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We moved 538 blocks this week! Here's how and why...and how we know how many :)
Creating an environment that is responsive to children's needs, wants, interests, and developmental stages is an important part of an emergent curriculum and developmentally appropriate early childhood program. After observing how children are using the space and materials, combined with our knowledge of how children learn, the Fungi Friends teachers decided to make some environmental shifts. One shift in particular is moving the blocks from the Great Room (formerly the Great Block Room) to the Bird Room. One of the main reasons for this shift is the ability to save block structures throughout the week, so children can return to their work day after day. When we were building in the Great Room, we had to clean up our work each day so that we had space for Morning Meeting and other gathering times. Now, children can work independently, in pairs, or in small groups to build Monday through Thursday, with a big clean-up happening at the end of the week. Returning to a project on multiple days supports children's development of executive functioning, such as long-term planning skills and working toward goals. If you're interested in learning more about executive functioning children, here's a great resource on executive functioning from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.
With this goal in mind, we started our Monday Morning Meeting with the questions: how many blocks do we have? and how do we count them and move them? This was an scientific and mathematic exercise from the very beginning as we started the process by making a guess as to how many unit blocks we had in the room (amended from our original question). A few Fungi Friends explained what it meant to "guess" or "estimate" - "think without counting" was the explanation that made sense to most of us.
Then, it was onto figuring out the counting and moving processes. Isa suggested we count by 10's and Emily recommended taking the blocks off the shelf to keep track. We decided to record an "X" on the board every time we took a load of 10 blocks down the hall. Luckily, we had two wheeled apparatuses to help us with this heavy job!
We had to hold a lot of information in our brains as we worked to count and move the blocks:
- working on one-to-one correspondence as we counted to 10 over and over
- carrying heavy loads, increasing our gross motor strength and providing proprioceptive input
- remembering to mark each load before it left the room
- drawing an "X", which encourages crossing the midline (good for the brain!) and helps with letter writing practice
- sorting blocks by type and finding a place for each on the shelf (matching shapes)
- communicating with each other to facilitate teamwork and working toward a common goal-
We felt so much pride as the final block was placed upon the new Bird Room shelf! Below, there's a picture of the new Bird/Block Room in action!
Later, we gathered to count our "X"s and find the answer to how many blocks we had. We used a 10x10 chart and colored in each box to represent an "X", in order to organize our data. We circled each "X" in highlighter as we counted it to make sure we only included it once and to ensure that every "X" was counted. Finally, we did our final count by 100's and 10's, with 8 leftover to get to our total - 538 blocks! We were amazed that there had been that many.
So, what's happening where the blocks used to live in the Great Room? Right now, we have added a play kitchen with both food replicas and loose parts as well as baby dolls with clothes, carriages, and accessories. You may remember an area similar to this from your childhood called "housekeeping"! There have been updates to the name, but more importantly, also the research behind this area that is now often called "dramatic play." Dramatic play is another great space to practice executive function skills, as children develop "rules" that guide their roles during play. Besides that, it is just plain fun! Sometimes dramatic play can have more concrete props that facilitate a particular kind of play, but often it is filled with open-ended materials and loose parts that could become whatever children's imaginations can dream up - a rocket ship or a restaurant, the sky's the limit! Taking care of babies and cooking the kitchen mirrors our current themes of nurturing (as we take care of our maple trees) and the cooking we are doing on Fridays.
Speaking of cooking...our latest cooking project was dumplings! To honor and learn more about the traditions surrounding Lunar New Year, we decided to make dumplings. This was a multi-step process that required a lot of patience on our part. Everyone took a turn helping, whether they were washing, peeling, chopping, grating, cleaning, sautéing, or stuffing! We also colored in dragon masks and made red paper lanterns - you can learn why by watching this video, which we shared in class. Before all of that, we started our day by asking "how do you celebrate holidays?" We talked about all different sorts of holidays that we celebrated ourselves, and found linkages between those holidays and also with Lunar New Year. Here are two playlists that accompanied our morning work: Lunar New Year and Chinese Festival.
So, why should we talk about and honor holidays that we don't necessarily celebrate with our students? Holidays from various cultures can be a piece of an antiracist, anti-bias school curriculum. Learning about other cultures and traditions help children realize that there are many ways to "be" and that what is familiar to them might be similar or different to someone else. We explore the significance and meaning of the holiday to the groups of people who celebrate it while also looking for connections with our own experiences. This expands children's world view, in conjunction with other exposures to difference, beyond holiday celebrations - learning about the people themselves, the arts, history, music, etc. For more on anti-bias education, visit Teaching for Change.
A little side project: our newest favorite stories all feature gingerbread people in different forms, and we have been reading them over and over! One thing led to another, and we came up with the idea of building Randolph School out of gingerbread. We thought about the steps we would need to take to get to that point, starting with photographing the school to see what it looks like. This week, we took a photo from our playground and then recreated that side of the school using Magna-Tiles and a few other materials. We will see how this project progresses over time. One interesting attribute of an emergent curriculum is that children's interests can wax and wane over time, so sometimes we drop a ball, then pick it back up later.
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