DUPLO BOARD RAMP

Colleagues have always asked me whether I allow children to help build the apparatus I make for the sand and water table.  To this point, I have not.  But in an attempt to provide a building experience for children at the sensory table, I made a Duplo Board Ramp.

The Duplo boards I used are listed in the Lego catalogue in the education section under Lego Wall Board.  They have their own bin and are attached to the wall.  When you buy them, you buy them in a pair.  They are quite pricey.  Amazon has them listed here and they look like this:

I have had these in my room on the wall for several years with alphabet and mosaic tiles (which cost extra). A couple of years ago, a colleague showed me an apparatus her son had built for a sensory table using Lego boards.  I did not build anything that looked like his apparatus, but that was enough to get me wondering what I could do with my Duplo boards.  I did decide to built a wooden ramp in which to lay the boards end-to-end.

I used a tray to set the board on a slant.

If you look at the structure of the board, you can see strips of wood on the bottom that run the width of the ramp.  That was to give the structure strength.

Those strips also provided the extra wood necessary to hold the screws that fix the Duplo boards to the wooden ramp.  I used a thin piece of plywood for the base, so without that extra wood, the screws would stick out the bottom.

I caulked the inside joints of the wood---not the Duplo boards---so water would not leak through them onto the floor.

The Duplo board extends over the lip of the sensory table and empties into a tub.

The idea was to have children build in such a way as to impede the flow of water.  Below was my provocation.

There was building, but not as much as I would have thought.  The Duplos do not actually dam up the water.  Water finds its way around and through.  Interestingly, the knobs of the Duplo board disperse the water as it flows down the ramp.  There is an added benefit to this apparatus: the children are building on an incline surface.  How often does a child get to do that and what does that mean for spacial literacy?

This year I decided to add the Duplo zoo animals.  That fostered an extra bit of role play with the children spending a long time arranging the animals.

And then pouring water over them.

Several children noticed how the water slowed and dispersed when they poured it down the Duplo ramp. Watch the 13-second video below as a child pours the water down the ramp.



After pouring water down the ramp with a small pot, the boy runs around to the other end to see it come out.  He says: "Here it comes. It's..."  He stops his sentence and seems a bit surprised when it does not come out as one stream.  (The the knobs on the Duplo board slow the water flow by dispersing the water.)  He processes what he is seeing and then declares: "It's...leaking, leaking, leaking."

Children experiment with other things going down the ramp besides water.  Watch this little guy as he tries to slide some Duplo pieces down the ramp.



This boy experiments with sliding three different Duplo pieces down the ramp.  First he tries the giraffe.  The giraffe needs help so he uses the tree to knock it down the ramp.  Next he flips the chicken down.  He uses his left hand so it doesn't have as far to go and it is smaller and lighter and bounces nicely down the board into the tub.  Last comes the tree.  That takes two flicks with the fingers before twirling down the ramp.  As you watch him observe what happens with each piece, you can almost see him trying to make sense of how things tumble down this ramp that is not so smooth.

Though the ramp was set up to build, the was an awful lot of deconstructing, too.  When that happens, it is not at all unusual for the children to take everything off the Duplo board and collect everything in the tub at the end.  That is OK because then that leads to yet another type of play.

This little girl said she was washing dishes.  She was immersing her hands and arms in the water and swirling all the objects around the tub.  Besides the feeling of putting her arms in the water up to her elbows and swirling objects around, she must have associated the sound of all the legos bumping into each other in the water  with the sound of washing dishes.  In other words, there was an important auditory component to this play.

Here I thought I was making a building apparatus for the sensory table.  Silly me!

Just a quick note for those of you who follow my blog in Wisconsin.  I will be presenting on sand and water tables on Saturday afternoon at the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association conference October  20 - 22 in Appleton.  If you get a chance, check it out.  If you would like to meet to ask questions or exchange ideas, email me and we can figure out a time to meet during the conference.

BIG BOX II - WITH TUBES

Last week I wrote about connecting a big box to the sensory table.  With any apparatus, there is not just one configuration.  The main elements may be the same, but how it actually takes shape can vary quite a bit.  Here is BIG BOX II.

Like the previous big box apparatus, it is a big box with holes that is connected to the sensory table. One of the holes is a window facing the table and the other three holes are on the other three sides of the box.

