Interests and Passions

I have spent some of my time this week listening to some wonderful people talk about interest-driven education in the context of connected learning, and project based learning.  I'm eager to learn more about interest based learning, child centered curriculum, student driven projects...whatever you call them in your corner of the world.

A portion of the conversation above, on connectedlearning.tv, was focused on two words that some might use interchangeably:  interest and passion.  When we think about student engagement, many of us think about them following their interests and passions.  But what counts as an interest?  As a passion?  Are they different, and does it matter what student interest is?  Should we let students follow any interest, or are there ones that are "better" than others?

notes from the webinar

My personal experience with interest driven learning has been in the context of the Project Approach and guided inquiry.  When beginning to work within both of these ideas, I wanted someone to show me exactly what to do.  How do you find out what children want to do?  Then what do you do?  And THEN what?  

Looking back at posts about projects here on the blog, I know we could have gone deeper.  Even look back at Katz and Chard's words, I'm struck by how they describe a project:

"A project is an in-depth study of a particular topic that one or more children undertake.  It consists of exploring a topic or theme such as 'going to the hospital,' 'building a house,' or 'the bus that brings us to school.'  Work on a project should extend over a period of days or weeks, depending on the children's ages and the nature of the topic." (1989, p. 2)

Although a project gets a general description from Katz and Chard, that open description is followed by  a word that many preschool teachers can only see one meaning for:  THEME.  One of my greatest confusions upon graduating with a Bachelor's degree in Early Childhood Education was "theme".  Very little change will happen if we keep choosing topics (or letting children choose them) and then planning a few weeks' worth of curriculum around that topic for them.  Truly interest-driven education looks quite different from the project approach.  I picture interest-driven education as initiated and planned by students, while facilitated by teachers.  Reflecting on my project-based work with children in the past, it does not quite fit the bill of Katz and Chard's view.

Over at Edutopia, Project Based Learning is defined as "a dynamic approach to teaching in which students explore real-world problems and challenges.  With this type of active and engaged learning, students are inspired to obtain a deeper knowledge of the subjects they're studying."  Rather than set steps and phases, as Katz and Chard suggest, PBL is an approach to teaching.  There is also a focus on connecting to students on a personal level, suggested by "real-world learning and problems".  The definition of PBL encourages teachers to be active, know their students, and connect school to the world outside, whereas the project approach provides yet another package for Early Childhood Educators.

The conversation within the webinar on interests and passions had me thinking:  deciding on a ropic or a theme is quite different than starting with interests.  There is more playfulness and exploration implied with "interest" than with "topic" or "theme". A child playing with blocks day after day might have an interest in blocks, yes, but he might be interested in balance, a specific building he has seen, construction...or perhaps he is using a familiar material to make him feel comfortable before he tries out new materials.  We really need to watch and truly know our students before we can label anything as an interest or a passion.

The second webinar was with PBL guru Suzie Boss, chatting about her new book, Bringing Innovation to School.  Boss spoke about project based learning, social and emotional development, design thinking, and (of course) innovation.  I felt a much more positive connection to PBL through her words.  She writes about PBL for Edutopia, sharing cases of stellar ideas in education and PBL.  There is something about the way that Boss talks about PBL that is both less guided and "strict" than Katz and Chard; yet at the same time, there is more clarity.  Perhaps it is because she advocates that PBL is whole-child teaching and learning, rather than a piece of the puzzle.  She implies the importance of knowing students well in a piece for the New York Times Learning Blog:

By sparking students' interest in real issues that affect them and their peers around the world, you will give them cause to think more critically about what they are learning.  Better yet, you may give them a head start on becoming tomorrow's problem-solvers."

It is unlikely that we will know what real issues are affecting our students, and which real issues will engage them, unless we have laid the groundwork for getting to know them as people with curiosities, interests, and passions.  Beginning by knowing our students; understanding their interests, identifying problems, and creating innovative solutions is not only a more useful way to frame PBL, it is a less scary way.  It reminds me of the way I hope my students will approach issues in their everyday lives.  It also strikes me as adaptable:  it embeds a process and skills that can be used in a range of situations.

