TRAINING IN THE UK

I have finished my training tour in the UK.  I must say that I have gotten a little tired of hearing myself talk.  What I did not get tired of was all the great conversations I had with a variety of practitioners. The other thing I never grew tired of was watching the building process of others unfold and witnessing  their inventiveness and creativity.

All of the talks and workshops started with an opportunity to review documentation highlighting different constructions.

The next part of any presentation was the talk and the PowerPoint.  In Wales, I was a keynote with Elizabeth Jarman at their conference called The Potential of Provision.

Half of the presentations in the UK also included actual building where the practitioners could try to create their own structures. That was when the real fun began.  And it always began with gathering the materials and discussing the possibilities.

That takes a lot of communication and collaboration.  Those processes, though, do not stop once the building begins.  Those processes take on immediate significance as the groups tried to create a shared construction.

For some it was the first time using a power tool.

For others, it was not.

Needless to say, they was always a bit of fun.

In the end, no two structures were the same.

And so many of the structures had totally unique elements as a result of the creativity of the builders themselves.

Now that the UK tour is over, I have begun to think about the sustainability of the building process for the participants.  I know from over 25 years of building experience that some of the creations will die a quick death once the children have at them.  When that happens, what will be the response of their creators?  Will it be a once-and-done?  "Oh, I have tried that and it did not work." Or will it be an opportunity to learn a bit about the construction and materials and how the children approach them so the building process can be improved upon?  Or will it be an opportunity to bring the children into the process?  And when all is said and done, what factors will encourage continued building?  Will it be availability of resources?  Will it be support and encouragement of colleagues?  Will it be the children and their needs?  What will it be?

Thank you UK practitioners who attended the talks and workshops.  It was brilliant; you were brilliant.

IN THE HOTEL IN EDINBURGH

I did not think that I would do any original building posts on my trip to the UK and the Netherlands. I did a building workshop up in Aberdeenshire and watched the participants build things using the materials provided and their imagination.  No two were alike.

They inspired me.  I ended up taking some of the left over materials so I could make an apparatus or two to show early years practitioners in Edinburgh the following day.  When I reached Edinburgh, I got settled and took the materials I acquired in Aberdeenshire to build an apparatus or two.  What else does one do in Edinburgh?

I began with two butter boxes side-by-side.  If I wanted to be real simple I could just tape the two together and I would have two spaces for children to pour into and take out of.

But there was a third box that I wanted to put on top of the two boxes.  To do that I had to create a ledge or platform to put it on.  To do that I planned to insert one box partially inside the other.  I had to cut all the flaps off one box, but keep the flaps on the other.

The next step was to cut slits on two sides and the bottom of the box that still had the flaps and then insert that box into the other.

The two boxes are taped together and the flaps folded over to make a platform for the third box to go on top.  It is a smaller box with a hole cut out of the bottom to attach it to the structure.

It is a simple structure, but an interesting structure that has an element I have never used in my building before. By combining the two boxes in the way outlined above, a chamber is created under the little box on top.  When children pour sand into the top, it drops down into the chamber. On one side there is an outlet, but the other side of the chamber is closed.  That way, when children begin to fill the side with no outlet, they start to experience volume at an elemental level.

Here is a picture of the finished apparatus.  Mind you, it is not fully duct taped, nor has it been tested   by my expert R&D crew back in the USA.  It will be on the testing block come Fall when classes start up again.

P. S.  I would have loved to get out the hotel in Edinburgh to see the sites, but on the way in I popped a tire on a sharp curb.  I was not going to go driving around the city after that.  Building in the hotel room was good therapy for me.

P.P.S.  If you want to see how someone is using the ideas in this blog in a really unique way, check out Juliet Robertson's latest post at Creative Star Learning called: The "Sensori" Water Station.  I am blow away by her ideas.  They are much better than the piddly little box structure in this post.

THE NORTH SEA

What does the North Sea have to do with Sand and Water Tables?

This blog, Sand and Water Tables, has brought me to the North Sea.  I am in Aberdeen Scotland for a talk and a workshop on sand and water play to early childhood practitioners on Saturday, June 14th.  From there, I head to Edinburgh, Newcastle, Birmingham, Derby, Bournemouth, Odstock, Andover, Cwmbran, and Newport before catching a ferry to the Netherlands to do a workshop in Rotterdam.

How does a journey like this come together?  It does not happen alone.  For well over two years I watched to see where people were coming from when they visited the blog.  I especially remember mapping all the places in the UK.  I also remember thinking that it would be quite exciting to try to do a tour of the UK.

About a year and a half ago, I did a silly thing.  I mentioned the idea via email to three people I knew who followed my blog.  Julia Robertson of Creative Star Learning, Peter Ellse of Cosy and Nancy Adamson of Odstock Day Nursery all said yes, come to the UK and we will help.  I must say that Juliet was especially encouraging.  That was enough for me to put out the word that I would come, so here I am.

(By the way, Juliet's book Dirty Teaching has just been published and is available on Amazon in the UK.  The book is written for practitioners who want to teach outside.  It is aimed at the primary grades, but has plenty of insight for all teachers at all levels.  You really should check it out and have it in your library.)