Unlike the previous structure, this apparatus has a much larger window adjacent to the table.   In addition, this big box apparatus is partially embedded in the table.  If you look below you can see two of the legs of the sensory table resting inside the box so that the table itself is eight inches inside the box.  The box is duct taped to the embedded legs for stability.

In addition, tubes were set up to transfer the material from the table into the box.  There were two tubes: one was clear plastic and the other was a cardboard tube.  I cut out a small section of the clear plastic tube on one end so the children could more easily pour material into the tube.  I did several cut-aways on the cardboard tube so children could see the material slide down that cardboard tube.

The tubes are taped to a crate which is taped to a tray that spans the table.  The tubes are also taped to the lip of the sensory table to give them a second point of stability.  With this configuration there is a nice slant to the tubes, which facilitates the flow of material---in this case, pellets---down the tubes.

One of the things the tubes do in this apparatus is connect the two spaces.  That connection can be seen clearly in the picture below.  Two boys are pouring the pellets down the clear tube and the girl is catching the pellets in the box below.

There are different ways to put pellets down the tubes.  In the short video below, three different children use three different techniques.  The boy in the red scoops them directly from the table with a metal scoop. The girl in pink first filled her bucket and is scooping the pellets from her bucket which is resting on the crate.  And finally, the girl in the purple uses her hands to put pellets in her little plastic cup before pouring them down the tube.  How many more ways could there be?  Only the children know.



There is not just pouring; there is also catching.  Catching may seem simple and straight forward, but it is not.  First, you have to  wait for someone to pour the pellets.  Then it takes perception both to see and hear the pellets sliding down the tube.  And finally, it takes some coordination to position your container in the right spot to catch them.  And it takes a bit of wonder to appreciate it all.

With this particular apparatus, the children got to the point in their play where they wanted to fill up the tubes.  To do that, they had to block the tube in some way.  The child below, uses her hand.

Did you notice that the girl is basically in the box?  Only her legs below her knees and her feet are outside the box.

The pictured below shows a boy who completely crawled inside the box to do his blocking.  He used a little pail to block the pellets.  The picture shows him immediately after he pulled the pail away from the tube.  He is watching the pellets drain from the tube into the box.  The wonder of it all!

(I do believe that this operation makes a good corollary for Axiom 6 in the right hand column.  Namely: Whenever possible, the children will completely block the flow of medium.)

Blocking the tubes and filling the tubes is at least a two  person operation and often times it involves more than two.  How does it get decided who does the plugging and who does the filling? How does it get decided when the plug is pulled so the pellets drain?

In the video below, the children say the tube is full.  The girl holding the tube counts before she releases the pellets.  Watch and listen.



Did you hear how high she counted?  She counted to eight.  Why eight?  Right before she releases, her brother says something and grabs the tube as if to tell her enough counting already. Right after he puts his hand on the tube, she releases the pellets.  Was she reading her brother's cues or did she decide on her own to stop at eight?  Did you note the reaction when the pellets were released?  It was a collective: "Wo-o-o!"

In the next video, two boys communicate when the tube is full.  One of the boys foreshadows that it is almost full by simply saying that it is almost full.  A couple of more scoops and it is full.  The full tube is signaled by a exclamations and those exclamations are the signal to let 'r rip.



Pretty impressive teamwork.  Did you notice where the boy in the red shirt got his pellets?  He did not get them from the table.  Rather, he stepped down from a little stool, reached around the box and into one of the windows of the box, scooped pellets from the box, jumped back up on the stool and poured them into the tube.  Does he realize that the pellets are going right back into the box from whence they just came?  I don't know.  This boys operation to scoop and pour the pellets was first and foremost a physical pursuit; those big motions feel right for this age child.

In the last post I talked a lot about space and how it feels.  I want to leave you with three pictures of children relating to the space created by this apparatus.  Put yourselves in their shoes and try imagine how the space feels?  And what types of interactions does this space foster?

Did you notice that in and out got reversed?  At the beginning, the children were out of the box reaching in.  The last picture shows a child in the box reaching out.  Maybe we can call it thinking both inside and outside the box.

BIG BOX

A big box by itself always offers hours of fun for young children.  When I come across a big box, I like to bring it into school and attach it to the sensory table.  A few years ago, we bought a big TV.   It was not a flat screen, so it came in a big box.  So what did I do? I brought the box to school and attached it to the sensory table.