I know that I need to think of PBL as an approach to learning rather than as a set of steps.  An approach that includes whole child development and real-world learning.   Although I am shifting my teaching focus from the preschool set to elementary school, I find my thoughts looping back to the schools of Reggio Emilia, which will continue to inspire me, no matter what context I'm working in. Carlina Rinaldi shares thoughts on the unpredictable nature of projects:

"The word 'project' evokes the idea of a dynamic process, an itinerary.  It is sensitive to the rhythms of communication and incorporates the significance and timing of children's investigation and research.  The duration of a project can thus be short, medium or long, continuous or discontinuous, with pauses, suspensions, and restarts.  The statement of a hypothesis on how the project might proceed is valid only to the extent that it is seen precisely as a hypothesis and not as a 'must', as one of a thousand hypotheses on the direction that might be taken.  Above all, making hypotheses is a way to increase the expectations, excitement and the possibilities for being and interacting, for welcoming the unexpected as a fundamental resource.  A greater ability to predict will help us know how to better observe and interpret that which happens among children.  In this sense, the links with the concepts of observation, documentation, and re-cognition become strong and meaningful."  (2006, pp. 132-133).

I picture children following their questions and interests when I read that passage.  I picture teachers as facilitators, encouraging children to solve problems in innovative ways, expressing themselves through different media to delve deeper.

I hope to encourage children's use of multiple languages as they innovate to solve problems that interest them.  In the connected learning webinar, Mimi Ito shared about a variety of projects and addressed the common concern of what makes a "good" project.  She shared about everything from One Direction fan writing to interests in Anime - interests that she has seen students pursue in depth.  It is easy for us to make judgements about what we think a good project or a valid interest is, and I have struggled with putting those thoughts aside, and will continue to.  But, if it can be researched, it can be a project.  The first thing that we document as a potential interest might not be the project - if that was the case, preschool teachers everywhere would be assisting girls as they embark on kitten projects.  Let's think about the best ways we can get to know our students when we begin learning together, and then move on from there.

I talked about:

Katz, L. and Chard, S.  (2000).  Engaging Children's Minds: The Project Approach.  Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

Rinaldi, C. (2006).  The construction of the educational project.  In Rinaldi, C., In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia:  Listening, researching, and learning (pp. 121-136).  London: Routledge.

Expectations, Power, and Facilitation

I'm noticing some trends in my posts.  I'm clearly thinking about power and engagement.  Those are things that are an umbrella over every moment I have as a teacher.

Last week, I talked about expectations.  We need to suspend those as much as possible.  We can have inklings or guesses or pictures in our heads, but we cannot be frustrated when children approach something differently than we do.  We're adults - we've been in training for decades, and we are creatures of habit.  Just the other day, I had put up the children's names next to a sign up sheet at the easels - we are embedding more name writing into out days, and signing up for popular activities is a way to make those marks.  One girl walked up to the list, dipped the paintbrush into the orange paint, and basically highlighted her name on the list of names that was thee as a reference.  Why not?  She saw her name and painted on it.  And in her mind, it is a valid way to show that she wants to paint.  Her name is literally covered in paint.

As teachers, we can have ultimate power if we want it.  Children also know how to get the power if they want it.  We all have our ways.  I have my agenda, and each child has their own as well.  Who am I to say that mine is better?

You can picture a room where children are doing whatever they want - jumping up and down on tables, painting on the floor - whatever.  The classic image is from Miss Nelson is Missing:

That is one extreme.  The other extreme is children being forced to do things that they are not interested in at all.  But most of what happens is somewhere in the middle - especially when it comes to preschool.  There is no one way for it to look.  I've never had two environments that were set up just the same; I've never dusted off last year's planner and put it all into action again; and I've never expected one group of children to be the same as another one.  Not only would that be boring, but it would make teaching monotonous and repetitive.  

I like that children paint in random places and have different funny names for the baby dolls and a million different stories to dictate.  But I also like the common things that children do on their own, without instruction from me.  Play dough with popsicle sticks always turns into a birthday cake, three-year-olds always draw people like tadpoles, and four-year-olds put more weight on the word "friend" than any other word they know at that point.  Our job is to connect with children and make decisions based on that, with the input of the children.  We can try to make all the decisions as teachers, but it is not going to work.  But we have to facilitate and stay sane.  The better we are at seeing and listening and adjusting and listening some more, the better the experience is for the children.  I am thinking about preschool, but this probably applies to education in general.

I do not claim to be an expert at this - I'm writing about it because it is a challenge.  We need to be able to work with children, not create a free-for-all.  There would be no point in school if kids just ran around.  That middle ground is my ultimate goal.  Children engaged in the things that interest them, and teachers facilitating that work to help build on it and make it deeper and more meaningful.  Some might call it the Project Approach, some might call is Reggio Inspired, some might call it unproductive.  Call it what you wish.  Engagement might be children in a forest Kindergarten, children conducting science experiments, painting planks of wood, or making bread.  All of those things are able to happen because adults facilitate them.  

