PC4004

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects Program Transcript

MARGIE CARTER: Hi, I'm Margie Carter. In my work with early childhood teachers, I'm often asked the best way to approach curriculum planning. Teachers are often required to fill out a little form with miscellaneous activities in these little boxes. When they learn about emergent curriculum and the in-depth project work inspired by the educators of Reggio Emilia, teachers are often puzzled about how they can take this approach and still cover all the things they feel children need to get ready for school.

I think it's really helpful to watch teachers in action trying to figure this out. You may recognize Sarah Felstiner and Ann Pelo, two teachers who were featured in the videos Children at the Center and Setting Sail. In this video, you'll see Ann and Sarah even further along in their journey. They've become keen observers of children's play, skill documenters. And they've overcome some of that I can't mentality that plagues so much of the childcare field, especially in full-time programs with all its limitations and stresses and strains.

ANN PELO: When I first began teaching, I kept play periods really short. I didn't want kids to get bored. And I thought I would be entertaining them or policing them if they had long stretches of time for playing. My thinking has changed. I watch kids now use long stretches of time to explore their ideas, to dig deeply into their play. When the work that kids are doing is meaningful to them, the longer stretches of time, the better.

SARAH FELSTINER: I used to worry that I wasn't doing enough, that I was sort of sitting there watching the kids play. But I have come to believe that it's one of the greatest gifts I can give the children, is to be a really careful observer of their play. When I really watch children play, I get a handle on what they're playing about-- not just what they're playing about, but why they're playing about it.

ANN PELO: I've been inspired by the teachers of Reggio Emilia to think of myself as a researcher. The role of a researcher is so much more nourishing to me than the role of someone handing out information or keeping the children under control. It feeds me deeply. I feel curious when I'm with the kids. I wonder what's going on for them and what can I do to support it?

When we stock our classrooms with open-ended materials and when we create long stretches of uninterrupted time, amazing things happen. The project about height is an example of that.

SARAH FELSTINER: Projects can last a day or a week or a month or a year. And they can involve one child or a small group or the whole class. This project that we've come to call the height project was so central to what four-year-olds

1

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects

are working on developmentally that it lasted many months. And it came to involve all the children in the class.

ANN PELO: The story begins in the block area in about January, when kids started building really tall structures with blocks.

SARAH FELSTINER: The weeks leading up to this, kids had been building boats with blocks.

ANN PELO: But then their structures changed, and they just started building tall towers.

SARAH FELSTINER: And as we watched, we noticed that they weren't building particular structures. They were building for height. We had a lot of open-ended building materials always on hand. And kids turned to those often in these weeks to build towers.

ANN PELO: Seeing them build tall with every material was a reassurance that we were pursuing the right curriculum. Kids started out building structures as tall as they were and then wanted to build even higher than that.

SARAH FELSTINER: In my training, I was taught never to let kids build taller than their shoulders, I guess out of the fear that blocks would fall and hit them on the head. And it's been a big leap for me to really trust children to be safe, competent builders.

ANN PELO: I remember us talking a lot with each other as kids were building higher than their shoulders, higher than their heads, as high as the lights. We helped each other grow more and more comfortable with the risks that children were taking.

SARAH FELSTINER: And the more we watched, the more we came to trust the kids as builders. They were really learning how to build a strong foundation for their structure and how to help each other keep the structure stable.

ANN PELO: After several weeks of building with the small stepstool we had available at school and with stacking cubes on top of that stepstool, the kids were clear that we needed a different way to get up high to build.

SARAH FELSTINER: By then, kids had come to trust that they could bring us their good ideas, and we would respond with enthusiasm. So when they came and said, we need a bit of stepstool, we were ready to just pull out the red wagon and walk down the street to the hardware store and buy a new one. I remember inside the hardware store, kids did a great job of testing every stepstool that was there and really trying to figure out which was the most stable and which was the tallest. And they really did agree on one that they liked about.

2

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects

ANN PELO: We did some emergent math with Sarah's credit card and brought the stepstool back to school. And as soon as it was in the classroom, kids were using it.

SARAH FELSTINER: It became a daily goal to build a tower as tall as the lights or to stack of white cubes up and stand on them to reach the ceiling.

ANN PELO: As the kids played, we watched. We took a lot of notes and tried to understand what they were playing about, what was underneath this stuff about tall structures. We wrote down a lot of the quotes that kids said.

