Teachers are Learners: Illustrating a Year of Project Work, Part 3

The following is the third and final part of a series of posts illustrating the ways our teachers took on the different principles of project work last year. Click here to find the first part and the second part.

Bring the small group work  back to the larger group and find ways to integrate the work into larger classroom life.

From the early stages of her group’s music project, Serena encouraged the budding musicians to share their work with their classmates (and our resident musician, Wayne). In the beginning, their experience of performing a song in progress allowed them to get some feedback to help them improve. Later, they worked to catalog important vocabulary words and use them to write new songs, one of which they also performed for their classmates and parents. As their vocabulary became more nuanced and consistent, Serena encouraged them to share their new system as useful tool for other songwriters in the classroom. Through this practice, the work of denoting and writing new songs has spread into the greater culture of the classroom, adding new focus to a general interest in music making.

Choose your small groups carefully, thinking about their relationships to the concepts and with one another.

When Tracy was considering the composition of her sea monster group, she took into account the different possibilities that the project held for each child. For some children, the experience would help them practice listening to others’ ideas and integrating them into their own. For others, it offered the possibility of a leadership role – getting to speak up and gain confidence as an “expert” on sea monsters. In her careful formation of the group, Tracy brought together children who had normally not played together much before, but who shared an interest in sea monsters and could benefit from each others’ strengths.  Among the group, there were storytellers, artists, safety advocates, and trap-builders, each working to make the lore of the sea monsters richer through their contribution. In bringing together this diverse group of children, Tracy not only helped build a successful project group - which they collectively named Team Blueberry Pickle - but also helped to foster new friendships and a greater sense of community throughout her classroom.

Stay curious about what you observe.

We were unsure what project work would be like for babies and young toddlers, but we were certain that our teachers would find ways to collaborate with some of our youngest citizens. While Cathy watched how babies played with balls and ramps for inklings of understanding, Eileen studied friendship, reflecting upon the demonstrations of empathy and fondness that she saw to draw her conclusions. Brae thought long and hard about how babies communicate with sign language and then with speech. She wondered why children chose one mode of communication over another. This team had deep, thoughtful conversations about their projects, and how they could continue to explore side-by-side with babies. On the other hand, when Henna joined the Toddler Two North team in the middle of the year, she had to build new relationships with the children in her class, while also listening for that special spark of interest that indicates that a topic might be worthy of deeper investigation. She knew that food held a special fascination and offered a number of different ways for the children in her class to relate to it. She was persistent in her study of the children in her care and their relationship to food, and offered a number of different and delicious provocations to her class.  

Celebrate and honor the children’s work by ending it in some meaningful way.

As our year (and our projects) come to an end, we are excited to see what celebrations unfold for these many projects. Clearly these children and teachers will continue to learn more, about the workers in their community, about how buttons influence the world around us or how to communicate with one another. However, one way that we honor children's collective exploration is by following the waxing and waning of their interest - by helping their work together form a shape with a beginning, middle and an ending. Part of the practice of progettazione in Italy, and the projects that happen elsewhere in Boston and all over the US, is to recognize the work that's happened, look at it as a whole, and celebrate it with families and children. In the final weeks of our school year, teachers, families and children marked this moment, honoring the learning they did and relationships they built. Seana planned a plane-decorating party for her paper airplane group, Carmel and Aline invited families to co-create a bird guide that will live on in our center, and Miwako’s group invited their classmates and parents to the final performance of the play they created, to name a few. What a wonderful end to an amazing year!

Teachers are Learners - Illustrating a Year of Project Work - Part 2

The following is the second part of a series of posts illustrating the ways our teachers took on the different principles of project work last year. You can find the first post here.

Emphasize dispositions such as critical thinking, perspective-taking, intellectual and emotional risk-taking, persistence, and bold imagining.