I'll end this rambling with a quote from The Hundred Languages of Children that describes the curriculum of the early childhood centers in Reggio Emilia: 

 "The curriculum is not child centered or teacher directed.  The curriculum is child originated and teacher framed." - Forman and Fyfe

Everyone in a classroom plays an important role.  And if we're teachers because we want to provide positive experiences for young children, that is exactly what we should do - and we should try to make those positive experiences engaging, explorative, meaningful, and personal.

"Making a successful project is like making a campfire. The child's interest is the spark. Your job is to run around a collect little twigs and sticks and offer them up. Also to say, "Can I get you anything?"

(recognizing interest, camp creek blog)

Creating Thunderstorm Sounds

We made a recording of how our voices can sounds like a thunderstorm. We created rain, wind, and thunder. I really enjoyed the part when the chorus of "splash" began spontaneously.

sounds like a thunderstorm

Where has "Changes" taken us?

We are a few weeks into our final "unit of inquiry" for the year...Changes. I planned some activities that revolve around change to spark the childrens interests and start some conversations about it. We :

*Made ice cubes
*Used the juicer to make fresh carrot apple juice, then made popsicles out of it
*Made a simple yeast bread

We also read plenty of books about change, including :

*Leo the Late Bloomer
*A Color of His Own
*Little Blue and Little Yellow


(Leo Lionni really seems to have a thing for change as a theme.)

Sometimes I am sitting in the classroom with my giant to-do list and I start doing something else random. That happened at the start of last week : I was working on some paperwork and I got up and took every last thing out of dramatic play. Scarves, blocks, buttons, mirrors, xylophone -- all gone. I decided that the children can experience "change" by choosing what to change the dramatic play area into, and see the process from start to finish. I put up a clothesline on the wall with large paper clipped to it, and proposed that the children use that to plan what we could change the area into.


Many people have a housekeeping area in their preschool classroom, but I prefer to leave it more open ended. In the fall, it (along with the rest of the classroom) was transformed into a forest as part of our forest project. The ideas that the children proposed at meeting were quite interesting:

*australia
*big big thunder
*animals
*make a thunderstorm in there
*raindrops

There had been a thunderstorm the night before, and many of the children came to school with stories of flashes of light and crawling into their parents beds and seeing people get struck by lightning on TV. We talked about the storm for ten minutes straight after making our initial list of ideas for changing dramatic play. At the end of the day, we voted, and the choice to change dramatic play into a thunderstorm was almost unanimous. (There were two votes for raindrops.)

So the children have been hard at work drawing, cutting, and painting.








We are on the hunt for umbrellas, and are brainstorming about how to make puddles. The children prefer to have real water in there, so they may have to figure out the logistics of that. There was an idea to have thunderstorm sounds, and we have some very interesting recordings...

The beginning of the end

Returning from spring break has made me realize that the end of the school year is fast approaching. We have eight more weeks of class here before the summer holiday begins, and I feel like there is so much more I wanted to do with the children before the year ends.

We have completed one real project this year, I feel. The forest project engaged all of the students and lasted for about two months. There are some small things going on right now, but we are not "studying" one thing in particular.

Project-based learning is not frowned upon here, but it is not necessarily encouraged. I am lucky that I have the flexibility teach our curriculum through projects. We have broad "units of inquiry" that we do during the year, in no particular order, and so I can let the children lead me in my planning and link their interests to the "unit". I'm grateful to not have a set curriculum.

After a meeting with the other PreK teacher today, we are going to pick a unit and then see where the children take it from there. The unit is "changes" -- thankfully it leaves the door wide open for the children to take charge. And I always love seeing how the same thing can look so different after being presented to two different groups. I'm looking forward to tracking and journaling what happens in this space.

I have to remember that things pop up when you least expect them. I forget that and I look and look and look for answers, when I really have to encourage the children and wait. I'll call it proactive waiting.

Project Learning in Public Schools

It is really interesting to see how project learning can look with young children in public schools -- this video from Edutopia is a nice example.

Teachers are often trying to imitate what they see in other classrooms - topics, projects, environment...when that really doesn't bring you to the right place. Teachers (and parents) need to watch and listen to see what is going to work, and read and watch for inspiration from other educators. And in this age of testing and standards, it is wonderful to see a school supporting and promoting project work as a means to learning.