I attached it by cutting a rectangular flap on the side of the box adjacent to the table.  The top and two sides of the flap were completely cut through, but I only scored the bottom so I could fold it over and tape it to the lip of the table.  Since the lip was two inches wide, I actually scored it twice, once at the box and once where I wanted the flap to bend over the lip.

The reason it is taped is to keep it attached to the table so the children do not pull it away from the table. The hole is suppose to be a connection between the box and the table.

In addition, I cut big holes on three sides of the box not facing the table.

(If you look inside the box, you can see that all the loose flaps are taped down.  That gives the box a little extra strength and does not allow the medium to get under the inside flaps.

This apparatus creates two separate spaces.  The spaces are very different.  The space in and around the table itself is very open and bright.  The space created by the box is closed with less light.  They are, however, connected by a window that I thought would create action between the two spaces.

This apparatus was set up in my classroom over three years ago.  I thought the window would connect play, but as I look over my documentation, I do not have any pictures of the window as a catalyst for play between the two spaces.  Neither do I have a recollection of much exploration through the window.  As you can see in the picture below, two children are playing in the two different spaces totally oblivious to each other.

Maybe the window was too small or maybe the spaces were insular enough that there was litlle play between them.  I have attached other big boxes to the sensory table and cut a larger hole between the box and the table that has resulted in much more interaction between the two spaces.

Both spaces for this apparatus, though, were attractive for the the children.

Some played in the table.

Some played in the box.

Because I used farm animals and animal bedding, much of the play was similar.  There was a lot of scooping of bedding into the containers,  putting the animals in the containers, and feeding the animals.

At the table:

And in the box:

Though the play was similar, I think the experience of space was different.  Children get a different sense of space when they are standing at the table than when they are kneeling on the floor and putting their hands, arms, head, and torso into the box.   What I am saying is that an apparatus like this is teaching children about space because they experience space with their bodies.  And learning about space is fundamental to later academics subjects such as geometry.

Speaking of space, you cannot forget about the space on top of the box.  In the picture below, one of the children is working on the top of the box.

This picture actually shows all the different levels and spaces being used at one time in and around the table and apparatus: two girls are sweeping the floor (lowest level, flat/open space); two boys are in the box (a little higher lever, three-dimensional/closed space); one girl is playing in the table (the next highest level, three-dimensional/open space); and one boy is sweeping the top of the box(highest level, flat/open space).

Children naturally explore levels and spaces.  The more you provide, the more they will explore and discover.  That sounds a lot like Axioms 2 and 3 in the left hand column of the blog.

Just a quick note for those of you who follow my blog in Wisconsin and will be attending the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association conference October  20 - 22 in Appleton.  I will be presenting at the conference on Saturday afternoon on apparatus to build in and around the sensory table.  If you get a chance, stop by to say hello.

Baby Washing

I have been in the field of early childhood long enough to know that washing baby dolls is nothing new in an early childhood classroom.  For the longest time, I resisted doing it in my classroom because I could not envision an apparatus to go with the activity.  Then it dawned on me: add a clothesline, a clothesline over the table.

By adding a clothesline, the children could do more than wash babies; they could also wash clothes.  When they washed the clothes, they could use clothespins to work on the pincher grip needed for writing and other fine motor tasks.  When they pinned the wet clothes on the clothesline, the water from the wet clothes would drip back into the table.  In addition, it created another level of play above the table and I am all about levels.

This turned out to be a very simple apparatus.  I found four pieces of wood lying around in the basement.  I cut them with a hand saw for matching lengths.  I drilled a hole on one end of each and taped them to the sensory table.  I taped them in two places, one on a bottom bar and one on the lip of the table.  Taping in the two places made the poles more secure.  I then strung a clothesline between them and tied them off.

Besides the clothesline, I also set up a little table next to the sensory table as a place to dress and undress the babies and to dry the babies.  It also held some of the things the children could use for washing babies such as soap, towels, and washcloths.

I was very pleased because it actually turned out to be an activity that attracted both boys and girls.

As I watched the children wash the babies and the clothes, I couldn't help but notice how their heads kept brushing against the wet clothes on the line.   You can see it in the picture above where the girl on the right is bending over the table and her head is brushing against the wet clothes on the line. That is an additional sensory experience that anyone who has hung clothes on a line can relate to.

As you see in the previous photos, the children wash the babies. Sponges and washcloths are provided for washing and little containers for rinsing.   Larger towels are there for drying.



