Helping Them to Put Ideas Into Action

A frequent topic on discussion boards is for someone to post a picture of an interesting loose part or material they’ve found and say, “What should I do with this?” There are always some people who respond with craft ideas - that the adult should take the wood circle or rock or cork and paint letters, numbers, faces, or attach objects together in a way that the adult is using the materials to create a toy for the child. Then there are always others who respond that that the adult shouldn’t do anything and “Just put it out and see what the children do.”

Intentional teaching and scaffolding creativity are somewhere between those two points.

Wooden circles with letters written on them aren’t as open ended as plain wooden circles. Writing a letter, or number, or design on a piece of wood or a rock changes that object into something more specific. Objects painted with faces and costumes are dolls, just like any factory made doll that could be ordered from a catalog. There’s still plenty of ways that these materials can be used creatively,  constructively, and interestingly, in classrooms - but as soon as the adult permanently makes the material into something else, some of the open ended possibilities disappear.

 At the other end of discussion, “just put it out” doesn’t give children the tools they need to do “something” with the material. Children - and adults - view objects in context, and form ideas or action not based on the object alone, but on the other objects and materials in the environment. Even the classic open ended activity of using a stick to make designs in the dirt or sand requires both a stick and dirt or sand. Banging a spoon on a pot requires a spoon and a pot. Give a baby just a spoon, or just a pot, without the other object, and their play will be very different. If we want to spark and provoke innovative and creative play, when we choose materials and objects to share with children, we need to consider “What could they do with this” and structure the environment in ways that allow children to figure out ways to use the materials together, and to have the tools that they need to accomplish their ideas.

We humans respond to objects by their context. If you’re served a bowl of liquid with spoon, you’d probably assume it’s soup. If that same liquid was served in a glass, you’d assume it’s a beverage. If that same liquid were poured in a tray with a brush, next to a piece of paper, you might think of painting with it. If it were in a pitcher, you might think of pouring it. The same process of examining contextual cues is what guides children’s planning and decision process. If I see a container with a spout, I think of pouring. If I see a ramp, I think of rolling. If I see a tube, I think of what could go inside. More important, is what I don’t see, because if the materials I need aren’t in my environment, I can’t put my ideas into action. We’ve all seen children struggling to gather pebbles or shells when they don’t have pockets, and as adults we’ve usually stepped in to find some container. The goal shouldn’t only be for children to figure out what to do on their own. The goal should be for us to be partners with them in their discovery. Our job is to listen, observe, and when needed and welcomed, to help. 

The Power of Provocation

Early childhood education can sometimes get caught between two extremes. On one side there are teachers armed with lists of standards and objectives, tailoring every experience to instruct children in a specific skill. On the other side there are teachers who say they just sit back and watch while the children learn all they need to without adult interference.

The reality of learning is someplace in between. Children learn through meaningful experiences and interactions that allow them to construct their own knowledge and build understandings about their environments through play. But adults are the ones who control that environment. Whatever materials are there for children to play with are there because an adult provided them.

“Just put out the materials and let the children decide what to do with them.” Statements like this reflect the wonderful power of child-directed play and exploration, but they also ignore the adult’s role. What does “just put out the materials” mean? Are they on a table or on the floor? In a basket, on a tray, or in a pile? What are the materials, and how did they get into the classroom? What is the teacher doing or saying while the child explores? While trying to value and embrace child-led learning, teachers sometimes sell themselves short, and forget that every aspect of the classroom involves some decision making by the adult. The key to creating environments where children can direct their own learning is for the adults to make these decisions in an intentional way.

Objects can have social meaning and visible physical properties that impact how we think of them. We approach objects based on our previous experiences and knowledge. Containers can be filled and emptied. Rounded objects roll. Shaking and banging create sounds. Colors change their appearance in shadows and light. Children aren’t blank slates. Every interaction they have is built on the history of all the interactions that came before, as they experiment, explore, and build understandings of their world through play.

 

This is where adults can come in. Not by telling children what they should do with the materials, but provoking the spark of what they could do with them. By making intentional choices of what materials to have in a classroom, and how to present them to children, teachers can provoke children to think “What can I do with this?”  We can plan classroom environments and present materials that spark children’s creativity, initiative, and innovation, not by giving direction, but by presenting provocation. Intentional teaching is partnership with children. It’s collaboration and communication. Intentional teaching is the adult saying. “I see your wonderful idea. Let’s travel there together.”

Recipes and Experiments in Intentional Teaching

Over the past few weeks I’ve been baking a lot of cookies. I’ve been adjusting recipes, trying to figure out how little changes in the ingredients can change the texture or taste? How much brown sugar or white sugar? What can I use instead of flour to make the recipe gluten free? Does it make a difference whether I use baking soda or baking powder?

