The Year in Group A

In The Hundred Languages of Children, Margie Cooper reflects on the importance of paying attention to everyday moments in order to fully understand the value of long-term project work.

Although compelling and seductive, the long-term project work of educators and children in Reggio Emilia that has captured our attention will never be fully understood until we more carefully attend to and examine deeply the style of the daily life that surrounds, lives within, and gives birth to the longer research journeys that have captured our imaginations and emotions. How much positive attention do we give ordinary moments in our programs for young children in North America? For example, the physicality children naturally express in their everyday encounters—running fingertips along a fence line, spinning and darting in open spaces, breathing deeply the fragrances of the natural world, handling objects to view every single angle—are wide ways children build understanding through natural dispositions for researching worlds polysensorially—that is, through all their sense (Cooper, 299).

The following interactive graphic created by Val celebrates some of these everyday encounters that have occurred within our Fort Hill community. It shares moments from each group in the school as they pertain to this year’s unifying idea of collaborative stewardship. We all began the year with the same unifying idea, and we all found ourselves in seemingly different places. However, with some analysis and reflection, we were able to identify common threads of thought, which we pulled out as the “big ideas” of our unifying work. It is within these spaces that our interconnectedness became illuminated.  (Introduction from Val)

It is obvious in the variety of experiences illustrated in Val’s interactive graphic that the big ideas embedded in our work connect us to one another and to our world. In Group A, our experience in forming relationships with nature took on complex and important meanings as we pursued our work. And now from our vantage point here looking back on the year, we have the chance to map out our trajectory and see our path so clearly filled with examples of empathy, agency, innovation, and identity embedded in our relationship with each other and with our environment. Having the time to reflect on the work children do is a gift that not only pushes teachers to examine methods and practices but inspires us to continue these journeys with children. 

“Nature experiences can provide an antidote to children’s stress and can simultaneously lay the groundwork for a lifetime of awareness that is rooted in the natural world, and building children’s comfort and love for the outdoors can guide them toward a lifelong practice of turning to nature for recreation, learning, and respite and form the foundation of lifelong conservation values.” 

~ David Sobel

Much of the work this year in Group A has focused on our relationships with nature. As we focused our gaze on children’s work, we looked to the ways in which they interacted with each other and with their environment. We searched for examples of empathy, caring, and nurturing, that children created in their relationships and experiences as we looked for new pathways in learning. As teachers, we wrestled with the weight of taking on the heavy concepts of climate change as we looked for ways to connect our school-wide work to experiences that did not frighten children, but instead gave them opportunities to pursue their questions and to design  ways to approach the world. The big ideas of relationships, empathy, identity, agency, and innovation became the concepts we identified to frame our work. During the first half of our year in Group A, much of our work focused on the relationships we have with each other, our community, and with nature. During the second half of the year, we explored our relationship with water. 

As we teased out big ideas in children’s deep thinking we uncovered concepts to explore. We know this gives work meaning. It lends importance and nourishment to children’s learning and supports our desire to create experiences of sustained learning that children are committed to. We looked for connections in children’s ideas and work.  And always, always, always, …we remembered our school-wide question from the beginning of the year: How can we foster connections between our children and the earth?

In Nature Preschools and Forest Kindergartens, David Sobel reflects on the importance of nature experiences for young children.

Time in nature, especially quiet, calm times spent patiently observing, daydreaming, and reflecting, can stimulate a child’s sense of beauty, appreciation, wonder, and awe. And when young children are immersed in nature, they begin to mentally explore their own place in the larger world, and begin to understand that they are but one small piece of a magical existence that extends far beyond their own bodies (Sobel, 49).

As you may recall from earlier Group A blogs, the first steps in project work always include learning about children’s knowledge, understandings, and questions. This was the path we took as we approached the topic of water-gathering in focus groups, sharing our ideas, and mapping out the next steps. In order to provide a sense of the work we accomplished, I’ve included links from previous blog posts, photo galleries, and some of the documentation which was intended for our Week Of The Young Child Exhibit. There is a lot of work and information to sort through, so take your time and look through it in pieces if you like. Each step in our work includes a short explanation and will hopefully help you to see the trajectory we followed.

In the last several months, we embarked on a broad investigation of water.   As you may recall, this work grew out of a moment during a lunchtime conversation when children were discussing where water comes from.  The conversations and pursuit of answers were exciting and kept us busy. While we continued to build our appreciation of nature and our relationship with water as part of nature, the focus of our work shifted a bit, connecting and relating more to the ways we could enter into the climate change conversation with children.  Children’s thinking led the way and often became the sparks for new work. Their ability to speak their mind and find agency in shaping their world was empowering. As you can see from their drawings and words their knowledge is vast and their thinking is deep. 

THINKING ABOUT WATER:

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT WATER?

WHAT COLOR IS WATER?

OUR EXPERIENCE WITH WATER

A SPARK:

As we continued to think about the color of water, new potentials for work emerged. We invited children to bring in photos of their family’s experiences with water.  Children were excited to share memories with one another and we were presented with such rich information to consider as we searched for directions to pursue. This is the time in project work when teachers observe, assess, look for signs, and take leaps. We know there is not just one way to go. There is no right answer. Teachers have to be willing to take risks and dive in, keeping in mind Carlina’s Rinaldi description of project work.

