Growing inquisitive twins: May 2016

"Teaching is more than imparting knowledge, it is inspiring change. Learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding." - William Arthur Ward

As children grow, they gradually start spending more time in making sense of the world around them. They try to understand the place they live in, their neighborhood etc.

A couple of months back the twins started reciting the continent song learnt at school more often. They were truly inspired by Asia and Europe Immersion days celebrated at school. They drew flags of few countries they learnt about and re-enacted their cultural lesson experience at school.

Slowly they started inquiring about the continent they are living in. "Mom, We are in North America!", exclaimed Nidhi almost everyday. "Our grandparents are in Asia". "Do we know anyone living in Africa or South America?"

On a trip to ToysRUs, Nidhi insisted on buying a globe for them and we got one. (I know, we are officially a nerd family :P) This opened doors to lot of learning!

They started to recognize a number of countries and continents. They also started to take lessons on Geography at school. Frequently they would sit with the globe and discuss the continents and how they can fly from one continent to other to visit their extended family. This got them interested in maps.

They also started to inquire about the map of our community on their way to the park everyday.
"Where are we now?", "Where is our house?", "How do we get to our house from here?" were the questions asked almost everyday.

"Where are we in this map, dad?"

I realized they are trying to make sense of their place in the world. What a good opportunity to teach them our address needed for emergency purposes!

We started with reading the following books
Me on the map by Joan Sweeney
There is a map in my lap! - Dr.Suess
Beginner's World Atlas by National Geographic Kids

The book "Me on the map" was a great book to help them understand the concepts of continent, country, state, city and street. It also helped them understand how maps are drawn. They also observed that there are many kinds of maps and started to draw maps of their room and house.

They raised some interesting questions.
"I don't see the park in our apartment community map. If park is to be shown where will it be?" - Sid
"Why is the store not shown in our community map?" - Nidhi
"If our patio faces west as you say which direction is our living room?" - Nidhi

We started to spend time studying maps of National parks and farms that we visited. The twins started to express their understanding of spatial relations and maps in ways they felt most comfortable. This step of self documenting their learning is a significant step in their inquiry based learning journey. I am happy at the fact that the kids are taking ownership of their learning and documenting their understanding.

Here are some of their maps. Notice the addition of finer details in later documents compared to very primitive ones of their earlier documents. This shows how their learning has evolved over time.

Representation of a town - Initial version by Sid

"This is a town with buildings and a river" - Sid.

Representation of town with blocks - Recent version by Sid

"This is a town. This is our house. Here is the temple. This is the road. We go up on mountains to go to temple." - Sid

Map of our house - Initial version by Nidhi

"This is our house. That is my bed in my room. Each of us are in a room." - Nidhi

Map of our house - Recent version by Nidhi

"This is a house with door and door knob. This purple is the stairs. Our bedrooms are upstairs. Above that is the window." - Nidhi

Map of our neighborhood park - Sid

"This is our park. There is a slide and spiral climbing pole. There is a bench. Mom and dad are looking at us." - Sid

A city map with roads - Sid

"This is a city. Here is our house. That is our uncle's house. We go through this road to reach our uncle's house." - Sid.

Me: Why do you have roads in your map?

Sid : There are lots of trees and lots of houses. We can go to the houses through the road on car.

Map of our apartment community - Nidhi

"This is our building. There is clubhouse, our house, fountain and other buildings. This striped area is our street." - Nidhi

Till now their map keys and legends have mostly been oral. They describe the map as they draw. To assess their understanding of reading a map, I queried "Where is block D?" pointing to our community map. "Here it is!" , came an enthusiastic reply from Sid. "How do you know it is block D?", "Because it is shown here- Orange color is block D" replies Nidhi pointing to the map legend.

It has been interesting to see how the inquiry unfolded and also amazed to see how much the twins' documenting their learning has improved! I hope to keep this post updated as the inquiry progresses.

Spring is here! We are enjoying the great outdoors with lot of unstructured play time. It has been quite a while since the kids engineered something. What do preschoolers have to do with engineering? Well, to them, it is just a fancy word for play - to design and build, to explore and understand how structures around them are built in real life. So, I set out a couple of easy STEM challenges to kindle their interest in engineering.

These provocations helped them explore many design challenges, think critically and solve problems.

Here is a short photo journal of the challenges presented to them and how they worked on them.

Challenge 1: Build houses for the three little pigs

The materials used for this challenge are simple. I used cut drinking straws, popsicle sticks, lego blocks and play dough. I later added some air dry clay since play dough was not strong enough to support their straw structures.

The objective of this challenge is also very simple and open ended. Build houses for the little pigs. It may be straw or stick or brick house. It may be 2D or 3D.

Nidhi started to build a tall structure and realized that play dough is not strong enough to build a strong stable structure. So she asked for air dry clay and also changed her design.

Nidhi's straw house with air dry clay

Hey Mom! Look it is a mirror for the pig!

Sid started to build his straw house with a different approach. He glued the clay balls at the vertices rather than inserting multiple straws in same clay ball. Midway, he placed two pigs on either side of the structure and exclaimed, "Mom! I built this mirror for the pig!".

This is Nidhi's straw house complete with a door!

Do playdough work as glue?

Sid tried building a stick house with craft sticks and play dough. He realized play dough didn't act as glue and then changed his design to a 2D house.

Building a stick house

Building a brick house

This little piggy sat on a wall!

Challenge 2: Build a bridge.

Materials used for this are wooden blocks, magna tiles, popsicle sticks and HABA Wigglefants.
The objective is to build a bridge with given materials and balance as many HABA elephants as you could on the bridge.

Here are few pics of their built structures and balancing elephants. I regret missing pictures of some of their best designs.