Category Archives: Investigating Choice Time: Inquiry, Exploration, and Play

early childhood education, children, play

Sharing!

Sharing our thoughts and ideas with friends is so important to all of us. I recently discussed an Amy Tan book that I had just finished reading with the members of my small book club. After reading the book, I thought that I had a pretty solid interpretation and opinion of the story but during our discussion, I realized that there were many aspects of the text that I hadn’t even thought about. When I got back home, I went right back to the book to reread particular passages that my friends referred to in our conversation. I needed to revise a bit of my original interpretation and assessment of the book!

Children too need time to share their discoveries, their artwork, their constructions and their dramatic play experiences. After Choice Time, it’s so productive and supportive of children’s ability to listen and respond to others experiences and ideas if we leave time for a group share meeting. Perhaps something unexpected or exciting happened at the art center or an exciting discovery was made at the water table. Was a new math game invented at the math center?

When the children and teacher meet for post-Choice Time-share children might be encouraged and enticed into choosing an activity the next day that they hadn’t previously considered trying. We are also reaffirming by sharing peer examples the idea that, during Choice Time, we honor and encourage innovation, collaboration and exploration.

As my good friend, Julie Diamond, wrote in a note to me, interest in trying new centers “can be further expanded when teachers find places in the room to display work after the meeting – time discussion”.

Keeping the discussed work up for a while allows children to continue this discussion, ask each other questions, think of what they might possibly do at the same center. It’s also a good idea to have areas of the classroom where Choice Time projects can be displayed…an empty shelf, a bulletin board, even a homemade shelf. My colleague, Connie Norgren, created shelves for her children’s woodworking projects by using pieces of cardboard and string. She hung these temporary display shelves on a pegboard. (see photo)

In some ways, Choice Time follows the workshop structure that is used by the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. We begin at a group meeting with a brief ‘minilesson’, then the children have time for their ‘independent’ play and explorations, and we bring closure with our share meeting. It’s absurd to have to justify exploration and play for young children. However, if you have difficultly ‘justifying’ this very important part of the early childhood curriculum, you could call it “ Investigative Workshop” or “Exploration Workshop” instead of Choice Time. If that’s what it takes to make it work for you, go for it!

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A priority in Kindergarten?

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I’ve had some difficulty writing an entry this week because I’ve been rather depressed about the state of kindergartens in New York City schools. It’s becoming a cliché to say that they are becoming more and more like first grade but there does seem to be a lot of truth to that thought.

When I speak with administrators who have had Bank Street early childhood training, who understand how important play, inquiry and opportunities for social interactions are for young children and who STILL eliminate all opportunities for this to happen in their schools, I really do wonder what is happening? Why isn’t choice time and inquiry a priority for kindergarten classrooms?

Perhaps it has to do with the way that Choice Time is interpreted. I’ve been wondering about how my idea of Choice Time differs from what I’ve been seeing when I visit many kindergarten classes.

I always tried to encourage children to ‘think of the possibilities’. What can happen at this center? What’s the potential for these materials? What might we add to the center to broaden the potential? What center just isn’t going anywhere and what should we do about that? Should we add new materials? Should we just pack up the center and move on?

This was often a topic of discussion that I had with the children. Sometimes we charted ideas – (i.e. Here Are Some New Ideas for What We Might Do At the Sand Table). Other times, it was just an informal discussion that we had at meeting or among the participants at a particular center.

I don’t mean to imply that every Choice Time center, every day, was an earth-moving experience for the children or for me. What I am saying is that I always encouraged children and myself to think about how we could have new ideas about how to use materials and how the addition of new materials changed what children could do at a center.

Don’t we want children to become thoughtful, inquisitive readers, writers and mathematicians? Isn’t it logical to support these behaviors through play and exploration at Choice Time?

CLICK HERE to make a comment. I invite all readers (teachers,students, parents, grandparents, etc.) to leave comments. It would be wonderful to hear what you have to say so we can have more of a dialogue on the subject.

Improvisation

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We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot (“Little Gidding” from Four Quartets

My kindergarten class was studying bridges and because of their interest in the topic and the multitude of questions that kept coming up in class, this became, surprisingly, a yearlong project. We visited many bridges, returning to sites to answer questions and get more information.

