Traces

I have been thinking a lot about traces lately.  I started out by thinking about the types of traces children leave in the classroom.  Of course since this is a blog about sand and water tables, I went looking for traces there.  I specifically looked at traces at the sand table that was filled with Jurassic Sand because I had a vivid memory of at least two examples of traces children had left.

In the first example, a child sprinkled sand onto the table covering with holes apparatus and used her fingers to make make lines and squiggles.   

 

In the second example, a child traced the outline of her hand in the sand that had spilled on the floor.

Both of these examples are static traces that the children left in the classroom as they played.  That got me wondering what were the invisible traces the children conjured up that led to these fleeting impressions?  And then how did these old traces combine with these just-produced traces?  Is this what constitutes learning?

What about experiences that do not leave any physical trace?  Are there still traces of their experiences that are stored in the body?  

I started looking for pictures that captured the flow of children's experiences, again with the Jurassic Sand.  I found a wide variety of images of children attending to how the sand flowed through their hands and various implements.  These were moments in time that they created.

A child slowly released sand in a stream from her right hand onto the back of her left hand.

A child used the scoop with a small hole in the bottom to create a fine stream she distributed back into the table.  (If you look at the stream coming from the bottom of the scoop, you can see the stream is bent because she was moving the scoop over the table.  The picture itself captured a slightly more complex trace of movement.

A child used a cup to create a stream of sand into a funnel which was then transformed by a funnel into another stream of sand.

A child scooped sand into a minnow net which dispersed the sand into a much broader stream. 

I am sure the children do not carry the full memory of these experiences with the sand.  But what are the traces of their experiences that became physical, mental and emotional memories from which to draw upon as they continue to encounter and make sense of the world around them? 

Some of the trace memories necessarily revolve around a growing familiarity of physical properties of the materials they employed in their operations.  Could there also have been trace memories of agency?  Will the children remember they were given license to feed their curiosity, to ask questions, to experiment?  What role do emotional trace memories such as mastery and joy play in helping children inhabit and navigate the world?

P.S. As I edited the draft of my post, I realized that I chose the first two images because I had two specific memories of children creating trace images.  I doubt that they remembered the traces they created, but why did I?  Interestingly, I used those traces to feed my curiosity about how children make sense of the world.  As I fed that curiosity, my inquiry on traces morphed into a different question about traces.  It is easy to grasp a static trace image, but is it possible to find more dynamic trace images of children's operations?  That eventually got me wondering about trace memories that are not just physical and mental, but also emotional.   I will leave you with that to make sense of it as you will.  Hopefully I have left enough traces.