Building experiences

As teachers and well educated parents, we know that when children build they are not really just playing.  When children build they are gaining spacial understanding, learning about principles of gravity, engaging creativity, and learning basic principles of, well, building.  They are not naming these principles, but rather simply learning from trial and error; they have no scholarly understanding of these things- but they have a real understanding.  Building is also often a social activity, requiring cooperation, and  resolution skills.
As teachers and parents, we know these things and so we give the children blocks to build with and look for new building experiences for them.


Here are two building experiences recently offered in our classroom:

The first idea is from Bev Bos.  A simple idea- building with hangers.  In the first trial- I hung a hanger from the ceiling and left a bin of hangers for them to use.  They got right to it, but eventually it turned into a game of swinging the hanger to knock the other hangers off.  Still a learning experience, but it made me a little nervous about some one getting hit with the hangers.  Of course no one did, we took precautions and they made a game of falling to the floor and "ducking" whenever someone swung the hangers.
None the less, I thought maybe we should come up with another option, so I took the clothes off the rack from the dress up area and put a couple hangers on the rack to create the environment.  I liked this much better.  Unfortunately, they did not.  They fiddled with it for about 20 minutes, revisited it once for 20 minutes more, but after that it sat just like this for the rest of the day.



The next idea is from Lisa Murphy.  On the table I put out an assortment of small blocks in various sizes, large and small Popsicle sticks, and shaving cream.  Without instruction they immediately started using shaving cream as a building aid.
Some of them used their fingers to spread it, some used popsicle sticks to spread it and some of them didn't spread it at all- just put some on and squished another block on top.




Some children built a structured creation.

Others leaned on the adhesive quality of the shaving cream to make a less structured creation.

Still others weren't interested in it as an adhesive- they used it to cover block structures that they built.

The kids were nuts over the blocks and shaving cream- it is definitely an activity we will repeat soon, as I have daily requests for repeats since the first!

Failure: Not something to be discounted

As adults, we are afraid of failure and often are more than willing to pass this fear on to children.  Luckily, the world of adults and the world of kids are, well, worlds apart.

Today my class decided, (while playing on the balance beam), that they didn't want to walk on the balance beam, they wanted to "swim" under the balance beam like a "bridge."  Since the balance beam is about three inches off the floor, this made for an interesting proposition.


Miss Elizabeth, can we make the balance beam higher so we can swim under it?
Yes, what are you going to use?


Failure #1:  A dispute erupts: Some children want to use chairs, others want to use blocks.  Screaming starts, and I step in as a mediator.
"How do you think we can decide whether to use blocks or chairs?"
Eenie Meenie Miney Mo!
A vote!
"Should we use Eenie Meenie Miney Mo, or vote?"
Vote! 
You have to love democracy. Finally after taking a vote, it is decided that they will use chairs first.  A few "you're not coming to my birthday"s and "I don't want to play anymore"s, and the children with chairs were on their way.


Failure #2: They tried putting chairs under either end of the balance beam at first, but couldn't get the balance beam to stay on them. After witnessing the first failure, the children who wanted blocks decided to come back offering a different way to use the chairs:


Failure #3:  They tried resting the balance beam on a row of chairs, but then they couldn't crawl under because the space between the chair legs was too narrow.


Failure #4:  The initial craftsmenship of the the blocks that would support the balance beam was far too shaky to actually support it even for a second.

Failure #5:  The new, more stable block supports, in actuality did not make the balance beam much higher at all, at least not tall enough to crawl under.

Success! They put the supports that the balance beam comes with on top of the the block supports and are able to crawl under the "bridge."  

Failure #6:  One child insisted on lifting up one end to put more blocks under to make it higher which resulted in the demolition to the end shown below.  Angry voices shouted "hey stop!"  "you're breaking it!" Still, the builder continued, until Daisy walked over and said, "look over there.  You are breaking that end," while pointing to the damaged end, "can you please stop doing that?"  The demolisher stopped and helped to repair the other end.  They rebuilt the broken end and made the ends level again.  

