playing= coping

How many times have you had "that child" who clings to mom, who fights to hold on to her, and when mom is finally out of his grasp, who cries by the door?  You know the one I am talking about.  The one who hangs out at your elbow all day, just fighting away the sniffles?  No, he doesn't care how nice you are, how friendly, how reassuring.  He doesn't want to play.  He doesn't want to hear a story. He wants to GO HOME! It is a frustrating thing, sometimes for teachers.

99% of the time, with a little encouragement, with a little adult interaction, the child will eventually find their way over to an area of interest, play, and forget about home.  The child will have fun, but what is really happening here?  The child is coping.   (The 1% that is not included in this is the one child I ever had who didn't play after an entire day, no matter how much I encouraged.  The next day started the same way, I asked him "if you could do anything you wanted what would you do?"  He answered "go home."  "What if you couldn't go home but could do anything else?" "Cry," he answered.  I told him, firmly but lovingly, that he could cry if he needed to but we, he and I were going to play.  I gave him a list of three things that his mom said he liked to do at home that we could "play together" and said he had to choose one.  He chose drawing, and after a bit stopped crying, and never had a day like that afterward. Some children have to be taught how to cope).  There are a million important things that play "does" for children, but sometimes the most important is that it enables them to cope, and to cope with something that is (for them) very traumatic.  Many of these children have never been with this many children at once, some have never been in the care of someone they haven't know for their entire lives, and the ones that have get to have a "babysitter" in their own home.  It is a tough, tough milestone; but they are hardwired to cope by playing.

Other times play- coping takes a different form.  Sometimes children use play to make scary things that are upsetting to them okay.  For instance the other day a child passing from one side of the room picked up our telephone and screamed into it "OKAY! I ALREADY PAID THE FREAKING BILL!!"  Slammed the phone down and moved on to play in the art area.  Of course we all know there are far more scary things than this that some children are trying to cope with around the world, but this is a small example.

Other times, they are coping with disappointments, rules, or change.  Today one of the children explained to her "baby" why they couldn't go out.  "I'm sorry Charlie, but it is raining out so we can't walk to the post office.  Don't cry we can go another day.  I know you are sad, but we will go another day."

Of course these are verbal examples of children coping, but just imagine how much they are coping with that is NOT verbalized.

Yes, when children play they learn, grow, develop, and cope.  Such a little thing can be so important.

Cave of Wonders

Inspired by the fantastic Teacher Tom and his blog entry on a "light and dark den,"  I started begging my parents for dark colored sheets and disco balls for my vision of how I could replicate this in someway.   When I finally had a few sheets and had rounded up some Christmas bulbs that were quite reminiscent of disco balls (and one "modern" light disco ball to be used at a later date), I assembled this cave under the train table.  I had to leave the little hole in the front so that I can see what is going on in there, for safety reasons and because of regulations.

Inside there were a slew of pillows, three mini disco balls attached to the underside of the table in a way conducive to spinning, some glow in the dark stars and moons on the underside of the table (also a parent donation), and three flashlights.

They were mesmerized by the light reflecting off the mirrored balls....

... and the patterns made on the walls, "ceiling," and floor....

They made shadows on the wall and told ghost stories.

Stories about kid- eating bears...

and even a scary story about "bloody bones" passed down from Dad.

And when it was time for lunch, they begged for more time in the cave, and were only convinced to leave with promises of doing it again this after noon and the next day.

It was a place of discovery, a place to bond, a place to escape, and a place to enjoy a little bit of quiet.

The kids called it a "cave," and I jokingly called it a "cave of wonders,"  but that is what stuck with them, and we cannot wait to spend more time in the cave of wonders tomorrow.  :-)

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.  

An awesome creation

I say this a hundred times, but the thing about teaching is, the kids teach me all the time.  For the last few days we have had water in the sensory bins in my room.  This is nothing unusual.  Water is a pretty common sensory bin filler.  In it I placed many scoops, funnels, sponges, spoons, etc.  I also had a wheel in it (always fun for the first ten minutes), an old fashioned hand mixer,  and two turkey basters.

