My Thoughts As We Work Through The Learning Processes In A Makerspace Classsroom

It is hard to believe that nearly two months have passed since our school year started. As the beginning of the year has progressed I am again driven by the children that enter the class with a passion and desire to learn. I always want to be a person that enters each of their lives and inspires them to think, wonder, question and create. I aspire to always offer these opportunities through exploration and inquiry.

Some of the ideas that have been evolving this year are around Makey Makey and robotics. The students were given opportunities to figure out how this Makey Makey might work. Observing and documenting their thinking was a real pleasure for me as the educator to observe.

As we questioned, wondered and explored, “what is Makey Makey and how does it work”, we discovered learning takes patience and perseverance.

Teacher Questions

How do we make it work?

Why is there playdough at this centre?

What does the playdough and wires have to do with the piano?

How did you make the piano work?

Student questions as we explored

Miles asked "why is it only that one working?" He was referring to the piano key and only one was working.

He continued to connect playdough onto the alligator clips, trying to make other keys work.

Later in the morning Dmitry says, "Maybe we can put more wires", as he was pointing at the Makey Makey.

Quinn asks, "is that a robot piano"

Teacher- what do you think?

Quinn - yes.

Quinn had not been first on the list to explore, yet he kept gravitating over to the table as others were exploring. He was super keen to get his hands in there and try out what was making the "robot piano" work. He demonstrated patience and perseverance through the exploration process.

When students were asked how this might work. Some responses were:

"I think you have to find a certain plug"

"The red wire connects to the computer"

"Maybe we need to make it warm." Referring to the playdough.

Eventually students started to realize you could play the piano with the computer keyboard. The question then changed from "how do you make this work" to "why do we have playdough at this centre?"

Students then explored the wires in the playdough. Some students explored for an extended period of time and would have continued if they didn't have to switch for others to have a chance. Other students lost interest when it didn't work after a couple of tries.

We created art works and used them to make sound art.We documented using Google docs and the voice recording.

Questions around how sound and how it was being created using metal on our art works evolved through this process.

We finished with a wondering from a JK student; "I wonder how the electricity goes to the wires to this, (the makey makey board, to the computer). We now have our next step in the journey. We documented further understandings with the Google App, "Screencastify".

I am blown away by the depth of inquiry and by how many students are engaged in the process. We have many students to work with on developing their sound art and documenting their inquiries and I know we will have much to share in the near future.

Building Mathematical Processing in Early Learners through Coding

I have been observing my students mathematical processing as they explore coding using “Scratch Jr.” and “ Kodable”. Each of these programs has provided another opportunity for the children to develop skills in all seven areas of the mathematical processes.

Problem Solving

Kodable requires the students to use problem solving strategies to direct the fuzzy character's movements using arrows and coloured squares. The movements become increasingly more complicated as they move into new levels. 

The various levels allowed my students to work at their own stages of understanding and to support each other to move to higher levels. In Scratch Jr. the students used problem solving skills as they programmed the game characters to make specific movements.

Clip: Kodable – Using arrows to direct the characters http://tinyurl.com/nz2cpsq 

Reasoning and Proving 
Scratch Jr. allowed my kindergarten students to build programming pieces like a puzzle. The reasoning process is ongoing as the students explore the various possibilities of the pieces. They can change or keep the pieces together or apart based on how their character moves and if they are happy with the movement. The program is built to allow the students at this age to make their own decisions.

Clip: Figuring out scratch http://tinyurl.com/plary5d

Reflecting

This is an area that requires lots of practice and experience to allow the students to build the language to explain their reflections. While working in Scratch Jr. one of my students was 
able to explain how she created a character for her game. She was extremely excited because 
this character would be used in her game and was her own creation. Through guided 
questioning she was able to explain how she created this character.  As we continue to work on statements such as, “what do you think will happen?” and “Is there another way?”, she will continue to develop the language and experience to reflect on how things work together 
and affect each other.

Clips: Creating characters for games http://tinyurl.com/nfz4hk5

Creating characters 2 http://tinyurl.com/kw8pev4

Selecting Tools 
Using concrete and visual coding tools my students are able to plan and adapt instructions to move characters. As they share their strategies peers become engaged in trying new tools to build mathematical understanding around direction, movement, spatial awareness and numeration.

Clip  http://tinyurl.com/o7vmpqv

Connecting

The students did not all come in to class understanding directions and how we symbolize movement. This required some real life experiences such as using arrows and mapping strategies to move in particular directions. The more real world experience they had with using directional guides or symbols the better they understood the visual codes in the coding 
programs.

Representing  
Both Scratch Jr. and Kodable are designed to use simple mathematical representations and connect them to ideas, such as jumping, turning, etc. They also allow for the flexibility of thinking as the child or children develop harder or more complex models.

