Letting Them Learn For Themselves

I was visiting a preschool, and spending time with the children outside on the playground. An orange butterfly fluttered by, then landed on a small tree branch, just at the children’s eye level. Several children clustered around watching the butterfly as it first sat motionless on the branch, then fluttered to another branch, then settled on a yellow flower.

“What do you think the butterfly is doing?” I asked.

The children looked thoughtfully at the butterfly, then at me, then at their teacher.

“You know all about butterflies!” the teacher said, smiling. “Tell Shelli what you know about butterflies.”

One of the children broke into an excited smile. “Butterflies come from caterpillars. They’re caterpillars and the caterpillars turn into butterflies. There’s four stages. She held up her hand and  pointed to each finger as she spoke. “There’s an egg, then its a larvae and a pupa and then a butterfly.”

“And a larvae is another name for what?” prompted her teacher.

“A caterpillar!” the child exclaimed, beaming.

Meanwhile, the butterfly had flown away. And none of the children had answered the question “What do you think the butterfly is doing?” It was a simple question, one that each of them could have answered through their own observations, based on their own thoughts, conclusions, and ideas. But the opportunity to observe, evaluate, predict, and imagine was passed over in favor of reciting facts. Unfortunately, this is how science is so often taught – by teaching discrete pieces of knowledge or factoids for children to repeat back, or to represent in art projects where they carefully follow teacher’s directions to create a chart or diagram that shows what they “know” about butterflies, or trees, or the water cycle, or any other natural phenomenon.

Of course there’s room for teaching facts, even though many of those facts can wait until children are older, and have had the chance to first observe, predict, analyze and evaluate on their own. When we introduce facts, we’re taking away opportunities for children to develop their own ideas, because once you know the “right” answer, there’s no more room for your own theories. When we substitute teaching facts for observation, we’re teaching children to trust what they’ve been told, not what they see for themselves. The well intentioned teaching act of giving background knowledge also teaches them to trust other opinions, especially authority opinions, before considering their own. In a world filled with competing narratives and an ever-increasing difficulty in determining what is true and what is not, children need to develop critical thinking skills that they can use to process information, not only based on their trust of the source, but based on their own experiences, thoughts and observations. We need curriculum and schools that don’t just teach children to say the correct answer, but that give them an opportunity to discover why that answer is correct, and to evaluate any other possible answers as well.

One October in my 2-year-old classroom, we examined a pumpkin. I told the children we were going to cut it open, and asked what they thought would be inside. One of the children exclaimed, “A beautiful butterfly!” I didn’t tell him whether he was wrong or right. The only way to know for sure would be to open the pumpkin and see what was there for ourselves.

**Note: The butterfly anecdote described in this blog was not a verbatim exchange between me, a child, and teacher. This blog post is a composite of many similar conversations I’ve had with children, and that I’ve observed other teachers have with children, in which science “facts” replace personal experiences and reflections in conversation.

The pumpkin anecdote did happen as described. And much to the child’s disappointment, when we opened the pumpkin, a beautiful butterfly did not appear.

Summer in the City

I teach not far from where I grew up: a city neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. When I read curriculum ideas and blogs about outdoor play, natural materials, forest schools, and the like, I always feel a slight disconnect. I love the photos of children gathering branches in the woods and building structures out of them, children sliding down a grassy hillside, children splashing by the side of a lake or pond and making mud pies on the shore. But as much as I value outdoors and natural play, those aren’t my places. I felt this way as a child, reading books about children playing in the woods behind their house, hopping across a stream on the way to school, or sledding on a nearby hill. I tried to imagine these scenes, since I knew what woods, streams, and hills were. But I couldn’t imagine them next to my house.

It’s not that I think that city children don’t have opportunities for nature play, or that I feel the difference in environment is something to feel sorry about. Growing up in the city, my friends and I played, just like children do everywhere, and during the summer, we played outdoors. We gathered grass, sticks, and leaves that we mixed into pretend soup or potions. We hunted for rocks, which were sometimes tiny pieces of crumbled asphalt or concrete, but we treasured these as much as if they had come from a beach or wooded trail. There were no trees to climb, but we played under the branches of the neatly trimmed parkway trees, and spent hours gazing up, imagining what it might be like to climb them if we could. We made hiding spaces behind the bushes that were planted neatly in front of people’s houses, or better still, the ones lining the alley behind the house, where no one would see the private clubhouse we created.

There was no stream to wade across or skip stones in. But we still played with water – water that poured from the faucet in a backyard or from a garden hose, gathered in buckets and stirred with sticks, which then became improvised paintbrushes to make designs on the sidewalk. When it rained we watched the water rushing through the gutters, and improvised dams of sticks and leaves to block the storm drain and make huge puddles to splash in.

Our games, like the games of children everywhere, revolved around the materials we had access to. We invented endless variations of hopping, jumping, and stepping games that involved leaping across sidewalk squares, or chanting rhymes as we stepped up and down the stairs on someone’s front stoop. We measured our space in sidewalk squares, distance between the alleys on each end of the blocks, the patches of grass that separated the buildings from the sidewalk, and the ones that separated the sidewalk from the street. A curb could be a balance beam, and the streetlight home base for hide-and-seek or tag.

When I reflect on my city childhood and the materials I had to play with, I’m struck by how we as teachers can get overly fixated in the materials themselves. We need to remember that the magic of outdoor play isn’t about whether there’s a stream or a tree to climb, it’s about the endless opportunities and freedom that an open-ended setting provides. It’s not that it’s crucial for a child to have a stream to splash in, or to make mud pies it’s that a child have the chance to explore whatever is in their environment. A curb can become a balance beam as easily as a log can, the key is in how the adults teach children to approach novel situations and open-ended materials, and how the adults encourage and scaffold the children’s experiences. It doesn’t matter whether the play is in a city or forest, a park or a beach, what matters is that the play happens.