Learning from the Ground Up

03/01/2006

A child's life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark.
Chinese Proverb

At the 2005 World Forum on Early Care and Education in Montreal, I had the pleasure of moderating the session “Playful Strategies for Teacher Education,” organized by Betty Jones and Gretchen Reynolds and led by our Bolivian colleagues, Roxana Salazar and Maria Carmen Schulze. One of the many learnings from that session, illustrated that it WAS possible to build a standing structure using only newspapers.

Since Montreal, I have used a similar method when teaching the play portion of Infant and Toddler development. Essentially, I locate as many “found objects” as possible from our offices. Typically, these include boxes, newspapers, empty food containers, and ribbons. I instruct the groups to use these items to build a standing tower, with the caveat that their towers must be smaller at the bottom than they are at the top. By applying this condition, I try to put the adults in a situation where typical building rules do not apply. I compare this condition to infants and toddlers who are learning about their world from the ground up. Just like in the Montreal session, groups are instructed not to use verbal communication and to join their towers once they are standing.

I experimented with adding a twist to this experience. Once the towers are constructed and joined, I ask one group member to draw an aerial view of the layout on an overhead. Then, I show the drawings on the projector, layering the aerial views on top of one another. With each layer, I ask students what they see and, gradually as layers are added, the students see maps of dendrite spreading, as the brain develops … through play.

Contributed by Laurie McNelles

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