In this water table there are several things that they explored.  I added soap yesterday so they spent a lot of time creating many bubbles using the mixer and sponges to whisk up and squeeze out bubbles.  I added ice and they scooped and melted ice.  They also put the the funnel wide side up over the turkey baster end so that it extended the length.  

The Discovery

The greatest discovery, however, came a half an hour before lunch.  One little girl, we will call Brenda, was occupied with the idea of getting the turkey baster to squirt straight up in the air.  She couldn't because there was not enough water in the bulb to go up the length of the tube, not even to just pour and dribble over the sides.  Seeing this, a friend, we will call Georgia, attached a right side- up funnel to the upside down turkey baster and began pouring water into the funnel.  It took a while for her to realize that she had to squeeze the bulb of the turkey baster to get the water to run down into the baster and not remain in the funnel, but once she did it was fantastic.  They would shoot water  out the top of the funnel by squeezing the bulb of the turkey baster-  taking turns being the girl to stabilize the device, and the girl to squeeze the bulb.  They would refill and do it over and over, now adding another friend, Tina, to the mix.  It wasn't long before the entire room was watching these three girls.  Sometimes it shot out with a kind of coarse mist and other times just a thin stream.  Sometimes they would add too much water and it would just bubble over in the funnel.  Sometimes the water shot out only a few inches, other times it hit the ceiling (about 9 feet high)  and traveled a few feet across the room!

What they learned

So what was the point of this?  Was this just "another day" at play?  No, no, this was something big.  At lunch most days I go around the table and ask each child what they liked about today.  Every single child said that the thing they liked best today was when Brenda and Georgia were shooting the water out of their creation, even the ones who were just watching.  They learned something that day, they learned about the power of water, the power of suction, and the power of air.  They may not know these words yet, (although I probably mentioned them during the course of this activity) but when they encounter the word "suction" they have a concrete experience to attach it to.  

More than this, they learned about team work.  They could never have done this without an extra set of hands to stabilize the device.  

They also created, on their own, a simple machine; If that does not empower a child, if that does not build self esteem, if that does not inspire them to build and create, if that does not create passion for them, I don't know what does.  

This will be a lasting memory for many of these children, and sometimes positive memories that contain them doing GREAT things, is what it is all about.  

A lesson for you, a lesson for me

Like I said at the beginning, these children teach me all the time, and boy did I learn something today.  Three and a half years ago when I started teaching this discovery NEVER would have happened.  I would have been too wrapped up in getting them to keep the water in the sensory bins on the table.  Yes, I had a lot of cleaning today, and yes, one little girl slipped and fell, but that same girl refused ice because she wanted to get back to the activity as soon as she could.  They had so much fun today, and they worked so hard, and took turns and worked together.  I could never teach that by showing them how to do this, (though truthfully I never would have thought of using those two tools that way- my imagination is limited as an adult, not to mention my inclination to explore or try something that doesn't make "sense"), they taught themselves how to make it.  I also could not teach them something like the necessity of sharing and team work.  I could tell them "if you share, if you take turns, and if you work together, it would be more fun,"  but they never would have believed me, or really even internalized that statement.  Yet, they were sharing, not because they knew that "good" girls share, but because if they didn't share the other friend would stop helping, making it impossible to do, and because it is more fun to experience  something like that with a friend.  Joy shared is joy doubled, (I think that is how the saying goes),  and indeed the sheer delight those girls experienced was contagious.  I know beyond a doubt that this was better than any "teacher project" they could have done.  Preschoolers are not designed to sit at a desk and listen to a teacher teach AT them.  Sitting around and talking about water, about snow, about rain, is not really learning for them.  They have to see it, touch it, play with it, manipulate it, and do what perhaps some overly discerning adult would tell them not to do.  Children can harness potential, passion, and creativity in a way adults only dream they could.   