From the outset of her group’s investigation of ramps, Irene was guided by the question that inspired the project, “What happened?” As she brought children together to work at both building and using ramps, she also helped them to build the language, skills, and endurance of scientists and engineers. Over the course of their investigation of ramps, Irene offered children opportunities to make, test, and revise their predictions, as well as to solve problems and obstacles that arose during their tests. If a piece of their ramp broke, she supported them through the process of working together to fix it, make sure it worked, and realign it if not. She helped them to expand their repertoire of questions to include not only “What happened?” but “Why did that happen?”, “How can we fix it?”, and “What will happen if…?”

Watch for opportunities to integrate learning domains such as literacy, math, and scientific processes.

Throughout the center, teachers have found numerous ways to integrate learning domains into their projects. Although they were working with very different age groups, Irene and Seana both encouraged children to work at making predictions, testing them, and observing the results. Seana and Monica helped children stretch their writing muscles through writing lists and letters, while Tracy encouraged her younger preschoolers to write their intended messages on the sea monster signs they created.  Two teachers also used checklists to help children remember their work and analyze it later; the checklist made for Seana’s airplane group helped them note down their observations of how different airplanes flew, while Kerry’s group used a checklist to keep track of which colors of moon sand the different classrooms wanted them to make. In addition, by helping the children in her group follow the recipe to make the moon sand, Kerry gave them experience in both measuring and counting.

Find a starting place.

“How will I find a project?” This was on the mind of many teachers when we first started discussing project work. During the weeks that followed, two Preschool 2 teachers found their respective projects in very different ways, illustrating that there is no right way to begin a project. For Seana, inspiration came from an ongoing interest in paper airplanes already present in her classroom. After inviting several children to hone their airplane making and flying skills, she identified a dedicated group who came together again and again to fold, fly, and observe their planes. For Monica, on the other hand, the seed of a project sprang from a single lunchtime conversation. When a small group of children began to discuss the prospect of building a house for their classroom, she was struck by the enthusiasm and practicality of their conversation. She brought the group together for more conversation, and soon the House Group was born. Although each teacher found inspiration for a project group in very different circumstances, in both cases their projects grew out of their careful attention to children’s interests – whether ongoing or just beginning.

Write documentation that allows teachers, children and families to reflect on what's happening and contribute.

Documenting project work is unique in that it’s important that the larger class be made aware of what the project group is doing and because of the sheer volume of work children are creating on a regular basis. Kerry’s documentation in Toddler Two South honored the thoughts and questions of children by sharing them with everyone as the project progressed. She placed large pictures at children’s eye level so that they could reflect upon and revisit their work together. The size of the photos allowed multiple children to consider the pictures at the same time. The Preschool One team found that they were meeting so often with their groups, they didn’t feel they could adequately make a polished piece of documentation about every meeting. They knew that it was important to capture all of the children’s ideas, and record all of the different provocations that were part of the work, so M., Kara and Tracy started collecting “raw” notes in a binder that children and families could peruse. The notes allow anyone to get a real sense of the work that was happening, and provided the team with an organized way to reference their notes in team meetings when planning curriculum.

Teachers are Learners - Illustrating a Year of Project Work - Part 1

The following is the first part of a series of posts illustrating the ways our teachers took on the different principles of project work last year. You can see the second post here.

Aim to generate rather than answer questions.

When considering possible provocations for their respective projects, Sarah (investigating water) and Amy (investigating simple machines) always sought to challenge children’s thinking. Whether offering a new perspective on the materials (such as envisioning a stream of water falling continuously from the ceiling) or providing opportunities to explore an interest with greater focus (by constructing new wheel and latch boards for the classroom), these teachers were always creating opportunities for children, families, and the teachers themselves to develop new questions. In attempting project work with infants, they found that just as much can be learned through the asking of questions as in the answering of them.

Seek to increase the complexity of the study.

