling and grammar mistakes are the natives.

This is not tongue-in-cheek at all. I started learning this language at the age of ten and only got anywhere near what I would consider fluency in the last 5 years (that is, ten years later). I'm sorry to break the news on you, but your spelling sucks snails through a drinking straw. Not worrying about spelling mistakes is a bad policy to follow if you want to have pupils spelling words correctly later on. Sure, English speakers do have a hard time learning their language, but you should not assume that kids can't deal with strange rules and exceptions to them. Phonics are OK as an approach, but it seems like you deliberately do not tell your kids about the exceptions.

Worst of all, none of the kids who drew the pictures seemed to have had the idea to ask their supervisors for the proper spelling of the words they wished to write. Nor did the supervisors themselves seem to have offered help and I doubt they even thought about telling them about the proper spelling of the words, finding it oooh so cuuute how they spelled out that garbage on their pictures.

So if those kids are encouraged to write just about whatever they want without any guidance as to whether or not their writing is even recognizable as English words - well, what do you expect? Oh yeah, probably nothing at all. Because kids are too dumb to learn the complicated rules of English spelling. Right?

Sorry, this has put me in a bad mood, because people generally underestimate the intellectual capacity of non adults. If kids can learn how to speak Chinese, if kids can learn to use the OLPC much quicker than any adult can, then they can learn something as trivial as English spelling just as well. If only they'd be taught how to do it properly (that has nothing to do with rote memorization) and not encouraged to write garbage.

[#39 posted by Antinous , May 22, 2008 3:57 PM]

I graduated from high school in 1975 and 5 - 10% of my graduating class couldn't spell much better than that. And I went to one of the the top 100 public high schools in the US.

The assumption that children should be ready to take their SATs by age ten is, as far as I'm concerned, a disaster. The US has really adopted the Asian model of pushing kids hard and fast into academics. Conversely, some European countries start schooling at age six and spend the first year or two focusing on social skills rather than academic learning. By the time they graduate from high school, they're a hell of a lot better educated than most American high school students. And they're much better socialized.

[#40 posted by Cefeida , May 22, 2008 4:09 PM]

TP1024, it's not just the case for native English speakers. I've observed it among Spaniards, Poles, the French...

Me, I knew how to read at age three. On the other hand, I never managed to learn basic maths. At all.

As to the similar style of the wishes in those drawings, keep in mind kids have a tendency to copy off each other. If one kid had the idea to wish for recycling, and called it out loud, a bunch of others would probably decide that was their most important wish, too.

[#41 posted by guavajellyfish , May 22, 2008 4:43 PM]

Phonics teaches children to read very slowly.

[#42 posted by anthony , May 22, 2008 7:01 PM]

That writing is in line and grade appropriate for first graders as far as I can tell. You all should revisit your childhood writing efforts- I think you may be exaggerating a bit.

And yes, standardized, NCLB fueled test anxiety is present in first grade now.

[#43 posted by pjcamp , May 22, 2008 7:38 PM]

I wish every child was closed captioned.

[#44 posted by ZippySpincycle , May 22, 2008 9:47 PM]

Clearly these idiot children should all be punished, and perhaps publicly shamed, for their contemptible failures. And don't even get me started on the art! Could someone please explain perspective to these cretins?

[#45 posted by BeyondThePale , May 23, 2008 4:14 AM]

I want to vomit. Anyone remember Maddox grading children's pics? He gave them all an F.

How directed by a teacher or what they were learning that day were these kids' wishes?

I am concerned about how bad their spelling is (was their teacher not there to help direct that?) especially as some have used recognisable internet/texting short-hand like 'PPL' for people. Most of the 'wishes' are gobbledygook!

[#46 posted by viveka , May 23, 2008 4:26 AM]

Hello, people with random ideas about how children learn, based on your own sample size of one. Guess what? There is a mature body of knowledge on developmental learning, and you are spouting absolute garbage. Complaining that five-year-olds cannot spell "people" and yet are being permitted to write complete sentences is just daft. What do you want from them? English orthography is pretty much random; they will pick it up in due course. If you were spelling perfectly when you were five then congratulations, you have proved that early spelling ability does not predict a capacity to reason clearly in adulthood.

[#47 posted by unsafe at any speed , May 23, 2008 4:38 AM]

No more war and recycle .. simple.

Its a shame, soon they will have to learn how complicated and messy it really is.

[#48 posted by Anonymous , May 23, 2008 6:38 AM]

I remember writing my name mirrored as a kid. Not just backwards, but actually mirrored, letters and all.

I seem to recall that for a long time this was the only word I couldn't write the right way. I guess it was just some sort of an image to me, a symbol for "me" or something, not a word composed of individual letters like the others.

[#49 posted by insomma , May 23, 2008 7:28 AM]

Check out the third one. Pretty interesting representation of the natural water cycle, with water, clouds and plants. Also it appears he's taking glass recycling pretty literally- it's a pair of eye-glasses being directed to the recycling symbol! I think the object below it could be a tire (influence of a recycled-materials playground?) Anyway,... I love kids drawings.