As the study progressed, the construction of bridges in the block center became more and more elaborate. It seemed as though the space allotted in the classroom for block building was becoming too limited for their elaborate suspension bridges and often-collapsing moveable bridges. I began to notice that the “Pretend” center, abutting the block center, was empty each day. Nobody was picking this once very popular activity at Choice Time. I thought that this might be a time to pack up that center and extend the space of the block center, allowing for bigger constructions and for more children to work together in this center at one time.

I presented my observations the idea for eliminating the dramatic play center to the children at our next class meeting fully expecting a unanimous agreement. No! The children were unanimously AGAINST this plan! “What about making the Pretend Center smaller and the block center bigger?” Sarah asked. “But” I wondered out loud, “What could you play in a small pretend center?” “A store, “ Zeke suggested and excitement broke out. “Yes, yes, yes, let’s make a store!” What had I unleashed? I hadn’t anticipated this turn of events!

What ensued was two days of discussion at our class meetings about what kind of store could work in a small space. One child suggested that it could be the kind of store that the neighborhood has on the streets in the weekend. A stoop sale! At last, the decision was made to have a small bookstore. I said that if we were going to turn the pretend center into a bookstore, then we needed to do some research, so we arranged to visit a local bookstore. zeke-at-bookstore

On our field trip the children drew the inside and outside of the store and interviewed the workers and storeowner. We bought an ABC book to add to our class library. What followed were a few weeks of bookstore preparations. (Connie Norgren, a colleague, came into our classroom during one of our class discussions and she jokingly said to the children, “If it’s a little bookstore, maybe you should only have little books.” The idea caught fire immediately and hence K-239 Community Little Bookstore was born.

book-store-awning During the following exciting and busy time, many of the Choice Time centers became places where children were involved with bookstore preparations.

Block Center In the block center, the children switched from building bridges to building a bookstore. It was, at first, almost as though they were using the blocks to create a map of the Community Bookstore. I supported this work by taping up photos of the bookstore from our trip and also hanging up some of the children’s observational drawings. The store that we visited had recently added a small café and so a basket filled with cups, plates, utensils and fabric was added for the café. Paper, index cards, post-its, tape, pencils and markers were also available in this center so that signs, labels, menus and other print and pictures might be created. Although the Pretend Center was not in use, the addition of the café seemed to create a dramatic play environment in the block-building center.

Book-making Center: Because the children decided to only have little books in the bookstore, we set up a center where they could make small books to add to the bookstore collection. We had recently been looking at ABC books in our reading centers and the children seemed particularly interested in writing tiny ABC books for their store. I asked them what they might need at this center and they came up with this list: little blank books with enough pages for the whole alphabet (I prepared these), some ABC books for them to look at, dictionaries (we had a nice collection of picture dictionaries in class and the children loved looking through these) and abc charts. I also added paper and a small stapler in case they wanted to make their own booklets.

Sign Center: Children in this center made signs and labels for the store. They made labels for different sections (they decided on the categories after looking through the books that had been collected and sorted), made a sign with the hours of operation, and they made a big, colorful sign with the name of the store. On our trip, the noticed that the store had an awning and so they constructed one using fabric from the art center and a wooden structure that previously served as a puppet theater. I didn’t need to provide a lot of materials for this center. I left some photographs from our field trip, some trip papers where children had recorded some of the store signs, paper, blank index cards, markers and crayons. At the start of center time, I met with this group to review what signs had been made the previous day and to generate ideas for signs that were still needed. This was a very popular center!

Store Poster and Advertising Center: In the classroom art studio, children made posters to hang in the store and also bookstore signs to post around our school. (As a result of these school signs, parents, children and teachers from the school community began dropping in to donate tiny books for our store!)

Library: Children looked through our classroom library for ‘little books’, which they then sorted into different categories. I provided small plastic baskets that they could use to sort the books. The children at the bookmaking center brought their books to these children so that they could be added to the collections.