None of this was random experimentation. Knowing what ingredients can be substituted, how a recipe can be “tweaked” stems from an underlying understanding of how to bake. Using brown sugar instead of white sugar is one thing, using salt instead of sugar would be something else entirely. I know that I can’t simply leave out the flour, or the eggs, I have to replace them with something else that has similar properties. Baking isn’t just a random combination of trial and error, it’s a science that’s based on knowing what and how different materials interact when combined and heated.

A few weeks ago I wrote about play and learning – that children learn through play, but just because they’re playing, doesn’t automatically mean that they’re learning. Simply having an experience doesn’t mean that learning, development, or growth will automatically follow. 

 It’s the content of that play experience – the materials that children use, the investigations they pursue, the interactions and conversations they have – that lead to learning. That’s where teachers come in. With our knowledge and experience about how learning happens through play, we can play alongside the children, interacting with them and scaffolding their explorations. We can provide materials and present them in ways that encourage children to think “What can I do with this?” Yes, there are some times when adult interaction interferes with children’s activity or navigates it away from the child’s agenda to the adult’s. But finding that perfect point where we can both follow the child’s lead and use our own experience and expertise to co-construct with the child is the core of intentional teaching. We aren't planning what the children should do. We're planning in consideration of all the possibilities of what the children could do, and based on our knowledge of these children and of development, what they likely would do.

Teaching isn’t all that different than baking. Following a curriculum guide word for word, just like following a recipe word for word, interferes with creativity and limits innovation. But at the same time, curriculum, just like a recipe, has some scientific basic for what works and how it works. If you put in a cup of white sugar instead of brown sugar, the consistency might change a little, but you’d still have a cookie. If you put in a cup of salt instead of sugar, your cookies would taste unrecognizable. If you left out the dry ingredients all together, you’d have a puddle that wouldn’t bake into anything. Teaching follows the same principles – just like random materials from our kitchen shelves wouldn’t necessarily bake into a cookie, children’s random activities don’t necessarily lead to learning. Curriculum objectives and standards and teachers’ experiences and professional knowledge are all pieces that contribute to the interactions of intentional teaching.  Adults need to be careful not to overwhelm children with our own agendas, but we also need to be confident in our abilities and experience to be true teachers in partnership with children. That’s where the magic of learning happens - when we strike that balance between our sharing our knowledge and helping the children to build theirs.

Where Do You Keep Your Loose Parts?

I see lots of posts on education discussion groups asking “Where do you keep your loose parts?” Or “What does your loose parts area look like?” In my classroom, I don’t have any specific area designated for “loose parts.” Loose parts are just another type of classroom material, which children are free to use where and how they want. However, I do put some on shelves in intentional ways, with the purpose of sparking the child to think “What can I do with this?” 

I set up a small table near the door to have some interesting materials, not necessarily as a provocation to play, but an invitation to come in the door. Entering the classroom in the morning and separating from parents and caregivers can be the most stressful part of a child’s day. Having material to explore as soon as you walk in the door can ease the transition.

I also have a shelf close to the door, but not too far away from tables, with loose parts, containers, and other materials, ready for children who want to explore but might not want to be right in the midst of the play area with other children.

The materials on the shelf are set up in a way to encourage children to think about different ways to use them together. A container asks “What will fit inside?” A tray of beads calls out “Touch me and see how I feel.” 

Sometimes the children choose to play with the materials right where they are.

Sometimes they take them to tables or other areas of the room.

The magic of this space isn’t about what the children will do in this area, or even with particular objects, but what ideas will be sparked, and where they will lead.

It's More Than Just Fun

The kids love it!

They have so much fun with this!

In conversations with teachers and reading online blogs and comments, these phrases come up over and over again, as the reason for planning a classroom activity, or the evaluation of how it went? “Oh, you tried that art activity on Pinterest, how did it go?” “The kids loved it – it was so much fun!”

Of course it was fun, they’re kids. They’re naturally wired to have fun. If we give them an activity and they don’t have fun, that’s what we need to worry about. The bigger issue of planning and evaluating classroom activities shouldn’t be whether they’re “fun” or whether the kids “love it”. It should be how we observe the learning and development taking place. We shouldn’t be planning for “fun”, we should be planning to meet developmental objectives and to engage the children’s interests.

“I don’t have to plan. I just put the materials out and see what they do with them.”