Documentation and Parents

It is time for parent-teacher conferences this week. I'm working hard to put together some documentation about our current sewing project -- the kids have wonderful ideas and are all working hard to make something to bring home and keep. That seems to be the theme when I ask the kids about their projects at least!




I hope that the parents take the time to look at the photos and words that I'm presenting. Most bulletin boards are one art project that every child in the class has done with each piece clearly labelled with the artist's name. Is it that important to label with names? Does everyone have to do it? I think that is something that is done for parents. In my opinion, the children bring home artwork everyday, so each parent knows their child is producing artwork, and what it looks like. Documentation (or bulletin boards) are about our classroom community and what is happening. I think it is a true releflection of what is going on, rather than twenty coffee filter butterflies.

But are the parents looking at it? I'll share this round of documentation with you later this week, and I may have an answer to that question as well!

Forest Project : Culmination

After work began on the trees in the classroom, we spent two weeks buzzing with energy about our classroom forest. Trees went up onto the walls around the room, and our apple tree hung right in the middle. Because of its delicate nature (it was made of paper, after all), we made sure everyone who came along knew not to touch.



Using small groups of children, we set off to create the other major components of the forest that the children had decided to make: the pond, the train, and the secret playground. Mud and trees were incorporated into all of the areas, because we see those all over the forest.

It was decided that we should be able to go into the pond; and paper is too delicate and would rip. We talked about what our clothes are made out of, and how strong it is. The children decided to use fabric and paint it the colors they saw in the pond: green, blue, and brown.

The finished pond included cattails along the banks (which were originally referred to as sausages).

The train is an important feature in our forest; commuter trains zoom through the forest every 10 to 15 minutes. It was natural to draw it on long paper, and to place it up above our heads. We walk through a tunnel to get to the secret playground, and the train runs over that tunnel, so the children decided it would be way up high, and close to the playground.


The trees were places all over the classroom, and the branches made the forest pop out of the walls. While hanging the trees in places designated by the children, they also decided to give the trees a three dimentional effect. By the end, trees were all over the walls, and the branches were attached to the walls and then out to the ceiling.


As we were constructing the forest from our "What Should Be In Our Classroom Forest" list, one girl asked about the mud. Where will the mud be? How shall we make it? The first idea was to use the mud in the sensory table. We could get in the table and then walk around on the floor! This was a moment when we had to have the children brainstorm a little longer. The children talked about the color of mud, and how we had made the pond out of fabric and paint. The idea of using a shoe dipped in brown paint and printed onto a piece of fabric became the vision.


It was executed using one of my wellies. This was one morning when parents were quite intrigued by the set-up at the art table. A few parents complimented me on my creativity, and I had to say that it is their children who have the best ideas, not me.



The final planned component was the secret playground, which is a playground in the Sonian Forest. It was decided that instead of drawing or painting it, like we had done for many of the other parts of the forest, it would be built from blocks, and the structures would stay up for a few days. The planning process included a lot of drawing and looking at photographs. Then I worked with a small group of children to tape off where the different parts of the playground would be on the ground in the block area. It was an interesting experience to talk about the birds' eye view that we were taking on the playground, and they children were not totally prepared for that understanding. But in the end, spaces were planned.


The next day during choice time, children chose to go to the block area and work on different parts, including the airplane, the slide, and the picnic tables where we eat our snack. Children gathered blocks from all around our classroom and we borrowed from other classrooms as well, so a few kinds were used.


At this point, the classroom forest as it was planned was finished. But some unexpected weather put a twist on our plans.

We got a light dusting of snow in December, and making snowflakes became all the rage. They were taped to the windows, and as we began to run out of space, we began getting requests to hang the snowflakes. I spent at least thirty minutes one day standing on a table with a roll of tape, with a steady stream of children bringing me snowflakes and yarn to hang from the ceiling. Just like that, it began snowing in our forest.

With just a few days left until our winter holiday break, and since we were in a place that felt like a conclusion, we decided to celebrate the hard work in the classroom. The children had been talking about wanting to show the forest to their former nursery teachers, and to their friends in the other preschool class. This soon evolved into siblings, and siblings' teachers; so we had invitations to make! Every class in the Early Childhood Center was invited; and every class that had a sibling of a child in our class was invited. We came in on the final day of the first semester and got everything ready: the secret playground got a few more details, the pond was straightened, and the snowfall got heavier with a few last minute snowflakes.