SARAH FELSTINER: I'm the highest. I'm the king.

ANN PELO: It's a pirate ship. I'm in the crow's nest, looking for treasure.

SARAH FELSTINER: It's' as high as the light.

ANN PELO: I don't think I can reach any more higher. I feel scared way up here.

SARAH FELSTINER: I think it's going to tip when he puts the treasure in. I'm holding the blue block so it doesn't fall.

ANN PELO: I'm taller than anyone.

SARAH FELSTINER: Jump down to the lifeboat.

ANN PELO: If this falls, it will bump this one. Then this one will bump this one. It will all come crashing down. That will be a disaster.

SARAH FELSTINER: I remember Carl said, I'm in the crow's nest. I can see pirates ahead and treasure.

ANN PELO: And he exclaimed so excitedly, I can see the moon. I can see the stars. This is when we really started noticing the themes about changing perspectives and being powerful emerging. Those are the themes that kids seem to find most meaningful in this play.

SARAH FELSTINER: We had seen what they were building and how they were building. And we really began to get at why they were doing this.

ANN PELO: As we started paying attention to those developmental themes, we also starting noticing that kids were doing more representational building, which was a shift from their earlier work.

3

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects

SARAH FELSTINER: In response to their increasingly representational building, we created a bulletin board display with pictures of tall buildings from Seattle and people climbing mountains.

ANN PELO: As kids built, we also added pictures of them building tall towers.

SARAH FELSTINER: One day, we were tickled to see the kids building a cityscape on the shelf right in front of the bulletin board with the city images. And to build that cityscape, even though it was at their height, they still stood on a step ladder.

ANN PELO: About a month into this play, we added a platform to the classroom for kids to build on. As they built on a mirror. Their images doubled in height.

SARAH FELSTINER: Kids said things like, it's almost down to the ceiling.

ANN PELO: It seems like it's getting lower to the ceiling.

SARAH FELSTINER: It's going to touch the ceiling inside the mirror.

ANN PELO: The tower looks like it's getting builded on the bottom.

SARAH FELSTINER: We're building on the ceiling.

ANN PELO: It's upside down and not upside down.

SARAH FELSTINER: We began using our weekly nap time meeting to start talking about the documentation we had been doing of the height project and to try and determine where we would go from there. One teacher brought in ideas about birds that kids had been fascinated with. I guess they'd seen some birds and had done some drawings of birds. And we wondered if that's the next path that this work would take.

ANN PELO: To figure out whether the kids' interest in birds is something we needed to pursue, we brought branches into the classroom. We brought little nests in and little bird figures and then watched the kids play. I think-- do you have some quotes about--

SARAH FELSTINER: It's so clear from what they were saying that their play was still about being tall and being up high. And Ian said, I'm pretending I'm standing on these big, long branches. And Adrianne said, let's hide things high up in the trees. We need a stepstool. And Ian then said, look at me. I'm taller than the trees.

4

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects

ANN PELO: It was really clear that what was important about birds was that they could go to the top of trees. The kids were still most interested in being up high and building tall things. We decided to stay on course with the height work.

SARAH FELSTINER: Another provision we offered was books that had pictures of tall buildings. A particular favorite was the Empire State Building, which the kids lovingly called the United States building.

ANN PELO: One of the kids knew that that was the tallest building in the world. That was his understanding of it. And it became the for all tall buildings.

SARAH FELSTINER: They began to build the United States building with blocks, and with no ends, and with their own bodies.

ANN PELO: We saw kids make the transition from tall structures to long structures as they lined up many, many Unix cubes in a row.

SARAH FELSTINER: They were excited as the row grew longer and longer, stretching across the room. I picked up a couple tape measures and invited the kids to measure how long their row of cubes was. One of the kids wondered if the row would stretch from the floor to the ceiling. We carefully lifted the connected cubes and set one end on the floor. And sure enough, the other end did touch the ceiling.

It's great when that numeracy work can get folded into in-depth project work, because then kids really have a deeper understanding of it, I think, and a more ongoing interest in doing math learning.

ANN PELO: And that sort of math work has a very different feel than the work that is traditionally offered to kids as math work without any context that's meaningful for them.

SARAH FELSTINER: The fact that kids were pursuing something they were so passionate about made them really willing to do that hard counting work that it involved.