It is times like this that I wonder how many times I am holding them back from a major discovery by putting unnecessary limits and boundaries in their world.  By telling them not to do something or even by telling the TO DO something- am I hindering their natural instinct to learn and explore their environment?  More and more I realize that, as silly as it sounds, my role should be a "facilitator of learning, "  not a "teacher" in the traditional sense.  It is my job to know what they NEED to learn and to bring them the tools, the space, the time to learn it.  Everyday we as teachers, (or sometimes we as parents), have to create the environment and circumstances for children to learn.  These children teach me how to teach them everyday, and sometimes they teach me how to make a fountain/ shooter/ geyser/ out of a turkey baster and funnel.  

Education Reform: Why do we trust politicians with your child's education?

I used to say that I wasn't interested in politics.  The thing is, that politics affect all of us; and as a parent or a teacher the rumblings of Washington are very significant to us.  


Early educators everywhere are being called to push math and science and literacy.  So my question is, what exactly do they presume that we are doing? Playing, I guess.  However, if the education system is failing, if the education system is getting worse- isn't it time to turn around from the direction educational politics are taking us and perhaps ask someone who knows how to educate children?  Isn't it time to ask teachers?  


Why are we asking business men how to best educate our children?  Why are we asking politicians, lawyers, and anyone but teachers how to educate our children? Do you think that business men, lawyers, and political- science students studied child development in depth? 


Take writing.  Children cannot write until they have the proper hand development to do so (this usually happens at about 4), and until the have the fine muscle coordination to do so.  They have to through 5 stages of scribbling to be able to write.  If they are never allowed to scribble because it is "playing,"  how then, are can they ever learn to write? Furthermore they need to have an understanding of words and how they are used, that letters are part of words, and words are used to communicate.  They need to understand the connection between printed and spoken word.  

"Many people today struggle and give up communicating with others because their linguistic foundation is weak." -Bev Bos  

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but the bottom line is, in a DEVELOPMENTALLY APPROPRIATE CLASSROOM children are learning what they need to, when they need to.  Expecting a child who as not gained the proper experiences to read and write (after only having been on the planet for three years) is like teaching a seventh grader, who has not yet mastered even algebra (let alone trig or geometry), calculus.  It might be possible, but it makes no sense and what important mathematical discoveries did he or she miss?  I'll go one more: it is like cutting of his or her hands and expecting them to play catch.  


Example One:  When children are playing, they are learning.  Playing in a sensory bin of mixed beans they may (and probably will) practice sorting, practice counting, examine and label colors and more. 

Example Two:  Using pipettes with runny paints on a paper towel canvas put on an easel allows develops fine motor skills that they need to write and cut.  It also allows them to mix colors and see what happens.  They can also observe absorption and the effects of gravity.  In the words of Bev Bos children need "experiences to attach words to," (Turning Over the Page, Bev Bos).  An activity like this and a billion others that are happening in preschool rooms all over the country, and the world, everyday.  

Here are blog entries from other people that really should be read:

Let the children play: they play but do they write?

Teacher Tom's Blog: Habits

Janet Lansbury: 4 Reasons to Ditch Academic Preschools

Not Just Cute: Play vs. Academics: A False Dichotomy

Books:  

Turning Over the Page:  A Rant For Children's Play, Bev Bos

The Power of Play, David Elkind

Play = Learning, Singer, Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek 

Painting six ways

#1: Drizzle painting: for this I gave them three containers of tempera paint with pipettes.  I used powdered tempera mixed to a consistency thick enough to stick to the paper towels, but thin enough to run down the paper.

This girl was particularly interested in how high up on the paper she could put the paint and get it to still drip on the floor.  (Process!)

The girl who made this painting was persistently trying to make vertical lines; she said to me, in only a slightly exasperated voice, "even when I make lines across, they still drip down." 

#2: Color mixing. This activity is pretty self explanatory, but I cannot say enough about it.  They loved this activity (boys too) and created some fantastic shades.  See at the end of this section for a Bev Bos video that inspired it.  

video:

#3:  Dough Paint:  I found this in the Science Arts book.  The paint is made of equal parts salt, flour, and water, with a little paint added.  The book calls is "Sparkle Dough Paint," but I wouldn't say it actually "sparkles."  None the less it is a fun art activity.  They helped me funnel it into squeeze bottles and off they went.

