WHY BUILD PART 4

This month I have been revisiting posts from two years ago after another early childhood professional asked me the question: Why do I build?  I have revisited them because they will also help me prepare for the 15th Annual Launching into Literacy and Math Conference in Madison, Wisconsin at Madison College(MATC Truax) this next weekend.  This fourth and final repost proposes that children need space and time to play on their own.  By building the apparatus for the table, I am providing those two conditions for the children in my classroom. 

Saturday, September 29, 2012

SENSORY APPARATUS PART IV

I was asked last spring by another early childhood professional why do I build apparatus for the sensory table. That question was a lot more thought-provoking than I had anticipated.  I have been mulling over my answer here and here and here.  

In the first post, I stated that children demonstrated early on for me their need to transport sand out of the sensory table.  I began to build apparatus so children could continue to find ways to constructively transport.  An added benefit was that the children, given the chance to work constructively, demonstrated their ability to regulate their own behavior.  In the second post, I said that children recreated operations such as digging and pouring that harken back to a time when our very survival depended on such operations. I build apparatus so children can recreate those fundamental operations.  In the third post, I stated that children create a dialogue with spaces.   It follows that if I offer the children intriguing spaces by way of building an apparatus, they will create intriguing dialogues with those spaces.

This summer I read---and reread---a monograph entitled: Children's right to play.  It was written by Stuart Lester and Wendy Russell for the Bernard van Leer Foundation in December 2010.  Their starting point is Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Right of the Child.  In that article, they specifically cite the right of the child to engage in play. For them it is a necessity of life for children.  It is not a vehicle adults use to teach children about the world, nor is it a way to make academics palatable to children.  It is an activity undertaken for its own sake that is wholly owned by the children.

From their literature review of the research, they go so far as to say children need to engage in play for their very survival and well-being.  They say: "Children's play can be seen as a self-protecting process that offers the possibilities to enhance adaptive capabilities and resilience. ... Play acts across several adaptive systems to contribute to health, well-being and resilience. These include: pleasure and enjoyment; emotion regulation; stress response systems; attachments; and learning and creativity."

At one point in the paper, they reference a comment by Brian Sutton-Smith.  The comment states: "Play prepares you for more play, and more play offers a greater satisfaction in being alive."

Take a look at the following pictures from the sensory table to see if the children exude that "greater satisfaction in being alive."

According to the authors, the role of an adult is to provide the space and time for children to play---not to directly manage it.  

Watch the video below.  The quality of the video is poor, but the message it communicates is rich.   

WHAT ARE THEY DOING? from Thomas Bedard on Vimeo.

Do you know what they were doing?  They are burying jewels, their treasure.  That is not important, though.  The important thing is that seven children ages 2 to 5 are creating an activity of their own choosing that has an immediate meaning for them. There are no adults directing or managing this activity. Notice, even though there are no adults around, they are still working feverishly to complete a task that takes a whole lot of agreement and a whole lot of accommodation and a whole lot of negotiation and a whole lot of cooperation.  The adult role in the activity---and why I build---is to set up the space and then to provide the time for the children to create their own, wholly-owned activity.

There is one final reason why I build: building apparatus is my play.

Thank you for indulging me with these reposts.  I will be taking a week off from blogging because of travel but will be back in two weeks to play some more.

WHY BUILD PART 3

In the next month, I will be doing two conference presentations.   Because it takes me a long time to finish an original post, I will repost a few posts over the next few weeks that I wrote more than two years ago after another early childhood professional asked me the question: Why do I build?  I revisit them because they will also help me prepare for the second conference, which is a keynote presentation for the 15th Annual Launching into Literacy and Math Conference in Madison, Wisconsin at Madison College(MATC Truax) on February 7th.  This third repost emerges from discussions from a Reggio-inspired book study that examined how children create dialogue with and meaning from spaces they explore and inhabit.

Friday, September 21, 2012

I was asked last spring by another early childhood professional why do I build apparatus for the sensory table.  That question was a lot more thought provoking than I had anticipated.  I have been mulling over the answer here and here.  In the the first post, I stated that early in my career children demonstrated their need to transport what was in the sensory table out of the table.  I began to build apparatus so children could continually find ways to constructively transport.  An added benefit was that the children, given the chance to transport constructively, demonstrated an ability to regulate their own behavior.  In the second post, I said that children created and recreated operations such as digging and pouring that harken back to a time when our survival as a species depended on such operations. I postulated that those fundamental/primal operations are in our DNA and need to be expressed.

