One that I remember, that sometimes teachers say to me is, \u201cWell, there\u2019s nothing in our neighbourhood to study.\u201d I can\u2019t tell you how often I\u2019ve heard that, and it\u2019s 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 \u201cOh there\u2019s nothing in our neighbourhood, we\u2019re in the middle of the cornfields, and we only have a small community, about four thousand people.\u201d It\u2019s required, you\u2019re 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, \u201cWhen 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 \u2018cause we\u2019re going to study them.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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, \u201cWell, is this a ball?\u201d and they said, \u201cYeah sure!\u201d and she said \u201cWell what makes you think so?\u201d that question is so important, \u201cIt\u2019s round!\u201d and then she had a paper plate on her desk. She picked it up and she said, \u201cIt\u2019s round isn\u2019t it?\u201d \u201cYeah\u201d \u201cA ball?\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d \u201dWhy not?\u201d \u201cIt doesn\u2019t bounce.\u201d Well it turns out, the bowling ball doesn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And they cut, it wasn\u2019t easy, a marble, how do you put a string around a marble? But they wouldn\u2019t give up, and that\u2019s 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\u2019t 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, \u201cHow do you write basketball?\u201d and that\u2019s 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\u2019s an important part of developing good academic skills; it has a purpose. It\u2019s useful. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I can write the word basketball, and when my, my Moms or Dads or neighbours or the other classes come past the documentation that\u2019s on the wall, which by the way is another lesson from Reggio, they can read it, \u2018cause 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\u2019re talking about kindergarten children, they\u2019re saying, \u201cHow do I write, \u201cI don\u2019t know, \u201cTwo feet?\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t need a federal grant to do it, it was a great project. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One that I remember, that sometimes teachers say to me is, \u201cWell, there\u2019s nothing in our neighbourhood to study.\u201d I can\u2019t tell you how often I\u2019ve heard that, and it\u2019s 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 […]<\/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-2015","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2015","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=2015"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2016,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2015\/revisions\/2016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}