My nine year old daughter and I have been working our way through the activity book ‘50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Child Do)’. My daughter and I are having fun, but her mother is not all that happy about some of the things we have planned. The author of the book, Gever Tulley, also runs a summer camp  called the Tinkering School. I wanted to try something like this with my class of five and six year olds.

I decided to put together a tinkering cart to use in our kindergarten classes at school. At the beginning of the year I found piles and piles of old equipment outside our school’s AV department. All these goodies were getting ready for the final journey to the dump. A few of us kindergarten teachers decided took as many of these broken keyboards, mice and stereos as we could and put them into our storage room. Along with all the discarded equipment there was also an old overhead projector cart, perfect for this project.

Tinkering Cart

After getting a couple of sets of screwdrivers and some pliers it was time to assemble the cart. I put a piece of felt on the top metal shelf, put on the tools and another teacher added some magnifying glasses and a flashlight. Now we had everything ready to go. Cart + old AV equipment = tinkering time!

Next we reviewed our class rules, one of which is to ‘be responsible’. We had a long discussion with the children on the subject of how each tool is used and how each tool should not be used (example, no stabbing with the screwdrivers). We were also afraid the children might try this at home with the new flat screen TV, so we made sure to clarify that the equipment we were deconstructing was broken and did not work anymore.

Finally, time to get down to business. The children wasted no time the first few minutes getting into a stereo. Inside they found many cool moving parts, circuit boards, springs, buttons and cogs…and a little bit of grease. It was great to see that boys and girls alike joined in with the activity. I was afraid there wouldn’t be enough equipment left for the other classes so we put a stop to the deconstruction half-way through the first week. The children decided to make a robot with the mound of bits we now had (much cooler than my idea of making a collage). After A LOT of glue gunning the class had a new member. The robot’s name is A5-T1.

I made a time-lapsed video of our deconstructing, but was surprised at how unimpressed the children were. “We didn’t move that fast?” “Why did you make it do that?” I thought it was cool…they didn’t. The cart is now in another class and we’ll have another turn to tinker in about a month. When the tinkering cart returns I’m sure we’ll find more parts for A5-T1.

by Shaylor

More to come…

This video makes me think we might spend a bit too much time repackaging and we need to focus a bit more on refining. Hands on learning, project approach, constructivism…what ever you want to label it, has been around for quite a long time. Maybe we should all take a few minutes to learn from the past.

by Elsie esq. flickr.com

One of the main concerns for many parents and teachers is whether our students are learning enough content at school. Will students know enough ‘stuff’ to make it in the real world once they’ve graduated? Schools used to teach (or still teach) students how to remember as much information as possible because knowing information would help students to be successful. We used to live in a world where knowing a lot of information took you a long way in life. Now our world needs people who can filter through the mass amounts of information at their fingertips and understand how and when to use it. Even though the world has moved into the information age, many of our schools still live with an industrial age mentality.

Some school curriculum has shifted away from an emphasis on content and are now centering the curriculum around concepts. Concept based curriculum is concerned more about the mental constructs that frame a set of examples sharing common attributes; concepts are timeless, universal, abstract, and broad. I have worked with IB PYP, a concept based-curriculum where students need to learn how to look at the world through the lenses of some key concepts. Form, function, causation, perspective, change, responsibility, reflection and of course the concept that web 2.0 has brought front and center connection. Yes, content is still learned, but with the emphasis on students learning how to ask questions that will help them develop a better understanding of any particular subject area. I like to think of concept based curriculum as helping students become good at asking questions, not just good at answering them.

In early childhood education (ECE) we have been lucky. Many forms of quality emergent curriculum have been around for years. Project Approach and Reggio Emilia schools have been influences in my teaching career that show me that concept based curriculum helps students to develop deep understandings about themselves and their world. These understandings can happen in a content based curriculum, but they aren’t what drives the teaching and learning, it is almost as if the deep understandings happen by accident. I feel one of the reasons that ECE classrooms have been allowed to move forward with concept based learning and teaching is because there is no need to teach to the test when working with young children.

Standardized testing changes the whole argument. Over at Change.org Clay Burell talks about “spoons for feeding or spoons for digging”. He wonders if teaching less content but in a more meaningful way helps a students to learn more. I feel it does. The problem comes when the students sit down for a content based test and have only covered 50% of the content. Sure, the students might have a deeper understanding of the content that they did  cover, but the students are at a huge disadvantage when they encounter test questions that contain content that was never covered in class. Maybe the type of testing is the problem.

When I was going through university in the 90′s the state of Maryland school system had just put into place something that seemed to me quite groundbreaking at the time, performance assessment. The big state wide tests were not grading content, but asking students to demonstrate problem solving skills and a deeper understandings of subject areas. The hope was that changing the test would change the way in which schools instructed. Maryland stopped  administering these performance assessment tests in 2002. The tests were replaced with tests that met the requirements of No Child Left Behind. We need more tests that show what a student can do, not just what a student knows.

So who is the winner, content or concept? I think if our tests focused more on thinking and doing and less on knowing ‘stuff’ we could all  start getting our students ready for the information age.

I’ll start with a fairly safe web 2.0 tool, wikis. Over at Always Learning I discovered of an interesting little wiki where children are using voice thread to share drawings and comments with children around the world, KinderKidsDraw. Wiki’s can be a safe place for children to store work and have a selected audience. I  see a lot of possibilities with parent communication using wikis and I would love to find some examples. Though wikis seem good for closed community activities I still like the idea of blogging for opening an ECE classroom to the world.

When I think about what blogs have to offer my current group of students, 5-6 year olds, my mind begins to race with all the possibilities. Over at ICTECE I am  inspired by a wonderful post about the possibilities of blogging in children’s education. I would love for my students to show the world who they are and what they can do using the tool of blogs. Blogging allows for the creator and the viewer to have a conversation, something that should happen more in all of education. Unfortunately having an open blog puts  images and names of children together on the web for all to see, traditionaly a taboo in education. There is a part of me that thinks walling off (password or invite only protection) a child’s blogs  keeps children from experiencing  a large part of what blogging has to offer. It seems web 2.0 in an ECE program still has to deal with some age old questions…When does protecting our children interfere with their learning? Or…When does learning interfere with protecting our children?

If you would like to read more on blogging safely with children you can visit HERE.

In the classroom I have started to move the students away from using computers as a mere game console. We have been using MS Word to make signs & posters and we just started a podcast channel where we share some of our songs and poems with our school and home communities.

Blogs and wikis seem like a great way to make home/school connections. I just read a blog from a school in New Zealand, Manaia Kindergarten, where they make blogs with student content. I really like the idea of having a stuffed animal from school visit the student’s home and then making a video blog showing the visit. Now it is time for me to learn how to do some video editing.

Making connections with other early childhood education professionals around the globe is one of my main goals for this blog. Being new to the blog scene is exciting and there seems to be many more doors for me to open in the web 2.0 world. Over the years I have had mixed feelings about using computers and IT in an early childhood setting, but I see those doubts slipping away more every day.

Let’s get this blog started,

Steve