This little guy has the drying part down.

Besides the washing and drying of babies, there is a lot of washing of clothes.



Figuring out how the clothespin works is a little harder.  This boy wants to hang up a shirt, but cannot figure out how to open the clothespin to get it off the line.  He stops trying, drops the shirt in the water, and begins playing in the soapy water.



But he didn't really give up.  He tries again to make the clothespin work.  Watch closely to see how he does it.



Did you see he used his mouth to make the clothespin work?  He continued to mouth the clothespin and even bit down on it and got his figure caught for a brief second.  He mouthed a silent "Ow!"  But did you also see that at the end, he was able to take a clothespin off with his hand?  That is a nice little bit of progress in a very short time.

Lately when I have been reviewing pictures and videos for posts, I have noticed that some of the activities that the children create are tangental to the apparatus itself.  They have more to do with the materials provided than the apparatus.  The video below is a case in point.



The sponges were provided to wash the babies.  This child concocted this activity to line up the three sponges in a neat row with the sides touching.  That lining up of the square sponges has to be a basic geometric operation.  He then stacks them together with a folding motion.  It wasn't just laying them one atop the other, but he almost shuffles them like a three-card deck of cards. There is a certain novelty and beauty about how he does it.  So why did he line them up and stack them?  It was done in the vein of discovering the properties of the materials.   The child is thinking and acting with his motor actions.  Once he has figured  out what he thinks is interesting about the materials, he wants to show someone.  He asks me to watch and shows me how he can shuffle and then squeeze them all out at once and how much water comes out.

That sounds like a seventh axiom to go in the panel on the right.  Children will always devise new and novel activities with the materials presented that are tangental to the apparatus itself.

I will be taking a couple of weeks off from blogging.  School is starting up again and we are in a new space so there will be some long hours trying to organize the space.  I will post again mid-September.

Funnels and Clear Plastic Tubing - Experimenting

Experimentation with the Funnels and Clear Plastic Tubing always begins with children pouring water into the funnels.  Nobody tells them what to do or how to do it.  They just know to pour the water into the funnels. Why?  What is it about the apparatus that tells them immediately how to interface with it? Holes, for sure; they are just so inviting they have to pour the water into them. (See axiom five on the right panel.)

This boy has gone a step further and started to pour water from a bottle into a big plastic syringe that he has inserted into the funnel.

Before long, children try to figure out where the water goes when it is poured into a funnel.  That is not as easy as one might imagine.  Watch how this child tries to figure out where the water empties when he pour waters into one of the funnels.



Did you notice that when he pours the water he looks down and to his right to see where he thinks the water will come out.  Since the water did not come out where he expects, he tries to look down the funnel to see where the water went.  He just did a basic experiment.  He had a hypothesis about where the water will go.  He tested it.  He found out his theory was wrong.  And finally he tried to figure out why his hypothesis was incorrect.  Not bad for a young three-year-old.

This boy was a very good experimenter because he kept at it until he figured out where the water came out when he poured it into a certain funnel.



He moved to the other side of the table to continue his experimentation.  This video captures him redoing the experiment and confirming his hypothesis.  It sounds like one of the other children is pretty excited about the success of his experiment.  He is, too, but his excitement is more on the inside and verbal.

Children will often try to catch the water emptying out one of the tubes.  That is an interesting proposition when it is a sprinkler head, but it does accommodate more than one child at a time.

Children will also try to block or redirect the water emptying out of the tubes.  (That has just become the sixth axiom in the right hand column of this blog.)

This last spring I included basters with most of the different water apparatus that were set up. That held true with this apparatus, too.  Watch!



As the child squeezes the bulb of the baster, the water pulses out of the sprinkler head.  I can't help but think that when she has to study the action of the heart in a science class, she will have a good basis for understanding the whole process.  Or when she has to take a hydraulics class for environmental science, she will understand how to move water from one point to the next.  Or when she....

Of course, basters work well for plugging holes, too.  As you watch the video below, see if you can guess what this child is up to.



Did you guess right?  Now that is one happy child having figured out how to plug the hole so the water will gush out.  Just think about the steps he has figured out to reach that point.  He has figured out which funnel to pour the water into.  He has figured how to plug the hole with the baster.  He has figured out how much water to put in the funnel.  And he has figured out how to pull the plug to produce the gusher.  He has a lot to be happy about.