It is very hard, sometimes, as an adult to not jump in and help.  It is hard not to "just show them" how to put the balance beam on blocks so that it is high enough to crawl under.  It is hard not to jump in and stop the child who is demolishing one end of the supports.  However, if I had stepped in to help the first time that the balance beam could not be supported by their designs, what would they have learned?  They would have learned that grown ups can do it.  That's it.  

Because they were allowed to do it themselves, they worked together on a group goal.  They used communication and conflict resolution skills; once they had help to resolve a conflict, but they resolved a major conflict on their own and several smaller conflicts on their own as well.  They learned many, many principles of building, and enhanced their spacial understanding.  They had to deal with principles of balance and cause and effect.  

Whenever a child "fails" or "does it wrong,"  they learn to do it better; they eliminate a possibility, and go on to a new attempt or possibility.  Sometimes they implement their new understanding immediately, and sometimes, they store the information for another day.  Still other times, they need to repeat the same thing to fully understand.  This process is important, and it is an age old practice:  trial and error.  

This endurance, this perseverence, we can only hope will stay with them when they face adversity, adversity that everyone has to face in one form or another as a youngster or an adult.  We hope that in letting THEM make mistakes and seeing achievement rise from those mistakes, that they will carry this lesson with them, that they will have a undying belief and confidence in themselves that will carry them through their lifetime.  

Blogs and articles on related topics:

Habits by Teacher Tom

Evolution of Paintings and the Painter (Little Busy Bodies)

Time to play: the vital connection between play and learning

Praising Children, Risking Failure by Janet Lansbury

Everything I know about parenting I learned from Mythbusters by Kevin Makice  (I believe it was KJ who pointed me to this blog)

For those of you wondering what happened after the "final" achievement of building the bridge, they celebrated and crawled under it for about two minutes; It was, after all, all about the process.  "We really just needed a boat to sit on, so the sharks don't eat us."  They told me, as they all sat on the balance beam.  

ice, failure, spiders, and pests

Do you ever have times when the "lesson" you planned for a paticular day completely flops?  It doesn't happen to me very often, but whenever it does I am always surprised that something ALWAYS emerges from that failure.
Today, I had planned a big ice activity (I will spare all of the details until this project is successful).   We put containers with water outside and I asked for a hypothesis about what would happen.  There were two answers:  1. The water would evaporate  and 2.  It would turn into ice.  However, when we checked it an hour and a half later NOTHING had happened, (although the children astutely observed that the water got really cold).  The reason?  The temperature outside was 33 degrees.  SERIOUSLY?  33 DEGREES?  I was frustrated.  Why didn't it freeze, Miss Elizabeth?  Well, it seems it is not quite cold enough outside.  It feels cold to us!  Yes, it is cold but it needs to be a little colder, 32 degrees, to freeze, and I just checked the thermometer and it is 33 degrees.  Do you think we should leave it overnight and see if it freezes?  YES!!
Surprisingly, they weren't frustrated by this, and didn't seem to mind waiting until tomorrow.

We went back inside and play resumed as usual.  I set to work hanging clothes line across the ceiling to hang pictures up on.  Apparently, according to "the regs" I have too much art on the walls- only "20% of the wall can have paper on it,"  so as a solution, and so that we can still have children's art work in the room,  I am hanging some on the ceiling.

*instructions for the art on the front row can be found here, and for the back row here.

What are you doing, Miss Elizabeth?  Hanging some rope.  For what? To hang paintings.  Why? To decorate our room and display your art work.  Can we decorate our room? If you want to.  What do you need? Yarn.

So I gave them some yarn, and they started "decorating" the area where the blocks are kept.  It started out as just strands of yarn here and there, but eventually they decided to make a "spider web."  

As you can see they worked very diligently, both boys and girls together.  

We left it up for the entirety of the day.  They enjoyed adding to it and crawling under and over the strings.  

The spider web did its job and captured a pest!

A little spider even slept in the web during nap time.  (You can see the blue cot in the corner of this photo).  

The spider also got our table.  The kids thought it was interesting that the table was round, but the spider web was square because of the legs.  

All and all it was a good day.  They also played limbo and jump rope with the string.  So I guess the moral of the story not to fear when my plans don't work out, the children will always find something else to learn from.