Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/the-honeycomb-hypothesis-a-fresh-perspective-on-the-color-orange-for-infants-toddlers-and-twos/5026360/
*Figures and photos can be found in the pdf version of this article.
Have you ever observed honey bees when they are flitting around and nosing up to brightly colored and sweet-smelling flowers? Pause to observe, and you may notice how these busy bees repeatedly nuzzle and flit as they quickly buzz around the flowers. These repeated actions of flitting, gathering, collecting, and taking their found treasure back to the honeycomb are innate and instinctive behaviors. The same is true for very young children. They move about their environments, collect bits and pieces of information about their world, and store this data in their honeycomb brains.
The Honeycomb Hypothesis uses the analogy of a honey bee to help explore how infants, toddlers, and twos learn. Figure 1 shows a brief glimpse of some similarities between honeybees and children’s instinctive behaviors.
Children create understandings of the world through their own actions and interactions with the environment. They must have a multitude of opportunities and experiences with (1) collecting many bits and pieces of data through patterns of play movements throughout their environments; (2) storing the information in their brains; and, (3) making connections between the bits and pieces they have collected, in order for them ...