[#50 posted by ZippySpincycle , May 23, 2008 9:23 AM]

Wouldn't it be more useful to teach children how to mock other people's creative efforts? That's where most modern discourse is headed anyway. If you can't say anything nice, say it on a blog.

[#51 posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator , May 23, 2008 9:30 AM]

Jake @9: to add my bit to the answers to your question: yes, it's normal. The first time I remember writing, it was boustrophedon. I was playing with a big cardboard box, and teaching myself letter forms by copying some text on the side of the box into the blank space below it. I still remember dropping down one line when I ran out of room and writing my second line right-to-left, and the third line left-to-right. The text I was copying was all on one line. I think I'd already picked up the idea that it was to be read left-to-right, but somehow that didn't extend to the letters I was writing. I vaguely remember thinking it was sufficient if the letters that were next to each other in the original were still next to each other in my copy.

The spelling default got switched on one day when I was in second grade. My elder sister and her friends were talking about their spelling list for that week, I paused to think about whether I could spell their words, and it came to me in a blink that I could spell any word I'd ever read and understood. That's not abnormal if you're the kind of kid who wins spelling bees and grows up to be a copyeditor: the ability kicks in when you're seven or eight.

The people in this thread who are harrumphing about little kids learning to spell are wrong. Some of those kids will be very good spellers in future, but their full ability probably won't have kicked in yet. Some of them will never be able to spell accurately in English without outside help, so it's important for them to learn to be self-confident about their other language skills. The largest single group will never win national spelling bees, but if they work on their spelling, it'll get better. The higher-scoring members of the third group are the ones most likely to be self-righteous about spelling, because they know that when they put work into learning to spell, they succeeded.

Bugs @24, I suspect that watershed where kids stop reversing letters is the same point at which proto-copyeditors have the spelling thing kick in.

I've worked with too many whip-smart dyslexics to think it's anything but an input/output written language processing problem. For example, Steven Brust is markedly dyslexic, and Samuel R. Delany is severely dyslexic. Nobody would ever say they're stupid.

WWEBoing @27:

Only when they get to college and have their minds numbed do they start wanting huge, stupid things like "world peace" or "balance in nature." Stupid because the solutions in pursuit of those goals ALWAYS make things worse.

If that were true, statistically speaking it would be an astonishingly consistent result.

TRR @29: you're a whole lot cynical, and I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Adults trying to make kid-style spelling errors make different errors. Those are genuine little-kid errors, which is why they're so alien to us.

Evil Jim @34, 36: they're teaching them to read, write, paint, and generally express themselves. They're doing just fine. You were verbally precocious.

TP1024 @39, I congratulate you on your mastery of English, but drilling first-graders in spelling would be a poor use of everyone's time. When you were ten, you were well past the watershed where orthography becomes real.

Antinous @40: in the US, the single biggest predictor of success is family environment and parental involvement. Next biggest is student to teacher ratio. Nothing else comes close. Human interaction matters a lot more than standardized tests.

BeyondThePale @46, please tell me that was a joke that misfired.

[#52 posted by Lexica , May 23, 2008 10:45 AM]

Good grief. I almost feel like I ought to post an example of my own drawings from age 5 side by side with my various academic achievements since then as evidence that the one does not predict the other.

The people who are criticizing these kids for their spelling and handwriting ability need to back the heck off. They're five years old. They're in kindergarten. They can't even color inside the lines consistently yet. And you expect them to correctly reproduce a set of abstract visual representations of sound, many of which are confoundingly similar to each other, and to be able to spell correctly in English, a language whose spelling is notoriously irregular and challenging? Yeesh.

[#53 posted by Nelson.C , May 23, 2008 11:14 AM]

Man, and I bet Cory thinks his writing gets savaged in boingboing comments! Some BB commenters won't even be nice (or realistic) about first-graders. What a miserable bunch!

[#54 posted by Jake0748 , May 23, 2008 11:19 AM]

Everyone who answered my original post @9, thanks much, I love this place.

I guess I've always been kind of fascinated by early development of reading/writing/verbal skills, dyslexia and such. I like looking at little kids drawings and writings and imagining what's happening in their brains and how and why.
My brother and I are two years apart, I'd say we probably have about the same IQ, but we've developed differently. I took to reading immediately, am a champ speller (though you wouldn't know it by looking at some of my comments here), am good at figuring out tentative definitions of words I don't know, both English and foreign. And I'd die if I didn't have a book to read close at hand.

My bro took much longer in learning to read confidently, has continuing problems with dyslexia, hates to write and reads maybe 4 or 5 books a year. We went to the same schools, had many of the same teachers and of course shared the same home environment. So I've always wondered what IS it that causes the difference. Guess I'll never really know, but thinking about it is fascinating.

[#55 posted by Jake0748 , May 23, 2008 11:25 AM]

Boustrophedon - SWEET! Best "word of the day" I've had in a long time.

Teresa, expect an apple on your desk tomorrow morning. :D

[#56 posted by nuraskye , June 10, 2008 1:43 PM]

That is pretty freakin' awesome. and I know that this is really random, but Those are some kick ass kids!