This is a blog for early childhood teachers looking for ways to expand and enrich play and learning in and around their sand and water tables with easy-to-make, low-cost apparatus. It may also be of interest for anyone who appreciates children's messy play.
About Me
- Tom Bedard
- Early childhood education has been my life for over 40 years. I have taught all age groups from infants to 5-year-olds. I was a director for five years in the 1980s, but I returned to the classroom 22 years ago. My passion is watching the ways children explore and discover their world. In the classroom, everything starts with the reciprocal relationships between adults and children and between the children themselves. With that in mind, I plan and set up activities. But that is just the beginning. What actually happens is a flow that includes my efforts to invite, respond and support children's interface with those activities and with others in the room. Oh yeh, and along the way, the children change the activities to suit their own inventiveness and creativity. Now the processes become reciprocal with the children doing the inviting, responding and supporting. Young children are the best learners and teachers. I am truly fortunate to be a part of their journey.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
CLOSED CARDBOARD CHUTES - EXPERIMENTATION
In June I will be traveling for three weeks to the UK and the Netherlands to do several presentations on sand and water play. At this point in time, I am making preparations for that trip. Because it takes me so long to do an original post, I am revisiting some earlier posts. The post I would like to revisit this week is from January 26, 2011. It directly follows last week's post that described how to make Closed Chutes. This post includes one of my favorite pictures. It is the second picture from the end of the post in which a child has placed a funnel in a hole in one of the chutes and watches the sand flow he has created. Why is it a favorite? Because it shows that a simple action on an apparatus by a child changes his view of the physical world and how it works. And the thing is, you do not even need to see the child's face to get a sense of his focus.
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