See What Children Know
Click on the thumbnail to watch this video inside our video library. Imagine a child’s joy at discovering a constant, localized wind, aka a fan. Watch Owen explore this controlled event to figure out the boundaries and intensity of its effects. He feels the wind on his face and realizes the source of this invisible force. At first he approaches the front of the fan with one hand, palm parallel to the grill barrier over the blades. As the cool force hits his palm, he smiles at his teacher, communicating his joy. He places his hand very near the grill but decides not to touch the grill, as though he understands that the wind is something that comes from the grill but is not the grill itself. He touches the grill to move it slightly, as if to confirm that the feeling of the wind will be different than the feeling of the grill.
Owen brings both hands in front of the grill, palms parallel with the plane of the fan, fingers splayed outward. Perhaps he seeks to test the scope of the wind – how wide it might be. One hand at a time would only tell him that the wind blows at that one spot. Two hands tell him that this “one” wind spans at least the distance between his two hands. Again he smiles at the teacher as if he wants to share the joy of learning something about this fan-made wind.
What to do next? We see in this 46-second clip how a child reveals what he knows and how he frames a new experience. We also see his alternation between exploring the physical event and symbolizing his understanding of the physical event (pretending to be blown backward). Through this combination of testing and representing, representing and testing, children construct their understandings of new events. Teachers can help by letting the children know that we find their explorations and representations interesting and by occasionally bringing in a new dimension to think about (“How does it sound?”) or by making a method of knowing more explicit (“I can see your hair move.”).
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