Communicating 
Communication was a natural process when the children were using coding programs as they started to teach each other what they had learned. Some students naturally gravitated to those they thought could help them when they were at a point of struggle. Some did give up and then returned to trying again at another time. Most asked a peer or an educator for support. They continue to work on developing the language to communicate their representations. Those with the language were more at ease to explain their learning. Questioning was also a component of the communication. Whether it is questions from students to peers or from educator to students, both allowed the language to be heard in context to the coding development.

Clip: Working together on Scratch Jr.  http://tinyurl.com/oypjmwb

The amazing outcome has been observing how four and five year olds can collaborate and support peer learning and thinking. They can develop mathematical reasoning skills in a context that is of interest to them and at their developmental stage of learning.

The Thrill of Learning 

I have had the most invigorating experience watching my students the last two weeks. From the excitement around our outdoor exploration and how the students used photography to capture images, to watching a mapping inquiry emerge as students question what types of maps we can use and why pirates needed maps to find treasure. All of which have deepened my learning and left me with new wonderings.

During our outdoor exploration the students worked with a partner to capture photographic images of items that they found interesting. I had the pleasure of listening and observing during their exploration as I walked around in small groups. I was inspired by the children’s innate ability to ask questions. Some that I heard were, “why is the leaf brown?” “How did the butterfly die?” “Why is that fence here?” I have always believed that questioning was natural for students when not forced upon them through content knowledge first. This was evident during the outdoor exploration time.

What took me to my own new level of learning as an educator was not the children’s ability to question.   It was their ability to be happy in the state of wonder. They would sometimes add reasoning to someone’s question, but they did not seek a definitive answer. They didn't need me, the teacher, to give them a final answer; they were happy with their reasoning and understanding.

Empowering learning for me was that questions don’t need to have immediate answers. I think immediate answers would have taken away from their learning. So now I am wondering, when is the” right” answer required and is it required? Or what makes it the right answer?  I feel like my head is spinning.....

Another inquiry that is starting to emerge in our class is around maps and why we use maps. I mention this as a learning experience for me because for the last three weeks I had been wondering;

“How do you know when an inquiry is naturally taking place in the class?”

I guess I was still unsure whether the students in kindergarten would open an inquiry up or would it be driven by the teacher. This particular inquiry started with one student bringing in his compass and talking about how to use a compass to find directions. The next thing my colleague and I noticed was that some of the children were creating maps. One map was a fire exit from our classroom to the front of the school, another was a map on how to get to his house and one was a map of how to find items out in the yard. Others started to discuss treasure maps and how pirates use them to find treasure. It seemed the right time for us, the educators, to look at enhancing this inquiry by bringing items that would provoke further questions and wonderings about maps.

I am now in this space where the students are driving the inquiry while the educators add provocations. We spend time capturing the knowledge students bring to the inquiry and continue to gather his/her wonderings along the journey. An intriguing process to see evolve.

What we know and wonder about maps

I see..... "pirate ships"

I see.... "castles"

Deep observation has not only honed my listening skills, it has opened my mind to the possibilities that there is so much more to learn about how children learn. I can’t wait to dig into some literature that will help me to continue to question, to allow me to be still for a while in the beauty of wonder and to seek further questions to deepen my understanding around how learning happens.

Open-Ended Inquiry Learning Vs. Explicit Instructional Practice

I have thought long about what my blog post would be about today. The reason it has been difficult to decide is because I want the blog to be an honest representation of my learning journey. Along with that, I also want to be reflective enough to be aware of my own beliefs about education and how it affects my teaching. Reflection is not easy.

I have decided to reflect upon the ongoing cognitive battle I have had in the last couple of weeks around open-ended inquiry learning and explicit instructional practices.

I came into teaching kindergarten knowing that I wanted to build understanding around the Reggio philosophies and to immerse myself fully into play-based learning. I believe in the idea that educators need to give themselves permission to take the time to observe and reflect on student play.  Over the last two weeks I have given myself permission to trust that this observational time is essential to knowing my students. Sounds like I have it all figured out, right? Well, the other half of me keeps thinking, “what about the explicit language teaching? Doesn't there need to be whole group instruction? Where does that fit? Does it fit? How will I know?”

To answer my own questions I took time to think about what I was learning from my students in the last two weeks. I started to see a trend that pointed to the fact that language development was happening all the time in every place at every time. It became clear to me that the art in the classroom was actually a representation of stories and a representation of language development. Stories taken from students own experiences or interests. Not my stories, driven by my instructional practices, but true authentic stories that students were expressing in pictures, orally and some through written text. The educators had been capturing the picture stories by listening to the students explain the thinking behind the visual text. At this point very oral based.

