When so many children become involved in one play story, we consider the possibilities for launching a group project. We wonder how we might excite the most children by offering a project that holds many potential ways to become involved: through drawing, building, painting, book-looking and conversation; indoors and outside; through individual, small group or large group work; in the planning, experimentation, construction, and reflection of the project. Though a project might offer a common goal to satisfy, in the end, it is the process that holds the learning. What project might help create a context in which different children are encountering each other in new ways, challenged to work together, to negotiate their individual ideas and preferences within a larger group?
LET’S BUILD A BIG BOAT.
Building a big boat of cardboard could offer a great opportunity to challenge and extend our learning. Children will have to engage with a familiar material on a new scale. They will bring with them their ways of working with cardboard and their ways of thinking about boats. Children might think about waves and water and speed or the seating, the treasure boxes and people onboard. This project will lend to thinking around form and function as we attend to construction and stability, size and scale, shape and number, color and design.
Presenting the children with a provocation:
How could this cardboard box become a boat?
Envisioning possibilities by drawing plans:
Children communicate their thinking about what kind of boat it might be and what parts it might have, how it would move, who would be on board, and what would they be doing. Eleanor wrote a P to record her idea that we could paint the boat.
Coming together in small groups to share our ideas and mess about with loose parts:
In a group of three, children attempt to bring their different ideas together. We see them practicing how to disagree, shift their ideas, build new ideas, pose problems, and use language that supports a group effort.
Creating and embracing contexts for children to engage in further research:
We continue our research as we look at books about boats, draw boat parts, and create boats outside in puddles!
Coming together in larger groups to reflect on small group work:
During our gathering on Friday, we learned about the boat design that Marky, Helen, and Charlotte constructed together.
