children, children, what do you see?

Sometimes a photograph is a provocation.

It can be an image that elicits a conversation. That tells a story, yes. But also, one that asks a question. That asks the viewer to respond, to bring to it what he or she knows. To synthesize existing information with new.

Showing a class a photo of something in their local environment, allows the students to show and tell you what they know. To share it with the other kids. To be the experts. To be the teachers and the storytellers.

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Years ago, I realized that I couldn’t teach very much of the Grade One Social Studies curriculum through text books or other ready-made media, because so many of the objectives are specific to the community my students live in. And there’s no text book for that. I would have to create my own resources; letting the lived experience of being in Peace River, Alberta, Canada — a very specific place, at a very specific time — be my source material. The natural and constructed environments would be the “third teacher” in my students’ lives. (After their parents and myself.) (That’s a tenet of the Reggio Emilia approach to primary education.)

So I started taking photos that could provoke conversations around the curriculum objectives.

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1. Local Landmarks

One fall, I went out and took pictures of local landmarks in my small town of Peace River, Alberta. Places the kids would know, like the school, the swimming pool, the gymnastics gym and the hockey arena. Places like the movie theatre, the fast food restaurants, and stores. Places they should know, like the library and the museum and the town hall. I compiled these into a slide show, and we spent about a week discussing all of the landmarks; one or two slides at a time.

A river runs through it. These photos opened up discussions about rivers, islands, hills, valleys,
 and bridges. The top photo was taken by my husband, Tom Tarpey. The other two are mine.

The kids had lots to say. I added bits of information to fill in the gaps. I added context for some of the landmarks using Google Maps, to show where they were. We used the satellite view to look at our local landscape; the map view to identify streets and bridges, and the street view to “walk” down the main street of town. I asked the kids to give me directions (verbally) from one place to another. “If I am looking at the Town Hall, which way do I have to turn to go to A&W?” “If I walked across this bridge, where would I end up?” And so on.

The old train station.

Wooden sculpture of "Twelve Foot Davis" -- a gold miner,
and the stuff of local legends.

The Peace River town hall. Note the Town of Peace River logo on the
near end.

I printed some of the landmark photos we had looked at on card stock, and cut them into the shapes of postcards. The kids dictated a sentence or two about the landmark on their postcard to myself or a teacher aide, and we wrote them on the reverse sides of the cards as letters to their moms and dads. Then we addressed them and mailed them. Along the way the kids practiced reciting their addresses. (Not because this is curriculum, but just because it's important for them to know.)

Top: The MacKenzie Museum and Archives.
Middle: An artifact that lives outside the museum. It's the axle from the old paddle-wheeled
boat that used to be the main way in or out of Peace River.
Bottom: local mural of the paddle wheeler.

To extend the concept of local landmarks (because the landscape is a landmark), I taped a map of our town to a tray, and put out blue and green plasticine. I asked the kids to cover the water with blue, and the land with green. If we hadn’t run out of time, I would have added Lego blocks and centimetre cubes for the kids to make houses and restaurants and bridges, etc.

And finally — on a slight tangent — we looked at the logo of the Town of Peace River. It is a symbol the kids come across in their movements about town, and knowing about it contributes to their visual literacy and sense of place. Signs and symbols are also a part of the Social Studies curriculum. Our logo, happily, is a simplified image of the river that runs through our town and the hills on either side of it, which form our beautiful valley. So the logo is closely connected to the landmarks in our region.

Miriam Gair. Peace River Valley. Watercolour. 2004

We took some time to look at a watercolour painting by once-local artist, Miriam Gair,  which depicts the same landscape as the town logo — layered hills, receding waters, the sun as the focal point — talking about what is the same between the two images, and what is different.

Then we recreated the town logo on paper plates, using plasticine. I cut out “stencils” from sturdy dessert-sized paper plates, and placed each one on top of a whole plate. We squished plasticine into the holes of the stencils, using blue and yellow mashed together to make green (which tied in with our Science work on mixing colours). Then we lifted the “stencil” plates off, and — voilà — we had created images of the town logo, and by extension the local landscape.

Town of Peace River logo project: plasticine landscapes on paper plates.
Finished piece above and lower left. Stencil, lower right.

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2. Long Ago

The history of Peace River — at least in terms of European settlement* — is a short story. Our landscapes are still dotted with the remains of the homesteaders’ cabins who first cleared and farmed the land in this area. We drive by them every time we leave town. So this seemed like a good place to start the discussion about the “long ago” past of this area.

I took a photo of a fallen-down homestead. (I have since taken more.) We looked at it and talked about its size and configuration (one room), what it was made out of (wood), and where the people would have gotten their materials. Who lived in the house? How many people? How did they keep warm? What did they eat? Where would they have gotten their food? Their clothing?

We talked about gardens and barns and outhouses. (Oh, my!) We talked about roads and churches and schools and, eventually, stores; all of this “development” organized around the central concepts of basic human needs. (A topic which is relevant to the Social Studies, Science and the Health curricula.)