This summer, I started to participate in a book study through the  Reggio-Inspired Network of Minnesota.  The book study used the Reggio publication entitled: dialogues with places.  The book examines how the children use all their senses and their whole bodies to investigate space and reflects on how children subsequently make meaning of a place through those investigations. Because their investigations were always new and fresh, it was not unusual for them to pick up on features such as holes in the ceiling or cracks in the floor that adults simply ignore. For the children, though, those were important features to animate.  Those were important features that were "invitations" for the children to enter into a dialogue with the place and to ultimately create meaning.

For me, the sensory table is such a place.  It is a place in which children enter into a dialogue with the apparatus.  It is a place in which children find those "cracks" and "holes" from which they ultimately create meaning.  It is a place in which they use all their senses and their whole body to investigate.

They investigate spaces with their eyes.

  

 With their hands

With their arms

Even if the child cannot see the space he is exploring

And even through barriers

They investigate spaces with their heads

With their heads and torsos

With their whole body by climbing on

Or into

Or even lying next to

And they will always find that feature an adult would rarely notice

In the Reggio book, places have "form, energy, and rhythm."  At the sensory table, each apparatus has the same.  The form, energy, and rhythm that emerge will look different as each child---alone and with others---creates a dialogue with the apparatus.  That is exciting and creates multiple opportunities to make meaning out of space. Since children are master explorers, there is no end to the process.  So I continue to build apparatus for the children to investigate and make meaning out of new and intriguing spaces.
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WHY BUILD PART 2

In the next month, I will be doing two conference presentations.   Because it takes me a long time to finish an original post, I will repost a few posts over the next few weeks that I wrote more than two years ago after another early childhood professional asked me the question: Why do I build?  I revisit them because they will also help me prepare for the second conference, which is a keynote presentation for the 15th Annual Launching into Literacy and Math Conference in Madison, Wisconsin at Madison College(MATC Truax) on February 7th.  This second repost makes the case for children's operations that emerge at the sensory table that must be actualized by the children.  

Last week I started to answer the following question another early childhood professional posed to me: Why do I build apparatus for the sand and water table?  I gave two reasons in that post.  One was, when a bucket was serendipitously placed next to the table, children demonstrated their need to transport and to do it constructively by appropriating the bucket for their own purposes. The second reason was, by appropriating the bucket for their own purposes, they demonstrated their ability to manage their own behavior with minimal guidance or participation on my part.

The picture below illustrates both points well.  First, the children are transporting the water into the bucket.  Second, they are filling the bucket as full as they can without spilling.

  Flood or no flood?

Another reason to build surfaced from reflections on a book I read this summer: a child's work; the IMPORTANCE of FANTASY PLAY by Vivian Gussin Paley.   In the book, Paley talks about fantasy play as the children's agenda that spontaneously emerges between all the teacher-planned activities and projects.  She goes so far as to say fantasy play must come out.  Her first teacher told the undergraduates that children in the nursery school where they were observing were the only age group that was constantly busy making their own work assignments.  Because Paley provides the time and space and respect for children's fantasy play, she sees the children creating and recreating dramatic themes that span human history and that are reflected in the great works of literature and drama.  She says: "Words, words, words, where do they all come from?  It sounds like the poetry of a child's soul, nothing less, but the children are imagining vivid drama that must be acted out." (p. 32)

After reading the book, I began to construct a parallel between fantasy play and sand and water play. All the operations the children recreate in and around the sensory table span human history. I have often wondered why children dig, pour, fill and transport as soon as they they get to the sand and water table. Maybe the children are recreating those operations from a time when they were important to our very survival as a species.   Not only are they recreating those primary operations, but they are using contemporary implements to create new and novel operations. Those elemental operations must come out.  (Additionally, those operations around the sensory table often lead to a good deal of fantasy play, especially with the older children.)

Below is just a sampling of those operations.  Some operations involve just the hands and arms, and others use various implements.  Some are straight forward and simple, and some are more complex.

After reading Paley's book, I theorize that I build apparatus at the sensory table to create time and space and respect for the children to actualize those fundamental operations that must come out.

WHY BUILD?

