We are looking at change in my class of five and almost six year olds. I had planned a lesson around ‘walking water’ with colour mixing as the main focus. We didn’t get that far. I set up the three jars, two of which with water. I sprinkled some powdered dye into the first jar. Before I could get to the second there were cries of astonishment at the change that was happening as the dye absorbed the water. Sprinkling powder into water captured their attention for nearly fifteen minutes (and that was me doing it).
They noticed so many things. I was struck by what I had already thought to be pretty simple as a lesson was far more complicated than needed to engage them with our inquiry.
We still added the paper and did walking water at the end, but with a solitary colour.
Suddenly we are hypothesising and noticing so much more. Although this was teacher directed playful learning (and that might be a generous description) this has reinforced the wonder of play, stopping racing through coverage and just taking time to enjoy the world around us. As a bonus it is easily linked with the NZ curriculum as well!
It also highlighted once again that in my play pedagogy offering simplicity can lead to a far richer experience than originally planned.
This beautiful learning and passion of children can’t be easily and consistently captured by numbers. Qualitative data…narrative does a much better job. A quantitative study into it would need to be carefully designed because of the potential subjectivity.
The voice of a disengaged, struggling writer captured it’s impact well: “Can I write about this?”
Actually, that is just a nice ending. It did happen but I have ripped it out of the following day during literacy time… it did not happen during the experiment itself.
To be fair, the child said that upon discovering writing was an unavoidable activity, but did engage with their idea rather than my descriptive task which had been scaffolded earlier.
Research and analysis 