When the button project first began, Erin looked at how children worked with buttons. One aspect of their interest was social; they liked to have control of a button that someone else wanted. She looked deeper at buttons, and how they help children's attention and had a hunch that they were seeking to influence invisible, and interconnected systems. Thinking with one and two year old children about something this complex can be difficult. Anyone might struggle to get at this idea, which is physically obscured by the casings and exteriors of the buttons themselves. But Erin was undaunted. Over the course of their project, the pushing of buttons has given way to the creation of machines – from levers and catapults to wheels and axles. Together, this group is learning some of the mechanics at work behind the light switch they so love to flip, gaining a peek into the hidden systems that make our world run each day.

  

Create opportunities to represent and

re-represent ideas in multiple "languages."

Kara’s great love of and experience with yoga, as well as the investment that many children in her classroom have shown in its practice, made this a natural choice for her project this year. The question was, how could she help them to take their understanding of the poses they practiced to a new level? One way was through the use of multiple languages to represent the way their bodies looked while holding different positions. Children were already gaining much experience with movement when practicing yoga, so now she asked them to slow down, look at each others’ bodies, and recreate them using pencils and sharpies, clay and wire, and paint. These experiences gave the children an acute awareness of their bodies and how to represent the important parts of each pose, while offering Kara insight into the children’s understanding of the poses and how the parts of their bodies work together to compose them. When Kara invited the children to create their own poses and yoga flow, she had prepared them to use these skills for a new purpose – drawing their own yoga cards and teaching their flow to others!

Find ways to keep families abreast of your work, and to invite them into the process of planning.

Having chosen a single, class-wide project focusing on birds and children’s observation of them, the Toddler One South team of Aline, Carmel, and Danielle worked hard to apprise the families of the children in their care about the nature of their investigation. Through written documentation and weekly emails, the team recounted their provocations and observations around this project in the classroom, inviting families to contribute. As parents and grandparents began to share photos and stories of encounters with the birds around them, the teachers integrated them into the classroom environment – photos were added to the display board in the back of the room, while the stories were added to the book corner. Soon, parents were not only paying more attention to birds alongside their child, but also offering ideas for provocations they would like to bring to the classroom to support the project. Thanks to the teachers’ effort in keeping families abreast of their project work, as well as parents’ commitment to replying with their own reflections and ideas, the project grew far richer and more meaningful for all involved.

Teachers are Learners - Illustrating a Year of Project Work - Introduction

Every year our staff shares an annual intention; a shared idea that we bring to our different conversations and curricula all year long. This past year our center explored in-depth project work, an approach to child-centered curriculum that we share with teachers all over the world.

Project work (or progettazione, as it's known in Italy) is a way for adults to demonstrate that we see children’s competence by working beside them to pursue a big idea. Many Americans first encountered this idea through an exhibit in the 1990s called the Hundred Languages of Children, which showcased the work of teachers, children, and families from Reggio Emilia, Italy. This exhibition challenged many American educators to rethink their understanding of what children are capable of and the possibilities for their self-expression through artistic media, and it clearly continues to resonate with us today. Here at PTCC, project work seemed like the next logical step stemming from our emergent curriculum. We imagined it offering a new, more collaborative way for children and adults to interact with one another, a more rigorous way for teachers to plan curriculum and different ways for children to learn the dispositions of artists, friends, scientists, teachers and learners.

We started a full year ago, considering examples of project work from other schools and centers. We spent a day with Sandra Floyd, a mentor teacher from Seattle, Washington who has worked on in-depth explorations with children and teachers for more than ten years. We talked together about the conceptual framework that sustains project work, and about the nuts and bolts work of making time and space for this sort of collaboration among and with children. Together, we created the following document to guide us on our journey. 

After much conversation, our studio schedule and Katie’s role were shifted to support project work, making more room for small groups to do what they needed to do to focus on their project. We spent the fall encountering and practicing with the art media that children would later be asked to use to represent their thinking. Teachers listened for the seeds of projects, and, after our winter break they began to dive in.