ANN PELO: We decided it was time for a field trip to extend the children's thinking about tall structure. There's a water tower in a city park that has stairs spiraling up and up and up to windows that look out over the city. We arranged with one of the park officials to visit that water tower. On the day of the field trip, though, we got to the park before the officials did. So while we waited for them to arrive with the key, we spent time wandering around outside the water tower, looking up at the top of it and imaging how we might get there. Kids talked about climbing on top of each other's shoulders to get to the top or bringing ropes and pulling themselves up.

5

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects

SARAH FELSTINER: Other kids did wondering about how it got builded so high and thought the workmen must have used ladders to build that tower.

ANN PELO: We brought clipboards and drawing paper along with us. We wanted to invite kids to draw the water tower so that they could bring that experience back with them to the classroom.

SARAH FELSTINER: Well, I remember this was one of our first tries at asking kids to draw something specific at our request. And we sort of wondered whether their deep engagement in the project would be enough of an incentive to get them drawing. And it turns out that it was. They really worked long and hard at it.

ANN PELO: Kids were in really different places with their representational skills. Some kids drew very detailed, complex drawings of the water tower. Other kids tried hard to capture the roundness of the water tower. Even kids who weren't usually interested in drawing spent a long time on these sketches.

SARAH FELSTINER: As kids sat and drew, a bird landed on top of the water tower. And a lot of them included this in their drawing. One of the jobs we did as teachers was helping kids look at the water tower and notice particular structural aspects of it.

Once the doors were unlocked, we put the clipboards away and got out the flashlights and began the long, dark climb up the stairs. And it was rigorous climbing and rigorous counting, too. it was 107 steps. And the kids counted every step. And when we got to the top, we had the reward of looking out and seeing the Space Needle, which is one of the most recognizable landmarks in Seattle.

ANN PELO: As we headed back to Hilltop, we reviewed what we had seen and done and talked about. And we had this great collection of children's drawings. We've become more and more skillful and studying children's words and their play. And we're beginning to do that with their drawings as well, studying those for what they tell us about the children's understanding.

SARAH FELSTINER: And the drawings are really as varied as the children themselves.

ANN PELO: Back at school after the trip we invited kids to drop poster-sized sketches of the water tower.

SARAH FELSTINER: We brought together groups of three or four kids that we thought could bring different things to their collaborative drawing. And this is one of those times we were so grateful to have that studio space that we'd worked so hard to create. It really set space aside for kids to do quiet, focused work and to be in small groups together.

6

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects

In each group, we tried to place children who had a lot of experience with drawing and those who were just learning.

ANN PELO: Kids' first step in making these posters was to compare their individual drawings. They pointed out details of these drawings that they each thought were important. And then they planned together about how to create a poster that included those important details.

SARAH FELSTINER: The shared experience of having been inside the water tower and the help they offered each other let them do more careful work on these big drawings. So new elements like the dark doorway and all the stairs became a part of their work.

ANN PELO: With these drawings, kids could change the scale that they have been working with. This let them really experience the height of the water tower and let them really represent the height.

SARAH FELSTINER: One of the things missing from kids' individual drawings was what they could see from the water tower. After they'd been inside, they wanted to draw that, too.

ANN PELO: Jenny and Julia included a small window on their poster. And inside that window frame, they drew the Space Needle, just like they'd seen it on our trip.

SARAH FELSTINER: Ann invited them to work together on a larger picture of what they could see from the water tower.

ANN PELO: During our trip to the water tower, and then later as kids were working in the studio on their posters, they talked and talked about how powerful they felt being up high, looking down at things, and how different things looked from the top of the water tower. It was those same developmental themes just resurfacing and resurfacing. When the kids were finished creating those posters, we hung them on the walls of the studio. We wanted them to be surrounded by images of this water tower that they'd worked so hard to understand.

SARAH FELSTINER: We got the photos from our trip developed right away and had a meeting about them the next day. Kids revisited the trip and told stories about their visit. Having a good system for getting photos developed quickly is important, because it helps sparks kids' memories and their language development and the generation of new ideas.

ANN PELO: I remember some of the things kids said at that meeting. Ian talked about the tower looked like a big bagel.

7

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects

SARAH FELSTINER: And someone else said, it wasn't as tall as I thought it would be.

ANN PELO: Sam remembered, we rushed to the door. And the wind must've closed it, because I saw nobody by it.

SARAH FELSTINER: And Jeffrey said, we couldn't get in the door. And we tried to climb up.