It evokes the idea of a dynamic process, a journey that involves the uncertainty and chance that always arises in relationships with others.  Project work grows in many directions, with no predefined progression, no outcomes decided before the journey begins.  It means being sensitive to the unpredictable results of children’s investigation and research.  The course of a project can thus be short, medium or long, continuous or discontinuous, and is always open to modifications and changes of direction. ~Carlina Rinaldi

I love the ocean.Gram lives near the ocean…I once got salty water in my mouth at the beach with Mama and Baba – it was too salty!

After collecting and analyzing our documentation, we identified several topics/ concepts that children were engaging with in their conversations and play.  These included: water treatment, the importance of clean water, pollution, pumps and pipes, sensory experiences of taste, smell, and sight, uses of water, sources of water, and agency and empowerment.  At the same time, they were busy writing stories at the writing-table. While we were deciding on paths to pursue, the story below became the impetus for thinking about the importance of oceans in our lives. We used this as a provocation in our work. It became the spark for taking us farther along on our journey to becoming caretakers of our earth and environment. 

The Ocean Story by Q.    

This is the ocean story. Two oceans were sad. Then they became friends and as they grew they got married. They started to die because there was so much plastic in there. Then a little girl came and she was a baby and she cleaned up all the trash, and then she got to be a girl and then a grown-up, and then all the trash was gone.

 

As we continued to work and think about “The Ocean Story”, we also pursued other work simultaneously. Children were deeply invested in their relationships with the oceans and the life within and connected to it. We explored ideas in a variety of experiences and media – and often questions came up in conversation , like… “What if we ‘runned’ out of water?”

S: What if everybody in the class runned out of water?

  • -We can get it from a water bottle
  • -You can get it  from a swimming lake
  • -You can buy it from the store
  • -Maybe, get it from a sink.
  • -Sinks sometimes run out of water.
  • -They never run out of water.
  • -My dad’s sink run out of water before, so some of them can.
  • -That never happens to us, when we turn it on we get water and water and water and water.
  • -You could still get more water from a sink, there are lots of different places.
  • -You could collect it from outside.  You could have a rain bucket and collect all the droplets.
  • -We could go to the waterfall, and collect it, and boil it, and we could put it in the water cans.

Teacher: What does boiling the water do?

  • -The water from the outside has outside germs. …That you cannot see.That’s right!
  • -Germs are bad and they’re tiny.
  • -But the good news is we have germs inside of us.
  • -So you boil it and you can drink it. Water helps us grow, so if we run out of water we wouldn’t grow, we would just stay as we are, and food wouldn’t grow.
  •  

LEARNING ABOUT SEA LIFE:

Children’s interests spread as they sought information about sea creatures; researching and drawing representations of different animals and plants. 

 

MAKING THREE-DIMENSIONAL SEA CREATURES:

Our maker space took on important work, as well, as children turned their visual representations into three- dimensional sea creatures with our “beautiful stuff” materials.  During this time, particular interests emerged. For instance, very large creatures, mermaids, and the girls from “The Ocean Story” seemed to keep cropping up. 

PROJECTING SEA LIFE IN THE CLASSROOM:

We continued to have discussions about the oceans and it was clear that children had great concern for keeping the oceans clean.  Using overhead projections, children had opportunities for new experiences and seeing these creatures enlarged on the wall in the classroom brought forth so much compassionate thinking about caring for life in the water. This was the point when we began to expand “The Ocean Story” into a story that we could all take part in writing-

 

 

THINKING ABOUT SIZE OF SEA CREATURES

 

EXPLORING IDEAS OF HOW TO PROTECT THE OCEANS:

COLLABORATIVE STOYWRITING EXPERIENCE: 

This year, as teachers,  we often grappled with ways to connect our school-wide work on climate change to experiences that were not frightening to children, while also knowing that we didn’t want to back down from it. As we tried to find ways to expand and promote, even if just in some small way, the human commitment to protecting our planet, we looked to the children and were inspired by their capacity to communicate such important ideas.  While we felt as if we were just gaining momentum with more ideas to think about, we had to end our year earlier than we expected. Our hopes that the relationships children built and continue to build with nature would not only enrich their lives but would foster emotional connections of empathy and stewardship to fuel their work, empower their awareness of the beauty and value in nature, and to become agents of change in solving problems. It feels like even in our abbreviated year, we were fortunate to witness these ideals come to life in the collaborative story writing experience of the children in our classroom. So, please enjoy the work of Group A in “The Girl and Her Sister Who Save The Ocean”. 

THE GIRL AND HER SISTER WHO SAVE THE OCEAN

“The ultimate gift we can give the world is to grow [children] into adult[s] who are independent thinkers, compassionate doers, conscious questioners, radical innovators, and passionate peacemakers. Our world doesn’t need more adults who blindly serve the powerful because they’ve been trained to obey authority without question. Our world needs more adults who challenge and question and hold the powerful accountable.” ~L.R. Knost