Of course, with any apparatus, some of the experimentation has nothing to do with the apparatus at all. For instance: How full can you fill the five gallon bucket that is next to the table and apparatus?

As you can see, pretty full.

How full can you fill the bucket...

And still be able to lift the bucket to empty it back into the tub?

Experiments are a lot of work.

And sometimes you get help even though you did not ask for it.



The boy in the video was working very hard at transporting water from the tub to the bucket and then emptying the bucket back into the tub.  The girl saw what he was doing and simply joined the activity.  These two are young three-year-olds so they have plenty of language, but somehow with very little language they do some nice work together.  If you watch closely, you can see the boy signal when it is time to empty the bucket.  This is what he does:  he stands up; empties one last cut into the bucket; drops the cup in the tub; puts his hands in a position ready grab the rim the bucket; waits for his friend to finish pouring her bottle into the bucket. At this point they really start to work together.  This is what they do: he puts his hands on the rim of the bucket almost the same time she does; both lift the bucket; tip the bucket by balancing the middle of the bucket on the lip of the tub; grab the bottom of the bucket and complete the transfer; and finally set the bucket back down.  If you are wondering, these two did not have history of searching each other out for play. They just happened to play together on this particular day.

My hypothesis: We can learn a lot from children about experimenting and working together.

FUNNELS AND CLEAR PLASTIC TUBING

Several years ago I discovered clear, flexible tubing at the hardware store.  I bought some, cut it into several pieces of various lengths, and attached funnels to the ends.  I then threaded the tubing through a crate so the ends opposite the funnels empty the water at different points around the table. What I ended up with was an apparatus that looks like this:

Funnels, tubes and a whole lot of duct tape holding it all together.  (If you look closely, I even incorporated a larger black tube, one that is not clear.)

One or two of the tubes empty into a large tub at one end of the table.

One or two of the tubes empty back into the table itself.

This is not a good picture showing the two tubes emptying back into the table.  One of the tubes is sandwiched in between duct tape and a drinkable yoghurt container so the water squirts away from the crate.  The second one has the red water about to come out.

And one of the tubes leads to a sprinkler head that empties back into the table.

I purposely thread the tubes in such a way that it is not obvious where the water comes out.  For instance, a funnel on one corner of the apparatus can empty on the exact opposite side of the crate.  That way, the children have to figure out where the water comes out when they pour water into one of the funnels.  There are a couple ways of doing that. One, you can pour the water into a funnel and listen to where the water comes out.  It can get a little tricky, though, because there is always a delay from pouring water into the funnel and water coming out, especially if the tube is one of the long ones.  And besides, if more than one child is pouring into the funnels, the water is coming out in more than one place at the same time.  A second way to figure the path of the water is to track it through the clear tubes. The children see the water better if it is colored.  Either way, you can literally see the children working out which funnel empties where.   When they do, it is a wonderful discovery.

I have made this apparatus several ways.  The very first time I made it, I set the crate right in the table.

I learned from this first version that the end of the tubes where the water comes out have to be lower than the top of the funnels.  If not, the water does not empty out of the tubes when you pour it in the funnels; the funnels just overflow.  I taped this apparatus to the bottom of the table and then to the sides.

Later, I set a crate on top of a crate and taped the crates together and then taped the two crates to the side of the table.  This gave me the height so water emptied from the tubes, but it used a lot of duct tape.

This year, I taped a tray in the table.

And then taped the crate to the tray.

That gave the funnels the needed height with less duct tape.  It also added another level to the play and exploration and an additional space in which to operate.  See below.

I have often been asked if I have the children help build an apparatus like this. The question causes me to pause and think because I see children as builders---both literally and figuratively---of meaning and knowledge.  One of the reasons I have not had the children help build is a bit selfish: it is one of my creative outlets.  Another reason is because it would change the nature of the activity. When the children work on the apparatus they are figuring out how it works and discovering some of the laws governing the natural world.  They are also discovering spaces and levels created by the apparatus.  In that whole process, they make it their own and take their play into new and uncharted realms.  However, you could still ask the question: Doesn't  allowing the children to build lead to the same processes?  I will indeed pause again and think about that a little more.

If you want to read how one teacher allows the children to build with a similar tube apparatus, check out Teacher Tom's (from Seattle) post called:  Picking Them Off the Ground.