In the next month, I will be doing two conference presentations.   Because it takes me a long time to finish an original post, I will repost a few posts over the next few weeks that I wrote more than two years ago after another early childhood professional asked me the question: Why do I build?  I revisit them because they will also help me prepare for the second conference, which is a keynote presentation for the 15th Annual Launching into Literacy and Math Conference in Madison, Wisconsin at Madison College(MATC Truax) on February 7th.  This first repost recounts a transformation in my practice all because of a recycled five-gallon bucket.  

Saturday, September 8, 2012

WHY APPARATUS FOR THE SENSORY TABLE?

This past June, another early childhood professional asked me: "Why do you build apparatus for the sensory table?"  Even though I have been doing it for over 23 years, I did not have good answer. I have been thinking a lot about that question ever since.

At this point, my answer harkens back to the second post of this blog from July, 2010.  The post was about the lowly 5-gallon pail that you see below.

A mother, who worked at a fast food restaurant, brought in this dill pickle pail and asked me if I could use it.  Maybe she thought since I had such a small room I could use it for storage. Instead---and because I had no place to store it---I put it near the sand table.  What happened next was transformative for my practice as an early childhood teacher.

You can read the first transformation in the post about the 5-gallon pail referenced above.  The gist of the post is that the children use the pail to transport in a constructive way (Axiom #1 in the right hand column).  As a consequence, my communication with the children becomes much more positive about their operations of transporting the medium out of the sand and water table.  In other words, instead of always saying: "No,! No dumping on the floor", I can now say: "Put it in the bucket."  That positive communication completely changes the tenor of my communication with the children at the table.

Something else happened in relation to the pail that transformed my practice.  I no longer felt like I had to micromanage the children around the table.  Rather, I began to see the children as capable of managing their own actions at the table.  Instead of managing, I was able to observe.  By taking the time to observe, I started to notice how the children were able to manage even more of their own actions.  This whole process is now a virtuous circle that carries the day throughout the classroom.  

That may seem like a lowly bucket, but it started it all.  The bucket afforded a chance for the children to figure out a constructive way to do what they needed to do: transport.  Since then, almost every apparatus incorporates opportunities for children to discover new and constructive ways to transport.  

Though I have not answered the question to my full satisfaction, it will do for now.  And I will keep building.

CLASSROOM PHOTO OF THE YEAR

Last year I wrote a post I called My Classroom Picture of the Year.  One of the interesting aspects of that post was that it was taken in a different part of the room from the sand and water table area and presented a building project, not sand or water play.  This year, I am also posting a picture of a building project, but for this picture the building takes place next to the sensory table. Again, though, it has little to do with sand or water play.  It is a very simple picture of a child building a modest structure with the loose parts that are provisioned on shelves next to the sand table.  I call it: The Wondrous in the Everyday.

Why is this my classroom picture of the year?  The reason is that this picture represents so many layers of thought and concentration by this child.  He has failed to balance his structure once, but tries a second time to see if it will stand.  The picture captures the moment he cautiously lets go to see if it will stand this second time. You can see his whole body is poised in expectation. He is also gauging the structure's stability moment by moment as he lets go.   The amount of concentration is immediate, fluid and total.

Why did the child take these mundane loose parts---a plastic coffee container, a cardboard tube, a plastic measuring cup---and decide to build a structure?   Whatever the reason, it was quite generative.  Over the course of four weeks this child continued to build using a small variety of loose parts in multiple attempts to build various balanced structures.  Here is a sampling.

Is the structure seen in My Classroom Picture of the Year beautiful?  To be honest, not particularly.  That is not the type of beauty this classroom picture represents.  Rather, it represents a concrete idea that a child has the capacity to continually see possibilities is these most ordinary of materials.  At first it may be serendipity, but can and does become intentional with causation.  That's a different kind of beauty, a beauty that comes from deep inside and is able to be expressed with the found materials on hand in a highly individual way.

Here is the picture of the child showing his reaction to his success after his second attempt at balancing the structure.

This last picture would not be possible with out the first picture, my picture of the year.  That picture is really about how the mundane and ordinary are transformed into magic in a child's hands everyday in the classroom.

Happy New Year and and may you be lucky enough to celebrate the many wonders that happen every day in your classroom.

P.S. If you are interested in more context for this set of pictures, I wrote about this child's original building in a post called Agency.  What you will also find in that post is the mother's perspective and his own reactions to seeing himself build in a couple videos I took of him making his balancing structures.