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Context: Please appreciate that this episode comes at the height of a four-week focus at this school on justice and fairness. The strategies the teachers used during this period, including this episode with Arthur, were experimental and the teachers are currently discussing their value. We invite you to join their critique.

Measurement is challenging work. It requires children to have knowledge of mathematical concepts, spatial relationships, and measurement tools, and to then coordinate those understandings in order to carry out the physical measurement. This video clip shows three five-year old girls, Grace, Maya, and Peyton, working to measure a curtain from paper to hang across the front of their puppet theater.
Estimation and Size Comparison

By putting paint on his face Max has a particular reason to study his image in the mirror. Face painting involves thinking about which color to place where in what amount. But face painting also requires some knowledge of how mirrors work. I see the brush moving away from me in the mirror, so that means it is getting closer to my nose. I feel the paint all over the skin of my nose, but the mirror tells me it is only in one small spot. I see my friend growl at her image in her mirror. So if I go to the other side, will I see in her mirror what made her growl?

“I made brown, Grace” a three year old girl exclaims excitedly to her teacher. Grace asks, “What colors did you mix to make brown?” The girl answers, “Red, and blue, and black” pointing to remnants of these colors on her easel paper. Most likely the girl was not thinking about what colors she used as she was mixing so her answer comes from what she sees rather than what she remembers. What might the teacher have said as a follow up here? Should the teacher move in and experiment with the child to reproduce brown from red and green?

The boy in this video touches his brush in the red pigment, then the blue and notices how the water darkens. After touching his brush into blue again, he paints, perhaps expecting the color to be blue. But as you can see in the video, the red on his brush mixes with the blue to make a purple patch of color on the paper. The boy swirls his brush in his water, perhaps to clean it, perhaps to watch the color change. But as he swirls his brush, he looks over to his friend’s work and misses the accelerated change of the water’s color from blue to purple.

The seven children in this video clip are drawing their design for how to house pets of different kinds. Later on, each child will present his or her plan to the group and together the children will decide which ideas they think will work best. A complete transcript is included with this video clip.

Keywords: Fives, Children-Teacher, Markers, Drawing, Pets, Perspective, Invention, Function
Length of stand-alone master video clip: 6 minutes 22 seconds

This young boy’s curiosity causes him to pull up to a standing position to see what he can see. However, the rim he holds rises slightly higher than his head. So when he tries to re-seat himself on the floor, he cannot place his hand on the floor to break his fall without first letting go of the rim. He cries out in frustration and an observant teacher guides him down gently, but not without first allowing him to make a few attempts on his own.

Keywords: Ones, Body, Self-reliance, Gross-motor
Length of video clip: 2 minutes 36 seconds

In this episode, Alexandra writes “Happy Birthday” on a card for her grandfather with the support of her teacher. On occasion, two of her classmates help to figure out what letter comes next. Their interaction invites us to explore how young children are challenged by the frequently arbitrary relationships in the English language between letter names, letter sounds, and letter forms (graphic representation). We examine when the strategy of “sounding out” effectively helps a child to determine the next letter in a word.

In this video clip George uses color to define segments not delineated in the bare clay structure. Someone looking at his painted work can now more easily “read” the symmetrical sections of the clay as the wings of his “beautiful butterfly.” Color clarifies the symbol. Additionally, the choice of making small segments instead of broader segments creates a pattern. George probably realizes that a checkerboard of small squares is a better symbol for butterfly wings than one homogeneous color. Notice how he never places the same color in adjacent squares.

Diane has placed bowls of water, segments of brown paper, and paintbrushes at a circular table for the five children above to use. She wants to know how the children will “read” this situation. She also wants to know if they will read her actions when she makes watermarks on her paper. When children see a set of objects, they immediately assimilate the objects to particular action schemes, sort of like scripts that have a sequence of actions. Dip brush in water, bring brush to paper, stroke brush over paper, look at mark. We could call this sequence the “marking” script.