The children were excellent tour guides, and our guests loved the forest. Many of the older children knew about some of the different locations we had made and recognized them before the preschoolers even said a word -- and that made them so proud. Sharing the work with others really brought the project together, because the children showed their expertise.

Here is a video tour of the classroom forest:



Throughout the course of this project, everyone was a writer, a mathematician, an artist, a hiker, a cartographer, a biologist, a researcher, and a member of an amazing think tank. Although we took down our trees and put the blocks back on the shelf, this topic is bound to resurface in some form. We have not been in the forest as much as I would prefer, but we'll be back in soon. In just a few short months, the forest floor will be covered in bluebells, and we just might have to show our appreciation for that in our classroom. We'll see what emerges!

Forest Project : Hands-on work in the classroom

Something that used to confuse me about the using projects was what happens after the field work. You can go on a field trip, have an expert come in to talk to the children about a topic and answer questions -- that part is easy to understand. But what next? How are we supposed to keep them excited after that?

The answers have become much clearer through this particular project for me. I'd like to sum it up with the word creativity, but that would have frustrated me before now. So some tips... If you think it might work, try it. If a child suggests something, try it. If you can't think of anything, talk to a colleague...they probably have an idea to extend the experiences in the classroom. I used to think that if no one was interested in materials I had presented in a certain area, the project was over.

One idea came from a child one afternoon in the forest. He suggested that we gather some mud and bring it back to the classroom. It was in our sensory table for a week, for the children to experiment with. Many of them found it interesting that it "turned into dirt" after being in a dry classroom for a few days.
The interest in bats that was sparked by our bat house tours continued in the classroom. We checked non-fiction books about bats out of the library and used computers to find videos about bats. One amazing resource was a video we came across that shows a bat using echolocation to find a moth in the dark. Another wonderful resource was Gail Gibbons' book Bats. The second time we drew bats together, many children added her visual interpretation of a bat using echolocation.
We were creating so many bats of our own in the classroom, that the next move was very natural. The children began hanging the bats on the walls of the classroom. Through conversations with the whole class and with small groups of children, they talked about creating a forest in the classroom. The idea began as changing the dramatic play area into a forest with bats, but it soon evolved into plans to transform the entire classroom because of what they wanted in the classroom forest. Every plant was mentioned, from cattails to trees; many animals and insects were listed as well. But the big work came with the different areas of the forest they wanted to include: the secret playground, the pond, the train, the mud, and the trees. These are all distinct areas of the forest for this group of children, and all were equally important to create.

We began with trees, because everyone agreed that the trees are everywhere, and we needed to make a lot of them. We measured from floor to ceiling and got paper that would create trees that big. Then we drew the trees and painted them in small groups.


The first tree was the most exciting, with everyone contributing a stroke or two. The children that drew it decided it was an apple tree, and later on it came to represent the apple orchard in the classroom.
When we trimmed the sides of the large paper we drew the trees on, the long, skinny strips were quickly gathered up by a small group of children and they decided that those would be the branches. The branches were colored, and they began to stray from the browns and grays and blacks that were used on the tree trunks -- our forest took a colorful turn at this point!

I promise to be back (in less than three weeks!) with how our forest project culminated, including our finished classroom forest.

Forest Project: Field Work

The field work component of a project is so important to its success. Our topic gave us the opportunity to have experiences outside the classroom as much as we liked because the Sonian Forest was right outside of our door.

Throughout the fall, we went to the forest every Thursday morning for one and a half hours. In November, I began taking the children out two additional times each week in small groups for one hour. After an initial period of exploring the different places we could go, we began to stop each time to do observational drawings. The children drew what they saw in their journals using black felt tip pens.

Because we were able to go to a pond, an apple orchard, a playground, a beaver dam, and mud puddles all of the time, the topics were always fresh and exciting.

As interest veered towards bats, we called in an expert: an outdoor education teacher on campus. She took us through the forest one Wednesday and showed us all of the bat houses that had been installed be older students, as bats are an endangered species in Brussels. We were able to use her binoculars to look up at birds' nests as well.

There was a portion of the path that was always muddy, and the children definitely became interested in mud, especially the noises our shoes make in it.



Our forest adventures were well documented with photos, drawings, and video. The children saw all of that documentation, which helped keep them connected to the topic on all of those days when going to the forest was not possible. This also allowed us to make a smooth transition to our hands-on work in the classroom.

