Transportation week

Sometimes I get worried that, no matter how hard I try, I'm never giving my students enough of a chance to be as creative as they most possibly can. ... Until I watch them work, of course, and I realize that "creative" is their default setting. Even when given a pattern to build a picture from, the ideas that go into their personal creations take them their own way.

David: I made my bus pink and orange. It's going into town. [Starts walking around the classroom, pretending his bus is driving.] Uh oh! Now he's getting a ticket!


Kevin: Look, it's going uphill. It's a roto-tiller that cuts grass.

Tully finished her bus and immediately folded it into a paper airplane.

I left school after this activity and thought again about my increasing interest in emergent curriculum. It seems that, even when presented with what could be seen as a prescribed craft, children infuse their work with their own background knowledge and creativity. That is so re-assuring. And, it makes me wonder if it's a lesson for all of us in the diversity of learning experiences that are inherent in each "lesson" we try to teach, each "activity" we facilitate.

Of course, we can create and facilitate activities for kids with an objective in mind, e.g. they're supposed to make a bus out of construction paper pieces. For three-year-olds, it's a worthy task, especially when we've been reading books about buses and talking about transportation all this week. It's good for us teachers to know they've made the transfer of knowledge and can create the image of a bus on their own.

At the same time, though, when we hold too closely to our objectives, what do we - the teachers - learn from the children, other than that they can create a bus or not? I introduced the activity by showing an example of a bus I had made, so we could talk about the parts of a bus. But then, when the kids went to work, I stepped back and observed more than I spoke, to see where they went with their idea of what a bus is.

As the examples above show, each child both approached and left the activity having made different meanings of it, and having scaffolded their image of a bus into a different set of prior knowledge, experiences and interests. David changed the color of his bus from yellow to pink and orange, and gave it motion by walking around the room with it in his hands. Then, he made a story out of it by pretending it was going to get a ticket. Roughly speaking, I could see that he was applying his prior knowledge of the fact that if vehicles like buses drive too fast, they get a ticket. I can't tell whether he's experienced that first-hand, or if he's observed it while driving with his parents, but I can tell he's had some experience with that concept.

Kevin, I know, is really into plants and gardens and the tools that go with it. I'm not at all surprised that he imagines his bus like a rototiller, let alone that he even knows what a rototiller is. He was trying to fit the idea of a bus into his general interest in gardening, and the closest thing that a bus resembles within the context of garden is, of course, a rototiller. What intrigued me more, though, was the fact that he turned it on its side, and tried to put the second wheel on the opposite side of the first wheel, rather than next to it, as if he was trying to make it three-dimensional. THAT was fascinating.

Finally, Tully, if you haven't guessed already, has been sucked into the paper airplane craze that started our transportation unit. Anything she makes with paper, she eventually starts to fold into a paper airplane, no matter what it is, or is supposed to be. I'm not worried. By the time next Monday comes around, the craze will be past. For now, I'm celebrating with her.