I was talking to my colleague and mentor, Lani Shapiro, before the trip.  I expressed a lot of apprehension and excitement about this endeavor.  She uses the analogy which I quite like.  I am like a child going to a new playground.  Like that child, I am not sure of the rules and conventions of the new playground and hope the new players are willing to accept me and to play along.

I have 13 presentations is 18 days.  I hope to reflect on the trip, but it may be hit and miss until I get back to the States.

The journey to the new playground begins.

P.S.  I wrote this a couple of days ago.  I now have a presentation and a workshop under my belt. I can tell you that there was no need to worry about the players in this new playground.  They were welcoming and kind and gracious beyond description.  Thank you players from Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.  If the rest of the new playgrounds are anything like this one, I am in for a treat.  I need to give a special thank you to Heather Smith who arranged the first gig in Aberdeen at King's College and took the time to ferry me around and show me some of the sights.  I need a to give an extra special thanks to Juliet who has taken an inordinate amount of time out of her busy schedule to talk for hours and exchange thoughts, ideas and experiences both on a professional and personal level.

BOXES IN BOXES - BRIDGE REVISITED

Next week at this time I will be in the Scotland at the beginning of three weeks of presentations in the UK and the Netherlands 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 May 19th, 2011 called Boxes in Boxes - Bridge.  This is an interesting apparatus because it is not in the table.  Rather it is attached to the table and incorporates unique and intriguing spaces over, under, around and in the apparatus itself. 

I like to combine cardboard boxes to make an apparatus.  Boxes can be put together in any number of ways.  This year I took a big box that held patio furniture that I picked up at a big hardware store and combined it with a IMac box that was lying around the school.  What I came up with was what I call THE BRIDGE because one box bridges a larger box with the sensory table.

One end of the bridging box is supported by the lip of the sensory table.  There is also an opening where the box and the table meet to allow children to put corn in or scoop it out. The other end of the box is embedded in the larger, furniture box. 

The apparatus gains its character when I start to cut the holes.  I think it is important to cut holes on all levels of various sizes.  You can read more about what I think is the significance of holes here. 

Notice that there are holes on the top of both boxes.  Going down, there is two openings facing the camera.  Inside, you can see another window that connects the two boxes.  There are four more outside holes and one inside hole.  By taping the boxes together at the windows, I get a sturdy structure.  I also duct tape all the windows to prevent paper cuts.

Did you notice the plain cardboard patch in the front?  That used to be a window, but when the children started to pour the corn into the top of the apparatus, way too much came out that hole onto the floor.  Cardboard holes are easy to patch with cardboard and duct tape.

The fun begins when the children explore the holes.  From the top.

                                           

To the bottom

And everywhere in-between.

                                     

The apparatus is constructed in such a way that there are also spaces and holes to explore inside the boxes.

Below the child is moving the corn with the spoon out of the "bridge" box into the sensory table. Pushing the corn out of the box from above is a much different operation than pouring corn into the box.

Below a child is transferring corn from one box to another via a small hole that connects the chambers of the two boxes.  There is a bigger hole right above it, but the smaller one is interesting because it is even with the bottom level of the bridge box so all a child has to do is push the corn in the hole.

I included a new utensil to use with this apparatus: a minnow net.  Minnow nets added a whole new dimension to transferring the corn.  Watch.

Minnow net scooping and pouring from Thomas Bedard on Vimeo.

Filling the nets, which are flexible and bulge, is so much different than filling other containers with rigid sides.  In addition, trying to pour the corn out of the nets provided an extra challenge with different children figuring out different solutions to getting all the corn out of the net.

I want to leave you with a short, 8-second video that shows how one child animates his "corn machine."

Corn machine from Thomas Bedard on Vimeo.

Let me tell you what is not on the video.  The side of the Apple box we don't see has a picture of a computer on it.  Daniel first pushes a couple of the icons pictured on the that side of the box to start his machine.  In short order he starts his furious actions.  It was quite loud in the room, but I said nothing and just observed. What I saw was a child approaching and using this apparatus with his whole being. He absolutely threw every thing he had into his actions.  Just look at how he bends down, puts his ear next to the outside of the box, and passionately flails his scoop back and forth across the corn.  When a child can put this much of himself into an activity, he is a happy child.  When an apparatus can accommodate this much happiness, it is a good apparatus.

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.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Experimentation with closed chutes in some ways looks like the experimentation with open chutes.  For that description look at the post from December 2nd of last year here.

However, experimentation, discovery and play take different forms with the closed design.  That is because there are more defined spaces.  With the open chute, it is more like one continuum, whereas the closed chutes have several intersecting planes that crisply demarcate spaces.  Look at the apparatus below.

First, there is top of the chute.

And then there is the bottom of the chute.

Both spaces are well defined because the support box divides the chute into a top and bottom.

What is interesting is that the child catching at the bottom does not see when the person on the top is pouring so he has to rely on his aural sense to know when something is coming down the chute.  The other option is surprise.

Of course, a child could hedge her bets by covering both chutes.  That way, whichever chute the other child decides to pour into, the child whose hands are at the bottom will be sure to catch it. That looks like a nice little game these children have created.