As a staff, we sought to answer several big questions about this work. Given our commitment to justice, and to caring for each child, how might we honor the ideas of children ready and willing to take part in project work while honoring the children whose learning this year happened outside of small groups. One classroom decided to pursue one project as a class, while another had small, flexible groups whose participants shifted over time. Teachers found ways to integrate their project work into the larger milieu through documentation, provocations and circle times. We wondered how to do this work, usually associated with preschoolers and older toddlers with our youngest children.

We also thought about how to follow children’s interests while inserting our own, teacherly perspective, and how to plan for learning when it’s emergent. We tried out Backwards Design _tm  as a way for teachers to plan for learning while leaving the outcomes and options open to children’s choices and discoveries. (Backwards Design is a method that is “Backwards” because teachers first consider what they hope children will understand by the end of the project, planning back from there.) When Erin suggested that we make some kind of visual organizer to help teachers to work with this method, we came up with two that you’ll see displayed around the center. One is shaped like a tree and the other is shaped like an oval, but they contain the same ideas. Both helped teachers approach children’s theories and questions with some rigor, decide what they wanted children to understand about their explorations and make space for children to co-lead the project and determine next steps.

This past year has been an amazing journey - for children and for teachers - and we are grateful for the opportunity to reflect on all of the hard work that went on here at PTCC. In a series of upcoming posts, we will illustrate the ways in which our teachers embodied the above principles and key "ingredients" through their projects.

- Katie & Kendra

Families at the Center, and Children in Public Life

The center where Katie and I work is called Peabody Terrace Children's Center, but we mostly call it PTCC. Peabody Terrace is a collection of towers of graduate student dorms at Harvard University built in the 1960's as "married dorms." This year we celebrated fifty years of child care at Peabody Terrace. While our organization hasn't been around for fifty years, children have been cared for in these spaces for fifty years.

When we talk to our colleagues from Reggio Emilia, they emphasize that their approach is a moral and a political one. They must remind us again and again because it's easy to gravitate toward the beautiful environments, respectful image of the child and use of art media as a thinking tool. And more difficult to think about child care as a political act. Universal child care in Italy was a part of supporting women's right to choose work outside of the home, and part of rebuilding the country after World War II. Child care at Peabody Terrace was part of supporting women's burgeoning role in academia, and the rights of academics to have a home life.

Children learning that mothers' lives can be rich, varied and include more than parenthood is a powerful part of their education about what it means to be a man, a woman, a parent or a teacher, and an integral part of our teaching tradition. In my first year as a teacher here, during a parent meeting about friendship, a mother whose husband is faculty at Harvard shared with us what it felt like to be a child growing up on a college campus in the 1970's, with a mother who was an academic. In these times, our institutions of learning are still learning how to support families, and we are proud to be supporting them.

It's said that this collection of rooms at the bottom of these towers were the first space on Harvard's campus designated for children. This is also a political value that we share with our Italian friends; that children are part of public life. This year we've walked together with children up and down the Charles river hunting for sea monsters, talking with community workers, flying airplanes from upper story windows, visiting the acclaimed American Repertory Theatre or observing the habits of local birds. When we make these sojourns, we are continuing the story of childhood at Harvard, making our learning visible to passers by.

This short article describes a little bit about the history of childcare here at Harvard (and Radcliffe) and our relationship to it. For those of you who follow our blog, it may be helpful for you to know more about the context in which we operate. Check out these photos and how universal some aspects of child care are. Here at Peabody Terrace Children's Center, we let children learn through their play and so we don't look that different on the outside than we did in the 1960's.

Searching for Workers, Finding our Community

As many teachers at our center have embarked upon project work this year, they have sought ways to delve deeper into children's shared interests and to provide them with new perspectives through which to view such things as sea monsters, paper airplanes, ramps, and birds, to name a few. As with most new things, this has involved moving beyond our comfort zones, literally as well as figuratively. "Going deeper" has often included straying beyond the familiar walls and playgrounds of our school and into the city around us. These experiences have added a new dimension to the projects - the opportunity to get to know our community.