I'll be back soon with details about the hands-on work we did in the classroom, and then with how we celebrated our work and finished our project.

Planning

This is my planning map from about one month ago. There are many more relevant things that can be added, I am sure, but these are things I have planned for so far. We seem to be zooming towards the "bird"section; children seem to talk most about that, and we began this week on that topic.

Planning maps are encouraged in both Emergent Curriculum and The Project Approach; they are also a nice thing for a teacher to lean on, as following children's interests can really seem overwhelming and chaotic at times. About one month ago, I had taken the students out into the forest to draw once, and we watched a slideshow of photographs from a forest walk once while we did watercolor paintings on the topic. But the children were not bringing up the topic independently and spontaneously in their play, so I was frustrated. Why wasn't the project working?

For one, I had not talked with them about beginning the project, so they had not had the chance to give me their input. We began that last week. Now we all know that we are starting a study of the forest that is literally outside of our classroom window, and we have a lot to talk about as it has transformed so much since our first visit in September.

Tomorrow, we are spending our whole day in the forest, in the Scandinavian waldkindergarten fashion. Another teacher at the school is taking us through the forest to look at the bat houses and bird houses that were installed and are maintained by some older students. We'll do some observational drawings, eat a picnic snack, have an outdoor storytime, and play at the secret playground.

What are your children interested in? Are you using their interests as a focus?

Embarking (for real)

We took one day to recover from our vacation and get back into school mode, but this morning we began our day by saying we are getting ready to study the forest, and we talked about what we already know about the forest.

• There's trains.
• Mountain goats live in the forest sometimes.
• There are bikes in the forest.
• There are leaves falling down the trees.
• Red leaves.
• There is nuts.
• There is trees.
• There's mud in the forest.
• The trees have lots of leaves.
• The little house at the trees.
• The birdhouses - birds live in them.

We have the unique situation of our campus backing up against the Sonian Forest, with trailheads that lead us in. Train tracks run through the forest, and we often see older students mountain biking along the same path that we walk along. There are also many man-made birdhouses, which the children often talk about on our walks.

So here we go. I hope that writing about this project and sharing it with you will help in our success. I have yet to aide children in a successful project; I feel more confident this time, though. We have so many hands on opportunities - all of the resources we need really are at our fingertips.

Happy (and hopeful) election day to you all.

This seems interesting...

Keri Smith's How To Be An Explorer of the World

"Observe, Collect, Document, Analyze, Compare, Notice Patterns". That is what got me...it's a fun site to click through, and I'm going to keep my eyes peeled for the book so I can browse through that.

by Keri Smith, via sun moon stars rain .

Wellies and clothes

More fantastic wellie action for your viewing pleasure...

The weather has been on the bad side this week, but we are still going outdoors to explore. We are really settling into the classroom and are becoming more comfortable with the community and the routines, and I think soon, we'll be ready to embark on a project.

After a few weeks of observations, I think a project on clothes could be really interesting for the children, and it could go in so many directions. The students are always talking about what they are wearing, what they have at home, and dressing in scarves in dramatic play to emulate other outfits, such as dresses, skirts, capes, and napkins. The school also requires them to have four different kinds of shoes at school, and that leads into its own study by itself.

We have our fall break in just three weeks, and when we return, I hope to have gathered enough initial data to launch into a project in November, as we begin to layer up.

It was interesting to read the Judy Harris Helm article I mentioned here and relate it to my new teaching post. I feel like I'm spending time getting to know they children's interests, as well as the who's and the why's of different children's interests. I think that helps immensely -- what is a fleeting whim, and what is a dissectable interest? What matters to these children's everyday lives that I can support them in learning more about?

I'm very excited about this.

Standards and Engaged Learning

The world of Early Childhood Education is evolving, but there are still some less-than-ideal situations that we have to face. A new one for me is standards.

But I was poking around the the NAEYC Beyond The Journal website the other day and was thrilled to find not only an article, but also a 10 day discussion forum with the article's author, Judy Harris Helm, on the topic of linking standards and engaged learning.

I love my job so far, and I'd like to be working theer for a while. That means I can either teach standards to the students through lessons and ignore the need to give them situations in which to apply them, or I can embed the standards into child based projects, making the project a priority. I choose the latter.

The discussion starts today, and I know I'll be following it closely for the next 10 as it goes on.

Bon Week-end!