There is also the tube in this particular apparatus which has two different levels: there is the top which is over the tub and there is the bottom which reaches into the table.

If you notice in the picture above, the child is slowly pouring sand into an opening that has been cut in the tube near the bottom.  As she pours, two things happen.  The first is that the sand slides only a short distance and the second is that it mixes with the sand being poured from the top of the tube.  What must she be thinking and feeling when she watches the sand she pours only slide a few inches and then get swept away with the sand from the top?  Maybe she doesn't care about either of those things.  Maybe she is just enthralled with how the sand falls as she pours it ever so slowly.  Do you have any other guesses?

There is another space that offers children another level on which to operate.  That is the top of the divider box.  It is a place to find stray pellets to sweep with your hand or....

a place to stack all the pellets you can collect in whatever container you can find.



For some children this apparatus provides an opportunity to simply pour into holes.

For others, it offers opportunities to observe what happens as one works with the different materials and objects provided with the apparatus.

This child decided to put a funnel in the hole on the top of one of the chutes.  He pours sand, which is quite fine, into the funnel and then looks down the chute to see the result.

What is the result?  Is he only focusing on the flow of sand created by the funnel?  Does he also notice how the sand hits the bottom of the chute?  Does he notice how it piles up and even backs up a bit before bounding down the chute? Does he notice how the grains of sand bounce down the chute?  In any case, it is a nice example of how an apparatus---or part of an apparatus---can sharpen a child's focus on how the physical world works.

In the previous picture, you can clearly see the child's focus even though you cannot see his face.
Let's take a look at what his face tells us.

You can still see his focus, but there may also be a hint of happy wonderment.

This is the children's table to experiment with as they see fit.  Observing the children has taught me to expect the unexpected and appreciate their inventiveness.

CLOSED CHUTES REVISITED

In June I will be traveling for three weeks to the UK and the Netherlands to do several presentations on sand and water play.  For the next few weeks, I will be preoccupied with preparations for that trip.  Because it takes me so long to do an original post, I will revisit some earlier posts.  The second  post I would like to revisit is from January 20, 2011 and is called CLOSED CARDBOARD CHUTES. This is mainly a "how-to" post with pointers on embedding chutes on a slant and on taping things securely with little to no measuring.

If you look at the DIMENSIONS in the righthand column of this blog, the first Cardboard Chutes posted in this blog (November 26th posting) fell under the dimensions of open and incline. The cardboard chutes in this post are also on an incline, but are closed.  Since this apparatus takes some constructing, this post explains how to build the apparatus.  The next post will talk about types of play and exploration fostered by this apparatus.

For this apparatus, I used three boxes.  The first box---the support box---was the width of the table on one of its orientations.  It was also both narrow and tall on its other two orientations.  Since it was the width of the table, it fit snugly inside the table and was thus easy to tape securely into the table.  The narrowness made it possible for the chutes to pass through.  The height allowed the chutes to be set on an incline.  Two other boxes were used for the chutes.  One of the chutes in the picture above is a box that held window blinds and the second chute is a box that held an artificial Christmas tree.  I cut out both ends of those boxes.  Without those ends, the chutes collapse easily.   When they are embedded in the support box, though, they are quite stable.

Here are three boxes I used to make closed chutes three years ago.

In this version, the support box is as wide as the table and actually sits on top of edge of the table.  A cardboard tube has been added so the flow of material can go two ways.  With the chutes only going one direction, the play and exploration sometimes stops when most of the material is emptied from the table.  Because of that, I considered the first design flawed and made the modification while the apparatus was still attached to the table.



To make the holes for the chutes, I first trace the end of the "chute" box onto the support box near the designated top of the support box.

If I were just to cut the shape I traced, the chute would be horizontal when I insert it through the box.

I don't want that, so I add an inch or two to the original trace on the top to be able to orient the chute on a slant.

Two inches is a lot to add to the original trace.  The more you add, the steeper the slant. (This almost sounds like a geometry lesson for a teacher.)

When the holes are cut, I insert the chutes through both holes.

By the way, I hardly ever measure.  Once I have done one side, I move to the other side. I usually place the top of the trace on the second side about where the bottom of the trace is on the first side.  I then add an inch or two to the bottom.

After inserting the chutes, I tape all around the them with duct tape to keep them from sliding up or down in the support box.  If I have cut the hole a little too big for the chute, the taping covers up extra spaces.  Taping is another process for which I do not measure.  I like to use duct tape that tears easily.  I will tear off a piece that is longer than the juncture I want to tape.  I use my fingers to push it into place.

Once the tape is in place, I tear or cut any extra that is hanging over the corner.  One section of the torn duct tape is pressed flat against the box and the other is folded over and down.

When I have taped all the chutes in place, I tape the apparatus to the table.  I orient it so the higher end of the chute is above the table and the lower end extends over the table and directs the material into a tub on the floor next to the table.

OK, kids, it is now yours to investigate and explore!

If you are counting, there are eight children around this table playing on several different levels and in several different spaces created by the apparatus.  My question is: Could there be even more children playing here?