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One year olds reveal their expectations by the subtle form of their actions on a big block of clay.

Keywords: Ones, Clay, Exploration
Length of video: 1 minute, 30 seconds

Mathew shares with his class an album of photographs from a recent trip. The photographs include Mathew, his father, and his white dog named, Alex. As you watch, reflect about the goals teachers may have for children at sharing time. What strategies might a teacher use to strengthen a child's understanding of past and present? In what ways may documentation such as photographs a) encourage children to develop their sense of story, and b) more effectively convey their experience to others?
Transcript
00:08 Teacher: Who is that in the picture Mathew?

Children are smearing paint on a surface. What happens that captures their interest? What are they thinking? Perhaps they are considering the slimy feeling of the paint on an otherwise rough surface, the sidewalk. The children say very little about the color change. When the teacher asks a question about color, Claire answers generically, “I can paint” as she smears paint over her palms. Perhaps she is intrigued with how her own hands have become strange. Making the familiar strange heightens interest. But can we make this activity a bit more valuable?

What teacher-role might you recommend in what situation with what age children with what group dynamics? This video clip shows one way a teacher might interact with children. The adult sits within the play space and helps the children accomplish their goals, e.g. spelling words. The teacher is not herself pretending at the moment.

Keywords: Fives, Props, Pretense, Children-Teacher
Length of video: 3 minutes 45 seconds

A group of children work with their teacher to add today’s date to the calendar during circle time. The children demonstrate an emerging understanding about the conventions of the calendar, number recognition, sequence and counting.

Like the director of a play, the girl in this video clip assigns the role of “baby” to the adult. The girl notices that her symbol for a baby (intern teacher) is misread when a classmate asks the “baby” for help tying her apron. The girl works to refine her symbol. She directs the intern teacher: “You have to get up and…you sit in my lap” (00:22). The girl realizes if the baby sits on her lap it’s a better symbol. The girl’s giggle tells us she senses the irony of having an adult on her lap when she says, “Look at baby” (00:42). Next, the child instructs the adult to crawl (00:53).

Watch how this young boy continues to shuffle the position of the blocks in his tower until the final structure has the wide blocks at the bottom and the more narrow blocks higher in the stack. Cole has stacked four blocks of identical shape and size together.  He now decides to add a rectangular, red block to his stack.  Notice that he positions the block horizontally by placing it on its side.

Sometimes it is useful to consider what a child is not doing in order to identify the significance of what the child is doing. Compare the persistence of this young girl as she presses two blocks together. Would she do this with wooden blocks? What does she know about these blocks that elicit the firm presses that we see? We suspect that she anticipates the blocks will stay together even if she holds them in midair. By observing the subtle actiions of young children we can figure out what they know or at least what they assume. The strategy reveals a theory.

We can “read” the child’s intent by looking carefully at small actions. Notice how these girls twist the key once they place it on the keyhole in the doorknob. While they may not have found the key the fits deeper into the keyhole, they still let us know that twisting defines the object as a key, and not simply some random shape that fits into a hole.

Keywords: Ones, Simple Machine, Spatial, Problem Solving
Length of video: 33 seconds

In this video we celebrate the joy of infants among infants as they share the delight of bells, jiggles, and babbles. As we watch their movements, we wonder what they wonder. Why do they shake the hanging bells while looking elsewhere? Is there a contagion from one infant’s action to another? Are their babbles messages to one another or spontaneous expressions of delight? What can we infer by the slight variations on the ways in which they pull on the hanging slinky and bells?