One example of what I mean occurred just over a week ago. As a part of their project work around the people at work in our community, a group of older toddlers, their teacher, Kerry, and I ventured out on a walk around our school's neighborhood, to "look for workers."  
As we started walking - 

Yoshi: Look! A delivery worker!
F: What’s your name?
Katie: I wonder if any of those packages are for our school.
Yoshi: (seeing a big diaper box) Those are for babies.
F: (points to the packages piled all the way to the handle of his cart) That’s too many!
A: Can we take your picture?

The delivery worker apologized for being too busy to stop and talk to us right then. As we continued our walk…

A: Look at that delivery truck.
Katie: This reminds me of when you guys did deliveries, too.
Kerry: Yeah! What was the name of the thing you guys used to make deliveries?
Yoshi: Some boxes were heavy and some weren’t.

Turning the corner, we noticed that a courtyard by some nearby apartments had been torn up.

Tracks in the dirt. What made them?

Yoshi: Maybe there’s construction there. Don’t go on there!
S: There was a tractor here.
Kerry: You think there was a tractor? How do you know?
S: See the tracks?
Yoshi: I don’t think it was a tractor. (sees a ladder nearby) There’s a ladder! That’s what the tracks are.

We walked down the street, hoping to see some people at work. We saw a lot of cones – traces of construction work – and the children pointed out drivers of big landscaping and contracting trucks that passed. A. noticed a fire hydrant, saying, “A fireman.” Yoshi noticed a tree that had been cut down.  “What happened to that tree? It’s just a stump.” I noticed some really full recycling bins, which led us to talk about the trash truck that the children watch every day from their window.

As we neared the MLK School construction site, the children saw something very exciting…

Yoshi: A street sweeper! It cleans a dirty dirty dirty dirty…

The street sweeper hard at work. 

A: Street!
Yoshi: Yeah, street!

The children looked closely for the man inside the sweeper. At one point, F. said, “Oh, there! See the orange shirt!” A. also pointed out two mailboxes on the street corner nearby, and the children peeked through the fence at the construction in progress, although the workers had all gone home for the day.

What struck me about this walk was that, although we didn’t see as many workers as we were hoping, we saw many signs of different types of work done in our city every day. From ladders to fire hydrants to mail boxes to construction cones, our city is full of objects representing the workers who help it function. When I think about the work that this group has done for our school (such as making and delivering moon sand to other classrooms), I can identify particular objects that hold meaning for them in a similar way. For instance, they are always eager to pick out a smock to wear before making moon sand, and it is only after their smocks are on that they declare, “We are workers.” For these children, these objects are important symbols, essential to the identity of workers and their jobs. One of the things that has been truly wonderful about this project is the way in which it has opened up children’s eyes to the multiple meanings of the word “worker” – it no longer just means a construction worker, but also a delivery person, a gardener, a baker, a moon sand maker… the list goes on and on. The many things they identified as belonging to workers illustrated this very idea. We don’t just need builders to build a community… we need lots of other people, too! 

A peek into the construction zone.

This process of reaching beyond our classroom walls and into the greater Cambridge community has been one of the most amazing parts of our first venture into project work. Many groups have been venturing beyond our school's walls - even if it is just a little way - in order to expand their perspectives and bring their work into the "real" world. One of our preschool groups is intent on educating the public about the dangerous sea monsters they believe live in the Charles River, whether that means yelling out at passers-by "Beware the sea monsters! They will eat you up!" or posting signs along the riverbank. Another group, who is interested in performance, is planning to visit a local repertory theater in order to learn more about all of the work that goes in to putting on a play. 