Every time we enter a classroom, choose a material, place it in a certain way on a table, floor, or shelf, we’re planning. Teachers in play-based, discovery learning environments sometimes shy away from this, out of fear of imposing their own ideas on the children’s play. But the social interaction that happens between any group of people, especially adults and children involves planning. Which materials did you choose to put on your classroom shelves? Are they stored in baskets, boxes, or something else? How many are there of each? When you saw that art activity on Pinterest, or in a neighboring classroom, it sparked an idea for you that was probably more than just “this is fun”. What did you think/hope/wonder that your kids would do with these same materials?

Planning a play based curriculum can sometimes feel overwhelming, as we balance what it means to “teach” and what it means for children to explore and discover. It’s true that in a play-based program, we aren’t teaching children to do specific tasks according to our directions. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t teaching. Our jobs as teachers are to observe where the children’s play is going and facilitate it, scaffold interactions between children and the materials and between children and each other, and to provide the opportunities for learning to take place.

Intentional teaching involves teachers having planning and purpose in the environment, activities, and interactions that we create, nurture, and encourage. When we choose activities, we need to ask ourselves, “What will the children do with this? That doesn’t mean we’re requiring or expecting them to do one specific thing, but we’re considering all the possibilities of what might happen. And how that ties back to learning and development?  We need to ask ourselves what experiences am I giving children that will spark problem solving? Collaboration? Innovation? Creativity?

And yes, it will still be fun, and the kids will love it. But it will be much more than that too.

Keeping "Art" in Arts and Crafts

It’s that time of year when teachers start to focus on children making things – holiday and seasonal decorations and gifts to display or to take home. Often the goal of these activities isn’t about children’s ideas or children’s experiences, it’s about requiring children to make a product that can be displayed to or given to adults. These products usually involve some template or design chosen by a teacher, with clear directions so what the children will produce will look “nice”. “I know this isn’t very process oriented, but the parents love it,” I heard a teacher say.

Is that the purpose of early childhood education, for children to follow teacher directions to make something the teacher thinks parents will “love”?

The purpose of art activities is for children to explore different materials, and experiment with their own creative expressions. What they make should be their own, not a reproduction of something a teacher was captivated by on Pinterest, or that the teacher has decided she wants children to make. We need to value children’s art as art – not as a means to create a product for adults.

One way to do this is to make a variety of art materials open and available to children daily. With toddlers and twos, it’s best to introduce one or two materials at a time, to allow them to explore their properties and give them a scaffolded experience in making choices of what to select. Children this age also need repeated experiences in figuring out how to use a material. Gluing paper seems easy to an adult, but it requires many steps that take time to figure out and practice. How do I get glue onto the paper? How much glue should I use? How do I make the thing I want to stick hold onto the paper? How many things can I stick on to this amount of glue?

Once children have had the opportunity to explore and understand basic materials like glue, paint, paper, and scissors, they’re ready for more choices. Setting up a table or art area with a small variety of materials can help them consider choices and continue to develop an understanding of the physical properties of different materials and objects.

And then when they’re ready, they can choose what materials they need, and how they’re going to use them. This is Art. They don’t need directions or templates or an example printed out from a webpage – they just need room to create.

Purposeful Play and Loose Parts

I’ve had a lot of discussions with teachers who are enthused about introducing loose parts to their classroom, but then become frustrated that the children don’t “do” anything with them. Or, they’re frustrated with what the children decide to “do” with them – dump them all out, mix them all together, or other things that don’t match the teacher’s dream of engaged children arranging natural materials into beautiful designs.

Sometimes children dump and mix because they’re interested in dumping and mixing. Loose parts, especially small, uniform, loose parts, are an excellent sensory experience. Pouring, filling, emptying, and mixing are all natural actions for children. Younger children in particular might find pouring and filling to be more meaningful schemas than sorting and patterning. 

But sometimes children dump and mix because they don’t know what else to do with these materials. In the absence of any other cues, they turn to the familiar – dumping out containers, or mixing objects together to make soup, or ice cream, or some type of pretend food. When we’re introducing loose parts to children we need to think not only of the materials, but what we expect the children to do with the materials. We need to set up environments that encourage children to think “What can I do with this?”

Pomp poms in a basket by themselves suggest dumping. But paired with tongs and containers, they suggest lifting, grasping, and filling. Paired with trucks or dollhouses, they suggest filling, transporting, and pretending.

Containers with different size holes provide a physics experiment of what will fit through them.

Containers of different sizes, shapes, and dimensions challenge the children to explore spatial concepts and experiment with how pieces fit next to, inside, over, and under each other, as well as concepts of number, volume, length, and ratio. 

 Small containers and defined space can encourage sorting.

And, once the children start thinking “What can I do with this”, their explorations will lead the way.