See What Children Know
One aspect of reflective practice asks that you question your certainties and routines. Preschools almost universally give young children pigments and small brushes to paint on a variety of surfaces: vertical easels, table flat paper, hardened clay, and even their own faces. We know that children enjoy adding color and streaks to an otherwise blank surface, but why? What are they thinking that makes this activity interesting? And how can teachers justify this time as educational, a question that defines reflective, intentional practice?
At a minimum, children become interested in the changes created by painting. They think, can I repeat this change? Can I vary it? Do I understand what I did that creates the variation? But this general form of interest holds for such a large set of activities that we would not feel satisfied with “cause and effect” as the answer to what children learn from painting. For example, tissue paper can be crushed and holds a new shape, sand can be pushed to the side opening a hole, soapy water can be splashed to create a mound of bubbles. Yes, the general interest in the causes of a state transformation are a part of painting a surface, but can we discuss processes that are more specific to painting? And can we identify episodes where children’s painting seems rather banal and needs to be bumped to something more valuable?
We have found a few video clips in the Videatives archive to encourage and support this discussion. Look at each of these in turn: Using the Mirror to Paint Faces,The Accidental Mark, Decorating a Clay Butterfly, Transforming Colors in Water, Transforming Colors on Paper, and From Smearing to Exploring. We would like to know if you think we are doing the child a disservice by using painting as a completely free play medium or if the teacher should enter the play with questions and provocations as suggested in some of the text that parallels these six video clips in the VSS.
To enter our VSS library and view these six clips click here . To subscribe to our entire Video Streaming Service click here. To download a high resolution Quicktime video file of any of these six titles please send your request to GEForman@aol.com.
Notes from the Field
Happy New Year! Videatives Views has entered it’s fourth year with over 3,500 subscribers. And the Video Streaming Service subscriptions are growing each month. We now turn to you with a request. Do you have a video clip you would be willing to share with others who subscribe to our video library? We are particularly interested in broadening the demographics and classroom environments represented in our video library. If you send us a clip we will let you know if we can use it. We will provide you with our analysis of the children’s goals, strategies, and theories and share the clip with others for comments that you can easily access. If you are able to supply us with a number of usable clips we are open to negotiating other incentives, such as free subscriptions to the VSS, free downloads, online consulting, or customized forums. Most digital cameras now record in a format we can use. We would only need full permission from you to place the video on our website. If you are interested, please let us know at GEForman@aol.com.