In addition to expanding our sense of community through these trips outside our school, many projects have also offered opportunities for children to build and strengthen relationships within our center's walls. The worker group's experience making and delivering moon sand to other classrooms is one example - the children were able to visit and get to know classrooms, children, and teachers they rarely see. Children whose groups shared a similar interest - ramps - shared a Studio visit together in order to learn from each other. For one group, whose interest lies in gardening and plants, their understanding of our school community expanded rather accidentally on a trip to the garden to observe and draw some plants. When they arrived, our school's garden plot was being carefully tended by a different classroom. As we made our way to a spot to draw, one child asked, "What they doing in our garden?" As I explained that the garden belonged to our whole school and that many children helped to care for it, I could see her brow furrow in thought. "We take care of it, too," she said at last, before turning back to her clipboard. 

A "Beware of Sea Monsters" sign tied to a tree.

The educators of Reggio Emilia often discuss the rights and respect that children as active citizens of this world. As the town's mayor, Graziano Delrio, wrote in his contribution to the Hundred Languages of Children,"In this period of our history, the idea of citizenship has had a strong influence on the identity of the infant-toddler centers and preschools - the sense of belonging, the willingness to take care of one another, the wish to participate, and the desire to be an active part of a process of change toward greater prosperity for the world community." These experiences within our school and our city are a means of building this good citizenship, not only by introducing children to their community, but by giving them a sense of place and power within it. They may not be the only gardeners at work in this place, but their contribution is still important and necessary. I hope this is an understanding they carry with them as a result of this work we are doing together. 


How did you understand your community when you were young? 
How about now?

Building Relationships with Our Local Ecology; Our Early Release Day 2014

Friday was our second Early Release Day of this academic year. These days are precious opportunities for our entire  staff to come together for professional development. We spent our time thinking about how we can ground more of our learning in the natural world that surrounds us. 

“Naturalist Intelligence” is one of Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, and it's one that we don't teach to as much as the others. We also know that most adults who are stewards of the planet were children who learned to love a special outdoor place through unstructured play and the mentorship of an adult who loved the land. Here in an urban environment, it can be challenging to think about our local ecosystem, so we spent time considering how we can bring children outdoors more often and more thoughtfully. 

Ann Pelo’s excellent book for teachers and families, The Goodness of Rain, provided structure for our time together. While Pelo cared for a toddler for one year,  she cultivated practices that can help any child develop “ecological literacy”. We spent some time with each of these practices on Friday: “Walk the Land, Practice Silence, Embrace Sensuality, Learn the Names, Explore New Perspectives, Create Stories, Make Rituals.”  Teachers worked together to learn these practices, and planned to make them a regular part of their classroom life.

Starting with Our Senses

In my research for this workshop, I found a list of smells that made people nostalgic. It was divided into people born in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s, and people born in the 1960’s and 1970’s. (The book was written in the early 1990’s, so folks born in the 1980’s weren’t old enough to be very nostalgic yet, and we’re not sure why those born in the 1950’s were left out.) 
The two lists were very different in part because the list from an earlier generation included natural smells like “Cinnamon, ocean breeze, rose petals” and the list from younger people included “vinyl, children’s aspirin, gasoline.”  I was curious to see if our intergenerational staff would break down similarly, and wanted to ground our work in our own childhood memories and in our senses.

I asked everyone “What is a smell that makes you feel nostalgic?” 

People born Before 1970:

Lilac, a new Barbie case, opening a Play-doh can, Chanel #5, Garcia Vega cigars, ironed linen, manure, the inside of a barn, cloves, lobster juice, shoe polish, food deep fried in oil.

People born in the 1970’s:

Cedar, new crayons, plastic Halloween mask, gasoline, “vanilla” scented baby doll, horses, cut grass, pine needles, dirt, mulch, orange bubble gum, garlic, basement, chlorine, red dirt, orange slices, McDonalds.

People born in the 1980’s:

Dirt, pine cones, a cat who’s been outside, warm pine needles, old cars, chewing tobacco, bazooka gum, MFA (feed) store, city grates, garbage, human filth, “chocolate”-scented dolls, White Shoulders, Play-doh, mom’s chocolate cookies, clean sheets, cigars, mechanic shop, lasagna cooking, Drakkar Noir, cucumber melon perfume, watermelon or strawberry airheads, campfires, puppy ears, bonfire smell in my hair the next morning, old cans, peanuts roasting, mulch, newborn babies’ heads, sidewalk chalk, coffee beans, tobacoo, pigs in mud, fabric softener, orange and bananas together, a certain perfume all teenagers wore, ocean.

