Mitzvah Island Episode 4

i loved it Reply

My little sis loves it! Reply

my baby sis loves it Reply

it's good but babish Reply

WE FOUND THE TORAH!!!!!! Reply

a little babyish but fun Reply

Quite fun, but its not very exiting Reply

Love it My kids love this and learn so much from it! Well done! Absolutely no complaints! Reply

soooooo cut:) My sister shayna says that she loves it. Her best part was the torah song:) Reply

Too cute! Reply

it's so good my cousin chaya mushka loves it! Reply

One more learning principle Just to add a bit more perspective to the discussion re: early childhood learning: verbal mediation is a 3rd principle, one that is powerful throughout life. Words can and do mediate our thoughts & actions. Before Shabbos I heard two young children spontaneously singing the Mitzvah Island song with all the different verses about tzedakah, finding our friends, challas, etc. The children's singing guided their thoughts & ultimately their actions, leading them to look for tzedaka, etc.And when they went on to sing "We found the Torah..."...followed by " let's go find a Torah book...", it's not a surprise what those words led them to ask for. Then it was our turn to follow-thru, of course. Absolutely beautiful. Reply

kudos I compliment this brilliant series & the viewer's concern. 2 early learning concepts are key. Children do learn from concrete interactions but pre-schoolers also benefit from concrete-like relate-able pictures. This series is well designed to depict events at that middle stage of “concrete” pictures. Teachers & family will accompany this learning with actual concrete experiences. Like any excellent learning tool, this series is part of the learning strategy, not the whole. It is brilliant pre- & post-learning for the young , & the repetition/songs & final re-cap make it an extraordinary tool for Torah & cognition itself, thus enabling continued learning. The 2nd concept is Reciprocal Learning in which 1 person ( teacher, chavrusa, or even video character) & a learner(s) take turns interacting. Questioning, clarifying, summarizing, predicting yield huge learning thru dialog or simple conversational asking/answering. Kudos to this creative, age-appropriate series. Reply

reply to question Some educational philosophies (like Montessori) believe that the concrete has to come first before the imaginary. They would think that this interaction with the computer is not good. Other philosophies would say that the imagination is ok at any stage. From my limited experience as a teacher of quite young (1-3 year olds) I would say that they would love this and that it would be like having a teacher in the room. A teacher would ask these sort of questions and hopefully give all the repetition. Unfortunately, a lot of teachers don't have the patience to do this amount of repetition, so the video could actually do a better job of reinforcing a concept than a live teacher does. Usually when children see a video they interact with it anyway, so what does it matter if the interaction is two sided. I would think it was a better idea than having the child as an observer. This way they get to be a participant in the whole story. Reply

question the videos are very cute and my kids love them. here is the question: by the video being interactive and talking to the kids and the kids responding etc. isn't it blurring the distinction that a kid naturally has between machines and humans? is this a healthy thing? what do professional and experienced educators say about this? I would really like to know My gut instinct is that the distinction between human and machines, needs to be clear and vivid and should not be tampered with, especially for children. but what do I know? I am bringing it up here, to start a mature discussion about this question, which has other ramifications as well... Reply