Construction Center: A cash register was constructed and paper dollars and tin foil coins were cut out and ready for the opening of our new business. First I joined the children to look at photos of cash registers and together (shared drawing!) we made a design for one that they could build. I provided an empty carton along with the photos. The children worked near the art center so that they could get materials that they needed.

During choice time, there were some centers that did not have anything to do with our bookshop preparations. The sand table was still open as was the math and science centers. But for the few weeks of bookstore excitement, many children chose to pick centers connected with the bookshop, whether it was building, constructing, writing, drawing and painting, determining prices for books that were for sale (nothing more that 25 cents) or sorting books in the library.

There was a definite “bookstore buzz” in the room during Choice Time. When the store finally opened, we invited another kindergarten class to visit and buy books. Our 4th grade buddies came and we also opened the store to families on Family Friday morning. The children were all excited to talk about all of the different parts of the store and how they built it. However, after about a week of ‘playing bookstore’, interest waned and the bookstore was closed.

We returned to the bridge study. Interestingly, there was now a renewed interest in the Pretend Center, which reopened in its original space. Although it looked just as it did before the bookstore study, it became a choice time center where children were able to play and explore with a new and fresh perspective and with invigorated interest.

The teacher’s role is important in allowing this type of exploration to unfold. The teacher almost becomes an improviser, who can listen carefully to children and understand how to use their questions and comments as an impetus for introducing new projects and investigations. It’s important, however, not to jump quickly into a curriculum detour, but rather to give time for children’s’ ideas ‘percolate’. This will help the teacher determine if the enthusiasms are momentary or if they are interests that will withstand an in-depth exploration.

I’ve only described one example of how Choice Time and inquiry study can overlap, opportunities for using literacy skills can be integrated into children’s play, and how the interest, energy and enthusiasm of the children can unexpectedly ignite an interesting class inquiry project that works its way into Choice Time exploration and play.

Awakening Joy in Creative Expression

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When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college- that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “you mean they forget?”
Howard Ikemoto

Returning home from a school after discussing what is and is not ‘art’ with a group of teachers, I asked my husband, an artist, how he would define art. After a bit of thinking, he said “an intensely personal, charged, poetic and transcendent response to life”. In my discussion with the teachers, I said that to me, art represents an outlet for a unique and personal form of expression.

When my daughter was four years old, my family moved to Rome, Italy. The wife of the director of the American Academy very highly recommended a local nursery school, so my husband and I eagerly went to check it out. Everything was spotless and cheerful-looking. The walls were covered with children’s art – but all looking the same! Something was very wrong with that picture! We quickly said “thank-you” to the teacher and rushed outside, not knowing if we should laugh or cry. Luckily, we soon discovered a lovely school right near our home, where my daughter happily painted, drew, sculpted with clay, and returned home beautifully messy and full of stories about her day.

Now, more than thirty years later, it disturbs me when I go into classrooms and see walls filled with identical images of flowers, with pieces of colored paper pasted onto a teacher-made flower template, decorated ‘bubble letters’ representing a so-called artistic approach to learning the letter of the day, or row after row of colored-in worksheet pictures of farm animals. What do children take with them from this type of experience? Why is it that teachers still feel the need to control the outcome of what children produce when using paper, paste, glue, scissors and crayons? I’ve been told, on some occasions, that this type of activity is planned because it teaches children how to use scissors and to color inside the lines.

In discussing my thoughts about this type of proscribed activity with a wonderfully eager, yet anxious, teacher, I presented an alternate lesson for supporting young children as they learned to master the use of new art materials and tools. I suggested that children might each pick a square of colored paper and also be given a scissor. Before giving out the materials, the teacher would model how she cut squiggles and shapes from her own paper and also how she could tear shapes using the tips of her fingers. Then children could be invited to try it out on their own papers. While they are cutting and tearing, the teacher could gently show individual children how to turn their scissor to make the cutting easier while she marvels at the multitude of shapes that are being created.

Scissors could be collected and each child could be given a zip-loc bag labeled with his/her name and told that they were going to get their bags back tomorrow for something very exciting. Children could then return to the meeting area to share their responses to the activity and their ideas about what might be happening tomorrow.

