Over the school year the children
have been very interested in animals.
They are interested in how they look, how they sound, and how they
move. We wanted to explore this further
with them, most specifically how animals move, because we were wondering how
the children perceived this idea and would represent their thinking.
We
stated off by letting the children look at the hermit crabs we have in the
classroom. We let the crabs walk around
in our sand box on the ground so they could see clearly and have an idea of
their motion. The other neat thing the
children noticed was that as the crabs moved, they could see their tracks in
the sand. Many children pointed these
out specifically with their hands and fingers.
They couldn’t tell me what they were, but when asked how they got there
some of the children motioned towards the crabs.
We
then offered the children some of our classroom plastic animals to manipulate
in the sand. We offered them specific
animals that would have different tracks in the sand if the children moved them
around. Some of the children began to
notice these tracks and point them out as they moved the animals along in the
sand. We want to expand on this and see
if we can figure out specially what the children know about particular animals
and how they move – and think of ways it will be easy for the children to
represent their understanding.