Most of them chose to do "fold over" paintings, I did not suggest it, but one child did it and it caught on like wildfire.  (The term "Fold Over Painting" is borrowed from Bev Bos.

I love the one above.  It took forever to dry (three days) but I thought it was such a creative use of the materials. 

I love how this one (above) was folded at an angle to make an interesting shape.

#4:  Salad Spinner Art: This is one of everyones' favorite ways to paint at school.  All it takes is some precut paper, some liquid water colors, pipettes, and a salad spinner.  Like most of these painting options- no instructions are needed.

Add as much or as little paint as desired.

Spin for as long and and as fast as desired.

Ta- Da!

#5: Bubble Painting:  Some children a little older than my class did this project and was fascinated by making really cool designs on their paper with the over flowing bubbles but my class wasn't really interested in what was happening to their paper.  They were interested in what was happening in the cup: the bubbles building, the bubbles overflowing, the bubbles popping.  This being said, we switched from paper to paper towels so we could do more bubbles faster and clean up faster.  

#6:  Incline Painting (with cars and marbles!):  This activity was inspired by one of my favorite blogs:  Teacher Tom's Blog.  Now, mine was not as complex as Teacher Tom's, but I am not a builder, or a "tinkerer" or anything of the sort.  

My simple solution was to adjust only one side of our adjustable table.  I put a sensory pan at the bottom to catch the cars and left the roll of paper on the floor by the legs, pulling the paper over the top and cutting it off for the next group.  

This was pretty fun, and kept the boys interest for more than ten minutes!

The evolution of paintings and the painter

Admittedly, I did not know that much when I first starting teaching.  I made a lot of mistakes, and learned a lot along the way. (To be fair to myself I had a lot of good instincts and completed each year far above just survival).  Still, looking back, I wish I had known what I know now, and I am sure that as time goes on I will wish that again for the present time.


When I first started teaching I could not figure out why most of the paintings my students made looked something like this:

These paintings are actually a little more colorful and imaginative than most of the others I had back then.  Every time I "let them" paint, this is what they made: brown pictures, or various shades of brownish- blackish green pictures, usually covered with paint coast to coast.  Why?  I could see in their drawing that they had miraculous figures and doodles, but why didn't they translate over to painting?  On one hand, it was okay, because they liked painting and painting is a great art/ sensory/ motor activity.  On the other hand, I couldn't help but feel something was wrong, especially when I saw other teachers had their class creating paintings something like this:

When I broke down and asked a teacher I knew why her children's pictures were different than mine she said that she made them not mix the colors on their paper. There was a voice in my head that said that this could not be right.  Children needed to be able to experiment! They needed to have control over their own creative process.  Still, I didn't know what I was doing wrong.  

I started trying to use water colors; the results for some children seemed "better" but many of the children still ended up making pictures that looked like their other paintings, just watered down.  

My revelation came on a day near a holiday when I had just four children there.  I got out the paints and put them on the table with paper and let them paint; nothing was different... yet.  They asked if they could paint another, and I let them, (still nothing different), but they continued to ask for more paper to paint more and I continued to let them paint.  I let them paint as many pictures as they wanted.  

Then, to my amazement, the figures from their drawings started to appear! They made interesting designs that I had never seen before and experimented with the paint in new ways! Paintings that probably looked something like this:

I am horribly embarrassed by not knowing this when I started teaching, and I wish often that I could go back to that class and LET THEM PAINT!  But, I am sharing this because maybe someone else can learn from it, or maybe someone else made the same mistake.

