A Cow Says "Moo"

This has been an extremely interesting week...the children have proven to me through their actions that learning is recursive, free-flowing, and dynamic. Participating in a child's development continues to be a joy and really a gift....getting to see the "aha" moments, as well as the furrowed brows and the frustration that often come with learning. Mix that with my own expectations and assumptions, and one gets a really inspiring, awesome experience! Take these three examples....

LEARNING IS MESSY
Earlier in the week I presented a child in one my Constructing Number Concepts workshops with a really messy, ill-structured problem. Ill-structured simply means that there are multiple paths to solve the problem, and often, multiple "correct" answers. There are no simple algorithms or processes...the learning comes from the construction of knowledge.

Here was the problem:

"You are a walnut farmer (I thusly presented the boy with a basket of walnuts.) You are going to sell these walnuts, but first, you must organize them into wooden bowls to sell them to your customers."

[Under my breath I counted out 27 walnuts, so that the child would not know the quantity, and placed them on our activity table. Then, I set out 6 wooden bowls.]

"Okay, your task is to put the SAME amount of walnuts in EACH bowl. How will you do it?"

Oh boy! This really stumped the child. He grappled with it for a long time. He got frustrated and wanted to move to another activity. His brow was furrowed. It was really, really messy learning. So then I said to him, "If I put 1 walnut in this bowl, what should I put in the others?" In learning theory, this is called a scaffold. Basically, I was providing a bridge for him to connect to.

Aha...a brief moment passed and he got it! He placed 1 walnut in the other 5 bowls. But this is where conceptual understandings are so complex, because in the next instant he was placing unequal quantities of walnuts in the other bowls. So I reminded him that each bowl must have the same amount. What he did next surprised me greatly...

He took two of the bowls, one containing two walnuts the other containing seven, and turned them upside-down, keeping the contents in each bowl. Next, he pushed the bowls around each other a couple of times and then finally, lifted each bowl up and then looked at me perplexed.

"How come they're still the same?" He asked me. It took me a second to absorb what he was thinking, and then it came to me. He had turned the bowls, like a magician does with cups and the objects beneath them. He really believed that by doing so the quantity of each bowl would change to a more desirable arrangement.

"Well," I said to him, "I guess magic doesn't work very well with walnuts. I guess we'll have to count out the walnuts and put them into groups. Shall we turn the bowls over again?"

"Oh man!" the boy exclaimed, but he turned over the bowls nonetheless and we began the arduous task of counting out the walnuts so each bowl had the same amount. At last, he finished his task. But if you remember, we had 27 walnuts and 6 bowls, so of course, there were 3 walnuts remaining!

"So what shall we do with the remaining walnuts?" I asked the boy. His response....

"One customer will get 3 extra. Lucky for him!"

That's what I love about ill-structured problems...there is no WRONG answer. And the learning is not embedded in facts or knowledge (procedural or declarative knowledge); rather, the learning is conceptual and requires higher order thinking. One does not need to know that 6 X 4 = 24; rather, one must create that understanding through manipulation. This is at the heart of what we do in the playroom....we create understandings and meaning to lay foundations for lifetime learning.

LEARNING IS EXCEPTIONAL
So this leads me to my second exciting experience...my Earth Explorations workshop. We have been talking a lot about how our actions affect the world, and how if we do something that disturbs our environment, we hurt the animals and plants in that particular biome. Now how many 5-year olds get to learn about biomes? Well, we do! Anyhow, we had worked our way through talking and drawing pictures of food webs and food chains. And parents, do you know that your children already have a solid foundation in understanding hierarchical structures? It was fabulous to help them craft graphic organizers to display the relationship between plants and animals in a food web and in a linear food chain. They really have a great foundational understanding!

In all honesty, I was a little nervous about this particular Tuesday because we were doing something that most kids do in junior high school, but I felt I had prepared them adequately and of course, they astounded me. We culminated the workshop in a dissection of an owl pellet (owl throw-up, to be exact).

Before we even touched the owl pellet, we talked about safety (wear gloves) and how to pull the pellets apart (tweezers & toothpicks). We also put on safety glasses, like true scientists do. Then, I displayed a chart of bones from small animals like rodents, shrews, and birds. We then started to pull apart the fur from the bones and piled up the bones in the middle of the table (on newspaper, of course!) I shouldn't have even doubted what 5-year olds are capable of, as they carefully, with hands as sure as surgeons, separated tiny, tiny bones from the fur and placed them in the middle of the table. "What's this Miss Cheryl?" they exclaimed each time they found something. For the first 15 minutes I helped them identify their treasure by comparing the bone shape to those on the chart. Then, something amazing started to happen; they started to identify the bones on their own!

"Look, Miss Cheryl, I think I found a leg bone!"

"Wow, look how big this skull is...and what are those tiny things...could those be teeth?"

"Hmmm...this looks kind of like that hip bone we found earlier, but it is a bit bigger, do you think it is a hip bone Miss Cheryl?"

And the icing on the cake? We found a vertebra of a bird!

If you think about what your child is capable of doing; rather, what you BELIEVE you're child is capable of doing, you are often dead wrong. And that is the beauty of learning...we each have our own place and time for connecting with our learning. When we can connect as a group, that is an exceptional experience!

So what did the children beg to take home? You guessed it, another owl pellet to dissect at home!

Now perhaps some of the parents were a bit concerned about what to do with an OWL pellet, but no worries...you've got junior scientists on your hands!

LEARNING IS LITERAL
And lastly, a reminder that early learners are quite literal in their understanding of the world....

The other day I was working on a phonemic awareness activity with my 3-5 year old Whirl group. Each child had a picture card and one child had a ball. The object of the game was to roll the ball to the child who had a picture card with the same beginning sound as the child with the ball. So, the child with the picture of the "snake" would roll the ball to the child with the picture of the "seal" because they both contain the /s/ sound, and so on.

So, to model the activity, I first went around and asked each child what picture card they had. One boy said, "I have a duck."

"Yes, you do have a duck!" I responded. "What does a duck say?" The entire group said "Quack."

"Yes, a duck says quack, I confirmed, and then added, "Duck has the /d/ sound." The children repeated the /d/ sound after me.

We proceeded in this fashion until we reached a little girl with a picture of a cow. "What does the cow say?" I asked.

"Moooooo" the little girl said. I was stumped! We have been working on initial consonant sounds, so why was she saying "moooo" instead of "/k/"? Well duh, it suddenly occurred to me. I was not asking the right question, and therefore, she was responding literally.

"Yes, a cow says 'moo'" I responded. "Can you tell me the beginning sound of the word 'cow'?”

"/k/" she said. "/k/...../k/....../k/" the little girl repeated.

It was at that moment that I had a little reminder about how children learn - how literal they are, and how my adult assumptions could easily cloud their understandings. Quite literally, the children were responding correctly...a duck does say ‘quack’ and a cow does say ‘moo,’ but my questioning was not precise enough for them to understand the task, so I had to make modifications.

We completed the activity with each child identifying a sound and finding a matching picture. And, I was left with an excellent reminder, that often as teachers we have to remember to put ourselves in our students' shoes and to reflect on how a child might be interpreting what we are asking, because after all, a cow does say "moo"!