Katz – project on balls

One that I remember, that sometimes teachers say to me is, “Well, there’s nothing in our neighbourhood to study.”  I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard that, and it’s never true, but anyway, one teacher who was working at a school, about, I would say 25 miles southwest of Champaign Urbana where the university is, she said “Oh there’s nothing in our neighbourhood, we’re in the middle of the cornfields, and we only have a small community, about four thousand people.”  It’s required, you’re in my class, you have to do a project.  Anyway, they ended up, the next part of that story is, she went back to her class, kindergarten kids, and she said to them, “When you go home, I want you to ask your moms and dads and grannies and aunties and uncles and grandpas and neighbours to look in their attic or look in their basement to see if they can find any old balls  that they no longer use, they can give to you so you can bring them to the class ‘cause we’re going to study them.” 

And by golly, these kids got into it, and the collection was amazing, an old beach ball, a soccer ball, a football, a baseball, a tennis ball, ping pong ball, billiard ball, golf ball, on and on it went.  Wonderful.  But one of the boys brought an old world globe.  So the teacher took it, she held it up in front of the class and she said, “Well, is this a ball?” and they said, “Yeah sure!” and she said “Well what makes you think so?” that question is so important, “It’s round!” and then she had a paper plate on her desk.  She picked it up and she said, “It’s round isn’t it?” “Yeah” “A ball?” “No,” ”Why not?”  “It doesn’t bounce.”  Well it turns out, the bowling ball doesn’t bounce.  They got, she got them into the concept of sphere, and they loved spitting that word at each other, and spherical as well.  And, it went on, and then they talked about what was inside of them, and that was an interesting part of the project too, but the children divided up into small groups, and one group of three or four took each ball with string and measured the circumference, which was another word they liked to spit at each other. 

And they cut, it wasn’t easy, a marble, how do you put a string around a marble?  But they wouldn’t give up, and that’s the other thing, teachers have told me over and over again, once they get into a project, their motivation is very strong.  And they got all the pieces of string and they suspended them from a rod, vertically, so you could see the biggest circumference and the smallest, and so on and so forth.  Another group of children did rubbings of the surface texture of each ball, and evidently, I don’t know this myself, but they told me a golf ball has dimples in it or something, but the basketball has little pimples on it.  And on and on, and tennis balls and so on and so forth, and they did the rubbings and they portrayed them, and they said to the teacher, “How do you write basketball?” and that’s the other thing about the intellectual emphasis, they ask for help with their academic skills in the service of their intellect, and I feel very strongly that’s an important part of developing good academic skills; it has a purpose.  It’s useful. 

I can write the word basketball, and when my, my Moms or Dads or neighbours or the other classes come past the documentation that’s on the wall, which by the way is another lesson from Reggio, they can read it, ‘cause they wrote it, and they asked how to write it.  Then another group put a tape measure on the bookcase, which was suspended vertically.  They got the teacher to show them how to read the tape measure, and they bounced each ball, they predicted which balls would bounce the highest, by the way they got them wrong, and they recorded, so here again, we’re talking about kindergarten children, they’re saying, “How do I write, “I don’t know, “Two feet?” or whatever it was, and they recorded the bounce of each one.  Another group put, used a hollow block, about, you know, this high maybe, and a plank, and rolled each ball down to see how far it would roll depending on whether it was on the linoleum, on the carpet, or outside on the grass. 

So they were engaged in a tremendous amount of measurement, of weight, and distance, and height, and bounce, and on and on it was. It was a wonderful project.  So, again, the disposition to use basic skills, measurement skills, writing skills, came in the service of their intellectual pursuit.  Why not?  They didn’t need a federal grant to do it, it was a great project.