Two paintings three times a week is not enough.  Children learn through repetition and experimentation (which I knew, but didn't apply to art).  Every time a child steps up to the art supplies they are experimenting.  Every time a child uses a new art supply they have to learn as many possibilities for that art supply that they can.  They can't decide NOT to paint their entire paper brown until they know that mixing all the colors together and rubbing them across the paper makes a brown, crunchy painting.  They cannot create many possibilities until they have made others and eliminated other possibilities as being "undesirable" to themselves.  Every time I put out a new supply, most children make a brown picture or a picture with a lot of mixed colors and a lot of paint.  (In the words of Bev Bos "children need to use too much").  I see this over and over again.  Not only do they learn about the texture of the paint and about color mixing, but they are teaching themselves self regulation.  They are teaching themselves how much paint is "too much,"  that all the colors together make brown, and they don't like brown. Until they decide what they do not want to do, until they have eliminated that possibility, they cannot possibly do anything else... and how could I expect them to? 

The way to teach them how to make purple is not to tell them and then show them, it is to give them the materials, walk away, and let them figure it out for themselves. Furthermore, telling them not to mix colors is cheating them from a learning experience, not teaching them SELF regulation (since the regulation is, after all, being done by the teacher), and I am certain that this can qualify as some sort of torture since we KNOW they are just dying to mix those paints. 

Now that I know this, I do almost every art project at least two days in a row and we have painting or some other new art medium EVERYDAY.  The children can make as many paintings or pictures as time allows for.  I wish I had known this my first few months, so that the children had a FULL YEAR to paint  and create like children ought to be able to.  I cheated them, for months, I cheated them.  In the end, however, it is them I have to thank, for teaching me how to be a better teacher.  

Thinking in and out of the box (day I)

Before starting this blog I want to make sure to give credit to Teacher Tom.  It is from his blog that I had the idea for this activity, although, as you can see, he did it on boxing day (December 26) making it twice as cool as doing it in January. 


Previous to Thursday, I collected several boxes, cardboard toilet paper and paper towel tubes, and some other odds and ends. There seemed to be no limit for the possibilities of the boxes.  

Two pairs of children made side by side houses in the dishwasher boxes, adding a smaller box to the front of each "house" for more space.  In the left house was inhabited by a girl and a boy, but the girl stayed in and the boy brought her anything she asked for in the "house" and kept other children from going in.  The pair of girls who inhabited the left side were very active; they went straight to work improving their home. 

Other children had very different designs for their boxes. 

One boy pushed this box up calling it a "skyscraper" but then changing mind, calling it the "leaning tower of pizza" instead when it was accidentally propped up on another box. 

He next realized that he could move the box and use it for a basketball hoop.

Other boys wasted no time in joining the game.  

Meanwhile, other children busied themselves coloring on various types of cardboard and styrofoam.  They loved the "squeeky" sound of markers on styrofoam, and the "bumping" sound of markers on corregated cardboard. 

Little Opal colored all of the really big letters on this box. While she colored she kept saying "not O, not O, not O."  I later heard her tell her friends she was going to color O's pink and all the other letters blue- there weren't any O's though.  

Many of the colored pieces of styrofoam were especially pretty.  

While the rest of the class was coloring, Tommy up-ended one of the "house" boxes, and decided he wanted to go down the top of the chimney (box) like Santa.

"Guys! Can someone help me get in this chimney?  I can't get in it."  No one came to help, so he made a new plan.

"Miss Elizabeth, I made steps and a railing to get into the box!" Unfortunately, they fell before he ever made it to the box and a few girls....

Figured out that you could just lift up the bottom of the box and climb under.  They claimed the "chimney" as a new place to color. (Whoever said boys were better at spacial problem solving than girls?)

 The boxes underwent several different arrangements and uses.  

One group found a way to to hold on to markers and toys that kept rolling away and getting lost under boxes and other materials.  

Another child took advantage of an empty box to "read a book" that she made out of a piece of folded cardboard. 

The children could have played at this activity for hours more than they did (which is why we did it again on Friday).  To help clean up they came up with the idea of sorting the smaller pieces into boxes- styrofoam, tubes, and small boxes- an excellent system.

I will upload pictures and write about the boxes on Friday soon!