{"id":2013,"date":"2025-03-18T21:45:56","date_gmt":"2025-03-18T21:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/?page_id=2013"},"modified":"2025-03-18T21:45:56","modified_gmt":"2025-03-18T21:45:56","slug":"transcript-katz-project-approach","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/transcript-katz-project-approach\/","title":{"rendered":"Transcript Katz \u2013 project approach"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I got a call from a superintendent of a school district in the Chicago suburbs, and he said, \u201cWould you please come and train our teachers to do project work?\u201d and which is what I\u2019d been doing for a while, and, \u201cCome in august before school starts and I\u2019ll give you three days with the kindergarten teachers, three kindergarten teachers.\u201d&nbsp; Very, very wealthy suburb, very, so I said \u201cOkay,\u201d and it\u2019s only 150 miles from where I live, so I went up there and I met with the teachers, and it turned out that the school, which was quite, which was pretty old, was on the same piece of ground as a wildflower sanctuary that had been developed when that community started about, I don\u2019t know, 90 years ago or so.&nbsp; But the children had never been in it.&nbsp; Never.&nbsp; And you didn\u2019t have to cross the road, you just walked across the tarmac where the parking lot was, but they\u2019d never looked at it, they didn\u2019t know about it. Anyway, so I went with the three teachers, we went into the sanctuary, and I strongly urged them to have the children study it in detail.&nbsp; And one teacher, the kids could, her class could do the trees and bushes around it, another group could do the plants and wildflower grasses and so on, and another group could do the insects.&nbsp; And they reluctantly agreed, but the superintendent had brought me in, so they didn\u2019t have that much choice.&nbsp;&nbsp; And I agreed to come back and see what they had been doing, in late October.&nbsp; And there I was.&nbsp; And one of the teachers, in her 31<sup>st<\/sup> year of teaching, got the children, 19 were there that day, lined up to go outside and they were going to measure the circumference of the tree trunks, and the children were arguing again about who had the nicest clipboard.&nbsp; And off they went, and one of the children dropped a pencil in the poison ivy, and that was bad, so she took the kids back into the classroom and called the nurse.&nbsp; That was the end of that.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then she got them all to sit down because she wanted to read them a book before lunch.&nbsp; So they\u2019re sitting around, and she had a beautiful book, really lovely book, of photographs of leaves.&nbsp; Now this is October, in our part of the world the leaves in October are beautiful, Maple and Oak and all kinds of trees.&nbsp; So she\u2019s turning the pages, \u201cLook at this, isn\u2019t this pretty,\u201d and this is a natural coloured leaf of some kind, \u201cSee this is purple,\u201d and so forth, and the kids were pulling each other\u2019s shirts and stuff like that, they weren\u2019t really, she didn\u2019t interact with them, she just turned each page and so forth.&nbsp; But I was kind of fascinated by this, and when she finished I said to her, \u201cCould I ask a question\u201d she said, \u201cOh sure,\u201d and I said, \u201cWhy do the leaves fall off the trees?\u201d and I was serious, and a little girl sitting next to me stood up, turned to me like this, \u201cBecause it\u2019s fall,\u201d she said.&nbsp;&nbsp; And I said, \u201cWell that\u2019s why we call it fall, but where I grew up, which is England, we didn\u2019t call it fall, we called it autumn. But look out the window.\u201d&nbsp; It was a windy day and the leaves were falling.&nbsp; That doesn\u2019t tell me why.&nbsp; And the little girl sort of said, \u201cMmmm.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then another little boy raised his hand and he says, \u201cI know, I know, \u2018cause it\u2019s windy!\u201d and it was windy, and I said, \u201cYes, it\u2019s windy today, but the wind blows in the spring and the wind blows in the summer, but the leaves don\u2019t fall off the trees.\u201d&nbsp; And he said, \u201cAhhh,\u201d You know, sort of, \u201cYeah, you\u2019re right,\u201d kind of thing.&nbsp; Then the third boy raised his hand and he started to explain, but changed it into a question, he said, \u201cBecause, because it\u2019s cold?\u201d and what did the teacher say?&nbsp; \u201cit\u2019s time to finish your pumpkins.\u201d&nbsp; She had got supermarket brown paper bags, stuffed them with newspaper, tied the tops, and they were supposed to paint a pumpkin face on them because it was right before Halloween.&nbsp; She never picked it up.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got a call from a superintendent of a school district in the Chicago suburbs, and he said, \u201cWould you please come and train our teachers to do project work?\u201d and which is what I\u2019d been doing for a while, and, \u201cCome in august before school starts and I\u2019ll give you three days with the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2013","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2013"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2014,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2013\/revisions\/2014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}