ANN PELO: What if I standed on everybody's head? Then I could go to the top.

At our morning gathering a few days after our field trip to the water tower, I played a game with the kids. I wanted to recreate our conversation about scaling the water tower from outside. I created a miniature water tower and pretended that trolls were climbing up each other's shoulders to get to the top.

SARAH FELSTINER: I saw the kids practically jumping out of their seats with excitement. And I invited them all to a big open space in the middle of the room and said, let's just try this with our own bodies. Kids started climbing on top of each other, the largest kid getting on the smallest kid's shoulders. And they had a great, raucous time.

ANN PELO: I appreciated them being able to try out this idea they'd been so excited about, the idea of climbing on top of each other to get really tall.

These spontaneous moments are as important to me in the classroom as the carefully-planned ones are. It was just a delight watching the kids use their bodies as building blocks to create tall structures. And it really reminded me that kids learn so much through their bodies.

SARAH FELSTINER: It's so important to have space for that big body learning even inside the classroom. And again, that's been one of the things that we've worked hard on as teachers is to open up that space in our classroom.

ANN PELO: A few days after our visit to the tower, Sarah brought in some climbing equipment.

SARAH FELSTINER: I'd done some rock climbing and wanted to respond to kids' idea about scaling the tower from the outside. I showed them the equipment. And we talked a lot about safety and the words that climbers use to communicate with each other.

ANN PELO: Some kids took Sarah's climbing equipment over to the drama area. They pretended to be scaling mountains and towers.

8

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects

SARAH FELSTINER: We even brought ropes to an outdoor park and tried scaling one of the walls there. This was a great way for kids to build strength and coordination competency. But still, I think the underlying theme of that play was still the stuff about height and getting up high.

Meanwhile, Lauren and Julia built the water tower with the no ends builders. This was the first time we'd seen them use the curved pieces.

ANN PELO: I watched them build. And when they finished, I brought them clipboards and paper so they could dry this water tower.

SARAH FELSTINER: Watching from the drama area, Sam couldn't resist. He brought the stepstool over and climbed the water tower.

ANN PELO: From inside the no ends water tower, Steffie looked towards the bulletin board with the city pictures on it. I can see the Space Needle from here, she exclaimed.

SARAH FELSTINER: Kids had really been representing in so many media. They had done tons of building with a variety of building materials and then on the water tower trip did small black and white drawings and then came back and did larger black and white drawings that were collaborative. And our next planning meeting, we had the idea of moving from black and white to color. This time, we wanted them to really focus on color. So we gave each child a picture of the water tower and a piece of painting paper the same size.

ANN PELO: We invited children to look closely at the picture and paint a little, then look again and paint some more. With this new medium of watercolor paints, kids could capture new important aspects of their visit to the water tower.

SARAH FELSTINER: Things like the dark doorway and the colors of the trees all around the tower.

ANN PELO: Lauren finished her painting and declared, I'm going to draw a picture of my painting. She got a clipboard and some colored markers and drew what she had just painted.

SARAH FELSTINER: Each time children make a transfer from graphic medium to another, they have an opportunity for a transformation of ideas. They are confronted with new aspects of the thing they are trying to represent. We began to see how this practice of giving children different ways to represent their ideas was actually expanding their understanding.

ANN PELO: We decided to offer yet another medium for kids to work with and try our first round with clay.

9

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects

SARAH FELSTINER: Standing outside the water tower, kids had been impressed that it had been built brick by brick. They wanted to try it.

ANN PELO: Over the next month, kids worked in the studio, first making bricks out of clay and then using those bricks to build the water tower.

SARAH FELSTINER: It was hard, painstaking work. But the kids were really motivated to build it tall.

ANN PELO: Kids compared notes as they built.

SARAH FELSTINER: Let's build it as tall as the roof.

ANN PELO: But how can we reach?

SARAH FELSTINER: We could stand on the table.

ANN PELO: It might be wobbly.

SARAH FELSTINER: We could use a ladder.

ANN PELO: We could use a stepstool.

SARAH FELSTINER: By this time, the studio was full of kids' own representations of the water tower.

ANN PELO: They referred to these often like blueprints as they worked on the clay tower.

SARAH FELSTINER: We decided that going to see the Space Needle would be a logical next step.

ANN PELO: We talked to children and to their families about it and were surprised to learn how few of them had actually been to the top of the Space Needle, even though it's the Seattle landmark.

