Hi everyone! I'm sitting in a hotel in Chicago, the windy city! Not half as cold as where I come from though. In Edmonton it is still -7C (20ishF) and there is still snow on the ground.
Welcome to those of you who introduced themselves this week:
Katie Keller, Columbus, OH, USA
Stacy Wilder, Providence RI, USA
Jeanne Skidmore, Houston TX, USA
It was good to hear from you and to know who and where you are.
Each week I have found your contributions to the list make me think further about what we need to know more about to really understand project work better. This last week there have been several people on two or three early childhood lists who have asked for activity ideas for children in relation to specific topics.
There has not been an overwhelming response from other list members. In wondering why this might be the case I examined my own response to these requests for ideas.
I am drawn back again to thinking about the distinctions between thematic units and projects. If you are doing a thematic unit, maybe you are planning to schedule sets of activities in centres throughout the two or three weeks of the work. The teacher is making the decisions about what will be done when. The children may rotate through the activities getting a chance to undertake each one in turn. All children will be able to complete all the activities in the course of the unit.
A project is likely to look very different from this.
Last week I wrote in response to Shirley who is embarking on a project on trees. I described how the study of trees might get started in that class. The description I gave could fit any topic.
As a teacher doing a project you would find out what the children's experience with the topic is in the first phase of the work. Through helping the children to share and compare their experiences you would learn what knowledge they already had as a result of those experiences. You would learn who were the experts among the children and who were the children with the least experience and knowledge. You would help the children formulate questions to investigate and consider ways they might find answers to the questions they were interested in.
You would also request help from parents with special expertise in the topic through their work, personal contacts, training, hobbies, past experience, etc. You would let the parents know what you were about to study so that they could help their children by talking with them about the topic.
You would plan the second phase of the project on the basis of what you learned about the children in the first phase. This would involve planning field work, visits to field sites, guest experts coming to the classroom. These arrangements would depend on the interest of the children, the questions they and you were wanting to follow up. The follow-up activities to each piece of real world investigation would depend on what had happened and what information had interested the children most.
You can see from this description that what happens during the first phase of a project will directly affect your plans for the study of the topic during the second phase of the work. It is for this reason that it is not easy for someone who doesn't know your class, your school, your neighborhood or your local resources to be able to make suggestions as to what activities the children might undertake during the project on your chosen topic.
What would be increasingly helpful as this list develops, is for teachers to write about activities children and teachers undertook in their projects with some brief description of how they came to decide on those activities. It would be helpful to learn how an activity comes to be relevant and interesting because of what happened earlier in the project.
Now I can here some of you saying, "But how then does a teacher who has not done projects before learn about what activities the children can undertake during a project?"
At this point I find it much easier to respond. I can make a quite precise list of the different kinds of INVESTIGATION activities and REPRESENTATION activities which children could engage in during a project on any topic.
Some friends of mine in Washington (Jill Burnes, Sharon Lingbloom, et al. at Carl Cozier Elementary School, Bellingham, WA, Principal Greg Freeman) have listed these using the mnemonic AERO.
A: ask someone who knows, gather data (survey)...
E: explore or experiment... try out your ideas to see if you can learn more about the topic this way...
R: research using secondary sources, books, videos, photos, museums, etc....
O: observe, look closely at real objects, do observational drawing, time sampling, etc....
Field work is very important here. We have tended traditionally to prefer secondary sources of information in school rather than primary sources. However, it is very helpful to young children to see the real things, go to the real places, speak to the real people... Real objects can be brought into the classroom, visiting experts can be interviewed in the school or centre. Field work does not necessarily involve going out.
There are many kinds of representation, from the simplest to the most complex, involving drawing, photos, model construction, writing, numbers, and combined in various forms of diagram or spatial arrangement, as in a poster, a book or a bulletin board.
Different children's work can be combined in any of the more complex forms of representation. Children can work alone or collaboratively, they can combine drawing, math and language in their representations.
As you can see, perhaps through this description, the words 'investigation' and 'representation' offer an increased complexity to the term "activity". Yes, the children are active. But in the context of a project they take ownership of the work through being involved in
All children in the class can learn from all of the work that is going on, whether they are themselves directly involved or not. Projects offer many more possible activities for children to become involved in than any one child could possible undertake by themselves. This is one of the characteristics of project work which make it so impressive to look at. The children in one class can undertake a remarkable range of activities and complete an interesting collection of work which can be completed to a very high standard. This is because the children become committed to what they are doing and take ownership of the finished product because of the choice they have had in determining its final form. Another characteristic of project activities is their open endedness. It should be possible for children of very different abilities, prior experience and levels of interest to engage with an activity or a task at different levels of involvement. Making a book about some aspect of the topic for instance may be a very simple matter for one child, just folding a piece of paper in two, putting title and author name on the front of the four resulting pages, a couple of pictures with dictated captions inside and "the end" on the outside cover at the back. For another child a book may take weeks to complete and be a very complex affair with acknowledgements, ISBN #, contents page, index, etc.
Some children work best when they can undertake many tasks at low levels of involvement, others prefer a few tasks but considerable engagement and time taken with each. The children can learn from the products of each other's work, how there is always a choice to be made between depth and coverage. Most children will work on one or two activities in depth, taking several days or weeks to complete those. At other times throughout the project however, these children can also be more superficially involved with a variety of activities, sampling them as it were.
For example a child might be particularly interested in tires, perhaps because of an uncle's business, and be making a book about tires. The book may be added to over several weeks. Throughout the project this child might also engage in dramatic play, paint pictures, or construct with blocks in relation to the project topic of 'vehicles which travel by road.'
As a teacher you would wish children to be able to appreciate for themselves the value of having experience with both in depth work on a complex presentation of information (a book, a poster, a board game, etc.), and single, simpler representations (drawing, role play or construction). It is also important to remember that these simpler activities can also have complex manfestations if the child wishes... a drawing can be complex and take several days, as can construction. Dramatic play can evolve over weeks with a few children leading the activity there. Yet a few children may enter the play only rarely and then at a very simple and superficial level.
The teacher can make provision for such differences in level of engagement and enable the children to appreciate which of their friends are particularly interested or expert in which aspects of the study.
Well, fellow list members, I wonder if any of you are still with me??
I'd better finish here for this week. Plesase send us examples of activities which you have enabled children to carry out in response to their curiosity, the field work done, ideas they thought of themselves, suggestions from parent experts, etc. etc.?? I would like you to be able to help to create a list of examples of activities which you, the teacher, facilitated in response to the learning opportunities generated through the ongoing project work. These may have involved groups of children or just one child.
Your contribution of just one small story of this kind will be much appreciated! We can all learn so much from this technology if we can exploit its capacity to enable us to share our experience!
What was that saying?.. "Many hands make light work." How about "Many fingers make light work of sharing for all of us!"
Have a good week!!
(April 1 '96)