The next day the teacher could return to her own zip loc bag and another colored paper (different color) and demonstrate how she arranges and rearranges her cutouts to make different kinds of designs, reacting out loud to her various designs so as to publicly share her thoughts with the group. Children could then each pick their own second sheet of colored paper, be given their baggies filled with cutout shapes from yesterday’s activity and go off to make their own arrangements. Talking, sharing and laughing at work tables is encouraged!

Once again, the shapes are returned to baggies, paper collected and children reconvene at meeting to discuss their experiences. Tomorrow they would get their baggies back for something very exciting!

The third day, the teacher could once again model arranging and rearranging her shapes but this time she would decide on one that she was particularly pleased with. Now she could demonstrate how she takes each shape, one at a time, and glues it to the paper so that she has a completed work of art. Children are now challenged to find their most pleasing design and to glue it to their papers.

If this work were displayed for the group to see, the discussion would probably be so much richer than any discussion about a series of identical flowers. The children have had experience cutting and pasting without the anxiety of keeping within the lines or making something look ‘just right’. They also would have had the pleasure of creating and sharing art that is uniquely their own.

Classrooms should have a neat and well-stocked art center that children can use independent of the teacher. All that is needed is a bookcase (I’ve sometimes used four milk crates tied together when I didn’t have a bookcase available) containing selections of paper, scissors, glue, crayons, perhaps some colored yarn, small mirrors, interesting found and recycled materials, chalk or pastels, watercolors, a basket of books with art reproductions, a small container of attractive art reproductions and museum postcards. New materials could be added throughout the year. If the teacher takes time, when needed, to introduce new materials or some strategies for using materials (i.e. paper-folding, clay creations, wood sculptures, collages, crayon etchings…) children can visit the art center at Choice Time and have the opportunity to go on their own artistic journeys. In this exciting classroom, the teacher takes on the role of a travel guide, encouraging children to make discoveries in an environment that invites experimentation and creativity.

Investigative learning can be messy, filled with trial and error experiences. It can be frightening for a teacher to give up the control that comes with whole-class, directed lessons that have clear, expected outcomes. Teachers who encourage inquiry and investigative play are always actively observing and assessing the progress of children. They take time to plan carefully for centers that both welcome and challenge children’s intellectual, social and academic growth. Bumps or turns in the road are welcomed as indicators of curiosity and are seen as wonderful possibilities for enriching and extending the curriculum.

If teaching is indeed an artful profession, then as Albert Einstein so wisely said, “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge”

In my next entry, I’d like to discuss some ideas for employing Choice Time centers for exploring one inquiry topic. I welcome ideas and stories from your classrooms!

A Learning Partnership

Getting Started

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“The first essential for the child’s development is concentration. The child who concentrates is immensely happy.”
Maria Montessori

Two years ago I had the opportunity to visit a class of 5 year olds in Reggio Emilia, Italy. They had just finished their morning group meeting and were beginning their ‘work period’. Twenty- four children were scattered around the classroom, which included a loft area containing unit blocks and a large bathroom with a washbasin that children used for water explorations. Block building, art, dramatic play, math activities, water play…all of this was happening in a room that buzzed with the sound of happy and engaged voices. What particularly amazed me was that this period lasted for two hours and children did not appear to be wandering from one activity to another. Occasionally, a child would walk over to another area to observe or chat with the teacher, but then he returned to his own activity, seemingly ‘recharged’ by the encounter.

Although I’m not suggesting a two- hour choice time, I do encourage teachers to expect children to stay at their chosen center for the entire period, rather than shifting from one activity to another. Concentration and focus are important elements in the learning process. It is logical for teachers to expect that children will become engrossed in an activity over an extended time period. However, as we well know, this doesn’t ‘just happen’ in a classroom setting. It takes a lot of teacher preparation, expectation, instruction and patience.

At the start of the year, I scheduled a relatively short Choice Time. I wanted children to be asking for more time rather than wondering what to do at their centers after ten or fifteen minutes. Little by little, the period was extended to an hour, sometimes longer. By late winter and spring children were often so engaged in their play and explorations that they usually continued at the same center for two, sometimes three, consecutive days.