People born in the 1990’s : 

cherry blow pops, thunder storms, dead leaves, rotted apples, grapes and blueberries; bubbly tar, big trees in the playground sun, bird seed, fruit by the foot.

All of the groups had manufactured and natural smells in our repertoire. Given the urban environment we inhabit, the children in our care likely will have a similar breakdown. It’s helpful for us to remember that we are participating in precious years of children’s life, and we have some input on which smells (and tastes, and sunsets, and sounds) they associate with growing up.

Next we started on the practices described in Ann’s book.

Walk the Land:

When we walk around the community, children have opportunities that they don’t have when we carry them, or put them in a vehicle. When babies are wheeled around our community, they get to know it in more depth than when they are looking through a window. When we visit the same places over time, children develop relationships with their own sorts of landmarks (that huge dandelion, the good puddle, the purple car, the really high curb). They notice growth and decay when they are able to walk by the same places again and again.

I invited our staff to take some time walking around Peabody Terrace, with nowhere to go, paying attention to their surroundings.

Practice Silence:

As a community we are constantly discussing how we know when to “teach” and when to “step back”. Teachers are often extroverts, and we know that it can be helpful for us to narrate to children what we see. 

However, silence makes space for children and teachers to take their time, watching a worm in the garden, or a red-tailed hawk making a circle over our towers. As we walked, I asked folks to stay silent and to stop when they were ready and spend some time silently observing and enjoying their surroundings.

Teachers watched insects in the lawn, sat in the crotch of one of the sweet gum trees, looked out over the Charles river, drew flowers and poked at mushrooms. 

When we all came back together, I asked teachers to reflect on their comfort level with the outdoors, and to figure out a way to push their own boundary, to give children a little more time and space outdoors. 

Teachers shared that they had noticed some new things during our short period of silent exploration:

Brae: Today I learned that doves exist outside of magic shows!

Elayne: Birds hop on the ground instead of using alternating feet like we do.

Irene: I noticed that it smells so sweet here today, and that the constant din of traffic is almost unavoidable here.

Seana: I sat in the seat of one of the trees because I see kids do it all the time. It buffers that sound in a way. It was comforting in the way it sort of squeezed my body. It wasn’t as hard as I thought, had more give than I would have guessed. There’s this super soft moss, and my feet were in the dirt for a whole other sensory experience on top of the seat. It was a nice place to sit and observe you guys.

Embrace Sensuality

Next we had a snack to fuel the rest of our work. Our teachers spend much of our time considering the “sensory diet” of the children in our care, so this practice wasn't as far outside of our experience. 

We had some beautiful, seasonal and rich food; fresh sugar snap peas, strawberries and warm, fresh bread and butter to enjoy. Bringing experiences like this snack to children helps them develop their sense of aesthetics and beauty, and their understanding of the kinds of beauty that we find in the natural world. Taking time to feel the ferns brush our legs as we walk in the garden, eating some of our harvest or appreciating the smell of the wet grass after a rain are ways that we can directly experience the natural world and enjoy it.

Learn the Names

I introduced a variety of field guides as a helpful resource and a great addition to any bookshelf in the center. Field guides give children opportunities to practice literacy, taxonomy, and organization but they also put us on a first-name basis with the organisms that surround us. Pelo writes:

“The Earth is not an anonymous place. We speak of it in generalities, using categorical names to describe what we encounter: ‘a bird,’ ‘a bug,’ ‘a rock.’ In our seeing and our speaking, we are willing to make do with broad, indistinct groupings that contain a wide range of individuals, unacknowledged in their particularities. The absence of names becomes a barrier to intimacy: a bird is a bird is any bird, not this cliff sparrow, not this crag martin. When we don’t know what we see, who we hear, where we walk, we don’t know, really where we are. Names are integral to relationship.” (p 105).