Mapping

"Children build new understandings from existing ideas and concepts. Starting from what children know and want to know motivates engagement and excitement about overcoming challenges and solving problems. First hand, concrete experiences shape ideas that can be expressed symbolically in drawings, paintings, dramatic play, and in verbal and written forms (Greenspan & Shanker, 2004). Learning proceeds from the concrete to the abstract. "

http://www.cfcollaborative.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ELECT.pdf

Pictures were not the only artistic forms that helped represent the student thinking and language development. Structures in block play, the light table, the drama centre, the reading centre, geometric shapes. Everywhere stories were evolving and language was evolving. What was even more fascinating was how the language changed and grew as new people joined into the play and the stories.

See the video link to the story of the animal ages.

The Animal Ages

Light table story. 

Creating a scene about a gorilla and a tiger and the middle part was a path. The small glass pieces were babies.

We also started to recognize that without explicit instructions, some students wanted to start writing their stories and would pick up pencils and paper to do so. We encouraged these students to write their thoughts about their work for others to hear their story. Journals were provided to those who were interested. Some journal writers used only pictures and some a few words. All developing their experiences and the educators were naturally recognizing the next steps each student needed to help their language evolve.

Have I answered all my questions about when does explicit instruction happen? Not in the least. This is a year long journey for me and possibly longer. What I have learned is that taking the time to observe and reflect has shown me that the students will show you where they need to go next. I just need to be sure to be listening, reflecting and responding. Small group instruction is becoming a more evident need as I discover the various language levels. I will now continue to "listen in" to hear each child's individual needs so that we can provide the best opportunities for the child to develop and grow in language and personal interest. Will whole group instruction need to happen? Possibly to highlight more complex topics as inquiries evolve. But for now I think I will spend my time digging deeper to understand each child's abilities to verbalize thinking and to communicate his or her messages and/or stories.

The journey continues and how exciting each day is as I discover each child’s abilities, interests, discoveries, wonderings and how their stories tell me who they are as social and emotional people contributing to our world.

"Rather than looking for what is known through assessment, pedagogical documentation invites the creativity, surprise and delight of educators who discover the worlds of children." 

(Carol Anne Wien)http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/childcare/Wien.pdf

Day 1

There were many moments of discovery today as the children played, wondered and collaborated.

Wednesday, August 27th, 2014

Building Relationships 

Building relationships is essential in all areas of life and what is fascinating is how we learn so much about ourselves when building close relationships with others.

This week I have had the opportunity to meet three amazing educators that I will be working closely with in kindergarten. Each of us on a journey that combines a shared environment and an openness to understanding beliefs about learning to make the children our fundamental focus. I look forward to each day as I get to learn more about the wonderful experiences they bring to education.

Adding to building these wonderful relationships is this opportunity to learn about myself. Everything does not need to be in my control, (imagine.....). As this week moves forward I am letting go of the control; it is actually making me more acute to listening and hearing all ideas and opinions. A wonderful sidebar to this is less stress as I put trust in everyone contributing to a common goal.

I look forward to continuing to build strong relationships with my colleagues, parents and children and cannot wait to see the learning we share. In the meantime we continue to collaborate on the attributes that will make up the beginnings of the 'third teacher', the classroom. I anticipate the amazing changes the classroom will take as the children make it stretch and grow in new and exciting ways.

The beginning stages of the "third teacher

The Journey Begins...

Monday, August 18th.

As I contemplate the wonderful journey and professional development I was immersed in last week at the "Reggio Intensive", I cannot express enough the immense excitement I feel for the new school year ahead. I have spent a week developing a deeper understanding on how play is a catalyst to rich thinking. I look forward to listening, observing, hypothesizing and communicating the ever changing journey the students and educators take as they become "acutely sensitive to the pleasure of surprise", (Loris Malaguzzi). I also look forward to observing our environment change and grow as the space is filled with wonder and awe."Think of the environment not as shell but a skin - how does it change with those in it?" Carla Rinaldi



My role this year will be to explore the many possible ways to gather the evidence of rich thinking from the students as they explore through play. Setting up provocations based on student inquiries and figuring out the multitude of ways to collaborate with students and colleagues on each individual student's learning journey. Always keeping in mind that pedagogical documentation should be interactive and allow for multiple perspectives.



I also look forward to developing the relationships with families as we work together to listen to each individual child's curiosities as we explore our environment indoors and outdoors; the goal being to provoke new thinking through precise exposure to materials that allow for exploration.







The journey is just beginning and who knows where it will take us. What I can say is that I plan to "never stop questioning" and to always "play"

.