I suggest that teachers always begin Choice Time with a class meeting. Think of this as a group planning time. Perhaps the discussion might be on how a new material might be used in one of the centers. It might focus on a problem that the teacher has noticed or one that the children have complained about. Clean-up time immediately comes to mind as a challenging activity for a group of young children. This might require a discussion and plan that takes place over a few pre-choice time meetings. The crucial word here for these discussions is ‘brief’ because children are eager to go off and play in their centers.

I know that many teachers rightfully will wonder how they can maintain a Choice Time where children are naturally focused and engaged in one area and where they don’t lose interest and walk off to join another center. There’s probably also questions about the child who has a meltdown after getting ‘closed out’ of a desired choice. These concerns and questions, (and I’m sure that there are many more that I haven’t mentioned), are very understandable and need to be taken very seriously. I’m going to attempt to share many of my ideas, experiences and suggestions in the next few weeks.

For today, I would like to share some thoughts about setting up and maintaining centers. The organization of each center is so important for encouraging extended explorations and innovative work. Think carefully about what might possibly happen in the center. What are the basic materials necessary for beginning explorations? Start simple. For example, in the art center, be sure that there’s a variety of paper, enough scissors for about 6 – 8 children, nice, new crayons, glue sticks, and maybe some colored chalk. Don’t put out an overwhelming amount of materials and add new supplies, little by little. You might want to have a whole-class art lesson on using paper strips for collage and sculptures. Then you could tell the children that there will be a basket of paper strips in the art center just in case they want to try something new during Choice Time.

You could introduce a water center by first giving partners a small pan of water to explore, using stirring sticks, sponges and straws. The entire class could do this exploration and then, after collecting the materials, you might give children a chance to share their ‘discoveries’. Having perked their interest in water, you could tell them that you will be setting up a water table (you just need a plastic baby-bath basin on a table) for Choice Time. After children have had more opportunities to play and explore with the sticks and sponges, you might begin introducing new materials like funnels and tubes.

The idea is that the centers start out simple enough for children to explore and play without being overwhelmed but they are also ‘open’ enough to keep adding new materials to extend the possibilities.

All of the centers should have appropriate materials for writing such as paper, blank booklets, memo pads, list paper, chart paper, crayons, pencils, markers, etc. There also could be a space at that center where children might post or hang up work. My centers all had at least one basket of books that somehow related to that area of concentration. I told the children that these were books for ‘inspiration’.

I tried to incorporate my classroom tables into the centers, rather than having a cluster of tables in the middle of the room. This served two purposes. Having the table in the center gave the area a more permanent ‘studio’ or ‘laboratory’ ambiance. Also, it was much easier for children to independently get started as soon as Choice Time began, rather than have me ‘assign’ tables or room spots for each center.

Room design is so important. The room set up literally speaks to the child, but that is yet another discussion!

Why Choice Time?

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Exploration is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s what scientists do every day. If a scientist already knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t be discovering anything, because they already knew what they were doing.
Neil de Grasse Tyson
Director, New York Hayden Planetarium

This week, I received emails from two teachers, each asking for advice and information about Choice Time. They want to know what kinds of Choices to offer, systems to keep Choice Time from becoming chaotic and unfocused, how often to schedule Choice Time, what they should be doing during Choice Time, how many choices to open at one time, etc. These are all important questions that I want to answer so as to give these teachers as much support as possible. But, that said, I think that it’s important to first explain why I value Choice Time and why I spent so much time planning for this part of my kindergarten and first grade curriculum.

Choice Time provides a point and place, during the school day, for children to make sense of the adult world. So much of what happens in the classroom today is driven by a standardized, scripted curriculum. Teachers are bound by pacing calendars and quantitative assessments. Because of these mandates, children have less and less opportunities to make decisions, even down to being able to chose what they will be writing each day. That is why it’s important to provide time for children to explore, theorize, create, and experience the frustration of learning through trial and error.

