An Experiment

On our Tuesday nature walk we found puffball mushrooms spreading across the grass. With sticks, we gently poked the bulbous fungi to release their brown spores into the air. This action gave way to much excitement and soon the stomping of the mushrooms began!

Soon we were all stomping. Clouds of spores rose into the air and coated our boots. This is the way these mushrooms reproduce.

Back in the studio we decided to look at spores more closely by conducting an experiment.

What is an experiment?

It’s something you try that’s new to you.  You figured something out.  SOPHIE

[There is] a thing called a potion that you use in an experiment.  You change things, you might invent.  ELLIOTT

A test.  ELEANOR

If you cut a mushroom on the stem.  Put a piece of paper and a glass, it will make a print.  For one day.  JOSEF

The black is the paper.  The white is the spore print.  ELEANOR

The white is part of the the mushroom.  The black is the paper.  White print is from the mushroom.  The black circle is part of the mushroom.  JOSEF

It’s kind of round.  CALLEN

It looks like a letter.  ELLIOTT

When it was first on the ground and then you picked it up.  The water picked the white up and it dripped on the paper.  MARKY

I know, the white.  Maybe.  What I think is every mushroom makes the same spore print as the color of the mushroom.  SOPHIE

Through this experience, we began our community conversation around experiments, extending the vocabulary we use to talk about research. We wonder, how can this experiment help us to think about the work we do every day in the studio? This shared experience allows us to connect the concept of experiment with the learning children are engaging in every day. In every moment we see children messing about, trying out new ways of manipulating materials and tools within their environment, drawing conclusions, and asking further questions. This is the process of experimentation, of research.

“When we say that school is not a preparation for life but is life, this means assuming the responsibility to create a context in which words such as creativity, change, innovation, error, doubt and uncertainty, when used on a daily basis, can truly be developed and become real. This means creating a context in which the teaching-learning relationship is highly evolved; that is, where the solution to certain problems leads to the emergence of new questions and new expectations, new changes. This also means creating a context in which children, from a very young age, discover that there are problems which are not easily resolved, which perhaps cannot have an answer and, for this reason, they are the most wonderful ones because herein lies the “spirit of research.”  

                                                                                 –Carla Rinaldi