When I arrived at my new classroom many years ago in Seattle, I was stunned that the kids in my urban class could name all the different types of salmon, and would ask me “May I pick those juniper berries for our game?” I’ve seen the kind of intimacy with the land and its inhabitants that Ann describes. So I handed over the field guides and sent the teachers on a scavenger hunt in teams. They ranged all over, from the garden to the river, watching the trees for chickadees and blue jays, and searching the field guides for collected leaves.

Explore New Perspectives

In centers with a Reggio Emilia approach, we often discuss “perspective taking” as a skill necessary for life and for working with, caring for and enjoying other humans. I invited teachers to think about the perspectives of the creatures and even the plants that are in our community. It can be a challenge to do this in a not anthropocentric way, but any attempt to “walk in the shoes” of an ant, or a pigeon, or a seedling, helps us deepen our understanding of that organism, and see ourselves more clearly in comparison. If you haven’t, please check out the work of the children and teachers in Infant and Toddler 1 South. These very young children are thinking about the lives of birds in order to watch them.

As a group, we each sat down and considered the point of view of an organism that might live within five miles of here. We thought about that creature’s sounds and sights, the activities and preferences.

These practices are all intended for children and their care-givers to do together, and when teachers and children imagine the perspectives of the inhabitants of our local ecology, we grow closer to this place. When we remembered the smells of our childhood, we also recognized that we help determine the smells (and sights and sounds and tastes and feelings) that will represent their early childhood. Helping the children to feel grounded here, to really know the squirrels and pigeons (rock doves!) who share our play spaces will help them to feel connected to future ecosystems they encounter in the future.

Create Stories

The stories that engage children are not always the most dramatic, or interesting. Children enjoy hearing the simple story of meeting a moose on a trail in Maine, quietly stepping out of the way, and watching it wander off, chewing on some moss as it walked. Debbie shared that her son tells simple stories that  Sammie has shared about encounters with living things in great detail.  We don’t have to make up complicated tales about princesses or dragons, we can tell about the time that there were hundreds of ladybugs in the field. And then we can tell it again and again and again. Teachers practiced this by telling the story of the creature whose perspective they considered. The room was filled with laughter and warm story-telling.

Make Rituals

Rituals always help children transition from one thought, feeling or activity to another. They help us describe our community to itself. Rituals in a child care center are very simple, and usually brief. Erin mentioned the traditions of hollering into the parking garage to hear echoes on the way to the garden and taking some time examining the map of Peabody Terrace on the way back to the classroom each time. It can be difficult to incorporate new practices into our teaching because our days pass so quickly, and we have much to do. This time was provided for teams to take some time to consider what rituals might support, mark or celebrate their time outdoors together. I especially recommended visiting a place weekly or regularly, whether the garden or a library or a more distant playground so that children had access to the same views, the same plants, sidewalk and sky over time, to develop relationships with one corner of the world.

Here are some of the rituals teachers will bring to their classrooms:

·       Asking guiding questions before outings and revisiting them on the way back

·         Starting a journal in the garden, to facilitate communication about the work we do and the things we see there

·         Eating some more meals outside

·         Visiting the farmer’s market weekly once it opens in June for a yummy, local snack

·         An infant room will make a practice of telling the story of “what happened last time” as they put children into the strollers

We also collaborated on a list of local destinations for walks or bus trips. Katie and I will work to put these places on a map that we can all use to guide our outings. I am excited to see what kind of curriculum emerges from our work and play outside this spring and summer. 

It’s transformative for individuals to commit to knowing more about the living things outside our door, and I wonder what could happen over time in a community of learners who all walk the land, practice silence, embrace sensuality, learn the names, explore new perspectives, create stories and make rituals.