My ideal Choice Time involves an active teacher who, by listening closely to children’s conversations and monologues, becomes aware of many of their understandings, misunderstandings and wonderings. This invaluable insight into their world provides the teacher with the seeds for planting future classroom dialogues and inquiries.

In planning choice time centers, I would suggest keeping in mind your big goals for the year. I wanted children to develop independence and self-confidence. Making interdisciplinary connections and beginning to generate personal lines of inquiry and exploration is another important goal. I provided many opportunities for children to use reading, writing and mathematics in ways that would support their own, self-directed projects and activities. Children should understand that they could use classroom equipment and materials in new and innovative ways. There should be many opportunities within the center for children to expand and deepen their use of language to express ideas, discoveries and confusions. When there was a sense all of this happening, then I knew that I was on the right track and my Choice Time was becoming successful in meeting my goals.

In setting up choice time centers, I planned to leave opportunity for children to ‘set their own agendas’. In September, the centers were usually rather basic: blocks, dramatic play, play dough, an art center, water explorations, a science table perhaps with shells to explore. These were a few of the possible early centers. As the year proceeded, centers became more focused on the children’s particular interests and on class inquiry studies. For example what began in September as ‘water explorations’ might possibly become a ‘water-machine invention’ center where children were experimenting at constructing water machines. At the playdough table, instead of making traditional flour and salt playdough, children might be creating their own innovations on the traditional recipe, adding sand or sparkles to the batter to see what would happen.

Although I was setting up the centers and deciding, initially, what materials to include, my ‘message’ was “I wonder what interesting projects you are going to come up with?” We would have interesting class discussions centered on “what can we imagine doing with this new paper?” or “Are there any thoughts on what we might explore with our new microscope? What new materials will we need to bring to the science table to help you with your science investigation?”

Generally, there wasn’t a specific ‘task’ to be completed although, sometimes, there might be a particular focus for a center. For example, one year when my class was studying the waterways in New York City we read about landforms and how they affected the creation of these waterways. This topic fascinated many of the children and they asked if they could use our sand table to make their own landforms using the Plasticene that we had in our art studio. I emptied the sand from the table and each day a group of children went to work on this project. There was a big basket of reference books and some photographs of landforms such as mesas, buttes, mountains and valleys. The children decided on how this project would proceed and, on some occasions, a few disagreements erupted, such as on the day when Alex decided to add spikes to her butte. She adamantly insisted that buttes had spikes. When the children came complaining to me about this, I suggested to Alex that she defend her decision to add spikes by finding some pictures of buttes in the book basket. I walked away and left the group, hoping that they would come to some mutual agreement. When I came back, I saw that the other two children, looking through the photos with Alex, convinced her that the buttes should be ‘spike-free’. Through their dialogue, conflict, and rhetoric the children pulled apart an idea, experimented with different strategies and eventually arrived at a point of compromise and satisfaction.

There’s so much more that I will be writing about Choice Time in future entries…helpful routines for making it run smoothly, ideas for new centers, the role of the teacher during choice time, assessing the work that the children are doing in their centers, dealing with problems like scheduling and clean up time, making connections to the curriculum, how it looks different across the year and from grade to grade…and any other choice time questions that come up over the course of the year.

The door is open!

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When I taught kindergarten and first grade, the most exciting part of my day was Choice Time, when children had time to pursue an inquiry topic, explore materials and ideas and, of course, have space and time to play. If you would have asked any of the children what the most exciting time of the day was for them, I would not have been surprised if they would have also named Choice Time as the best part of their school day.

Now that I’m a staff developer working with early childhood teachers I can see that it’s difficult for them, considering the push for high academic standards for young children, to program Choice Time into their daily schedules. My challenge is to help them (and their administrators) understand that a well-planned Choice Time gives children the opportunities to explore new ideas, problem-solve, practice newly-learned literacy skills in personally meaningful contexts, and, quite importantly, to have fun playing!

I’m starting this blog to open up a forum for sharing ideas, reflections, memories, suggestions, problems and questions about Choice Time. Ideally, we will all have the opportunity to dialogue on the topic.

In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior. In play it is as though he were a head taller than himself.

Lev Vygotsky

The door is open. Let our Choice Time conversation begin!