SARAH FELSTINER: Before we went, we checked with kids whether they felt like going up to the top or staying down at the bottom. Every kid signed their name to indicate their choice. At the foot of the Space Needle, we reviewed the kids' plans, and then kids who were ready took the long elevator ride to the top.

ANN PELO: At the top of the Space Needle, we were reminded about why height was so important to the kids.

SARAH FELSTINER: They said things like, the cars look like toy cars, the kind I have at home.

10

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects

ANN PELO: The cars are so small, I could pick them up.

SARAH FELSTINER: I see downtown. That's my dad's work.

ANN PELO: The ferryboat looks long and skinny.

SARAH FELSTINER: Look at those long lakes. They take up the whole city. Here we were at the top of the Space Needle, still exploring the same developmental themes and underlying concepts that had been at the heart of our work this whole time-- height and power and changing perspectives. When we got back down, the kids weren't surprised when we brought out clipboards and asked them to draw the Space Needle.

Figuring out when to bring a project to a close is always kind of tricky. And this might have been a good culmination, but we decided to use kids' wealth of experiences and images about height to go for just one more representation in the studio.

ANN PELO: We offered the kids sugar cubes and colored glue and invited them to build tall structures.

SARAH FELSTINER: Again as they worked, kids chatted about the issues of height that they were working so hard on. Houses are taller than people. The Space Needle is taller than houses and the water tower. Ann is taller than a chair. We are as tall as chairs.

ANN PELO: Well, if we were teenagers, we would be taller than chairs.

SARAH FELSTINER: Once again, kids compared their own drawings as they worked collaboratively to build the sugar cube structures.

ANN PELO: One group of kids decided to build the tallest building in the world, the Empire State Building. First, they drew a sketch of the Empire State Building. They used their sketch as directions, referring to it as they built.

SARAH FELSTINER: It was really important to them that their structure be as tall as their drawing and that it be taller than all the other sugar cube structures.

ANN PELO: The kids wrote a note to the other sugar cube builders. Please don't build your structure taller than our structure. Adrianne, Jack, and Avi got a response to their letter. Dear Adrianne, Avi, and Jack, we want to build our tower taller than your Empire State Building. We don't agree with your idea, from Catherine, Steffie, and Willem. I really love this letter, not only for the literacy development that it reflects, but because it shows kids negotiating their concepts with each other.

11

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects

SARAH FELSTINER: With summer coming and some kids getting ready to move on to other schools or to summer vacations, we were looking for a way to bring this extended project to a closes.

ANN PELO: And it was a parent who gave us the perfect opportunity. She invited us to visit the building where she worked downtown, one of the tallest buildings in downtown Seattle and also the home of a peregrine falcon nest.

SARAH FELSTINER: From the roof of the building, the whole city was at our feet. We were looking down on the water tower and down on the Space Needle. After months and months of this hard building work, the kids were finally up as high as they had dreamed. What a powerful feeling for these four-year-olds to tower over the city.

ANN PELO: And we shared a sense of pride and accomplishment as well, thinking of the work and learning we had done together as teachers.

SARAH FELSTINER: It's such a different experience to come home from a day with children energized by their big energy instead of exhausted by it.

ANN PELO: One thing I appreciate about approaching curriculum in this way is that I really have a sense of the journey that I'm one as a teacher, this idea of reflecting on the work I've done, not because I'm going to do this exact project again, but because it helps me understand more deeply how to respond to the children and how to provoke their learning and thinking.

SARAH FELSTINER: I figured out pretty quickly this isn't a kind of teaching you can do alone. It takes somebody brave enough to be on the adventure with you as a co-teacher. And if you're in a situation teaching alone, it's important to have somebody to bounce your ideas off of.

ANN PELO: I tend to be a person who creates a little nest around me, and I really resist changing that. I learned from Sarah to let go of that anxiety and to experiment with the environment, to change it in response to what the children are needing. And what I'm learning about changing the physical space is a metaphor for me about staying open and responsive to the children generally.

SARAH FELSTINER: There are two important things that really made this project possible. We opened up the physical space of the classroom and that let kids do the big building they needed to do. And we got underneath their play at the developmental level. We brought both of our strengths to building this project. We both started thinking big.

12

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects

Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects Content Attribution

Hilltop Educator Institute. (n.d.). Thinking Big Extending Emergent Curriculum Projects [Video file]. Used with permission of Hilltop Educator Institute.

13