The kids drew pictures of what it might have looked like here “100 years ago.”

All of this became the jumping-off point for other activities about our first farmers.

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* We had been discussing the Aboriginal peoples in our region (long, LONG ago and now) since much earlier in the year. 

dyeing to know....

I’m in love with teachings that cross over curriculum boundaries. This one hits objectives in Science, Social Studies, Language Arts and Art.

So.

I wanted to dye Easter eggs using natural dyes with my kids this year, but I ran out of time before Easter. I knew I needed to experiment a bit to see what works (as far as both products and processes).

So over the school break I played around in my kitchen at home, making dyes from the following substances: onion skins, red cabbage, beets, spinach, and cherry juice. I won’t go into the how-to’s because they’re on dozens of blogs you can find through Pinterest. But I will say, it takes a surprisingly long time to get colour from natural materials. Most of my eggs were in their dyes for at least 12 hours, and some 18. The onion skins were the fastest; but I never did get colour out of my beets.

When school resumed, I took in the results of my egg-dyeing experiments, along with some raw wool I got from my local museum. I took in a hand-knitted sock (also from the museum, and also made from unprocessed wool). And I set them all up as a provocation with a few questions:

Which dye do you think made which colour? (The big surprise being that “red” cabbage, which is actually purple, dyed the eggs blue.)
What is the material in the bowl? (the raw wool)

The provocation.

Over the course of the week, I revealed the answers to these questions, but many more were asked. We read Weaving the Rainbow by George Ella Lyon, and Charlie Needs a Cloak by Tomie de Paola. We watched videos on youtube that showed spinning and knitting. I showed them slides of my trip to Peru, during which my family visited a small llama/alpaca farm and saw traditional dyeing and weaving being done. We talked about resourcefulness, and how people (“long ago”) would have had to make their own dyes, their own wool or other fibres, and their own clothing out of what they could find or grow locally. 

Then we tried to dye our wool in our natural dyes. The onion skin dye was effective, but nothing else was; even ones that had worked on the egg shells. But that was a good learning moment too. Not everything works the first time you try it. And there once was a world in which everything didn’t come with instructions on the package and money-back guarantees.

We wrote hypothetical letters to our great-grandparents, listing all of the steps they would need to complete if they wanted some new socks for the winter; starting with shearing a sheep and ending with knitting. We talked about how much time and effort that would take, and how precious those socks would be to you; how you would have fewer pairs of socks and how you would darn them if they got a hole in them. And we compared that whole process to our contemporary one: driving to Walmart to buy a pair of socks for a few dollars. Throwing them out when they got holes in them.

We talked about the awesome skills people would have had a few generations back; and about how their lives were harder than ours. How life has changed. We expanded our concepts of “traditional” and “modern,” as well as “natural” and “synthetic,” “transparent” and “opaque,” "paint" and "dye." We compared the vibrant colours of our times with the comparatively muted, watercolour tones of “long, long ago;” as well as the smelliness of things like natural wool and cabbage dye, compared to our scent-censored lives today. We talked about how much itchier and scratchier clothes must have been for our great-grandparents.

Next, we tried our hands at a simple weaving project.

on seeds....

My Grade One students gathered around our school's indoor fig tree,
doing "close looking" and recording their observations.

In Reggio Emilia circles, they talk about the environment as the third teacher (after the student's parent and teacher, and his or her peers). In my school, one of the notable features of our indoor environment is a beautiful, mature fig tree -- a little bit of green-and-growing life in the dead of our northern winters. This tree is a landmark in our school, as well as a kid magnet. (I found one of my students hanging by both arms from a lower branch one day! I wonder how many others have tried to climb it?) It's a provocation just waiting to happen.

So when we began to talk about living things, we sat down and really looked at our tree. For the first time, many of the kids noticed that there were little "nuts" or "berries" on it. I explained that these were figs, and that they were the fruit of this tree, although they would never grow big enough or ripe enough to eat. 

We took some back to our classroom, and left them at our garden table. The kids looked at them with magnifying glasses and discovered seeds. They wanted to know if the seeds would grow, so we planted them.

Now I'm not an expert on horticulture, but my guess is that the fig seeds won't grow. However, the seeds of curiosity and wonder will, I hope, continue to grow in my kiddos.

Some of the drawings they made and labelled.

100 colours of children....

A record of our experiments in mixing "skin colours."

In my small grade one class, we have skin tones that cover the whole glorious visible spectrum of humanity.

But last spring I overheard a conversation amongst a small group of students in which it became clear that the concept of "skin colour" is more complicated than it seems. So when my order of "multicultural" markers, pencil crayons and wax crayons arrived a few weeks ago, I decided to let them become a "provocation" (in the Reggio Emilia sense) to my students; or at least a jumping-off point for an honest conversation about the many colours of people in our community and our world.

Hand drawings in various skin tones.

I distributed the drawing materials to the kids and asked them to show me one that is "skin-coloured." Most of them picked the palest peachy hue -- even the kids whose skin tones didn't match that colour in the slightest. Then I asked them to find the one in the bin that was closest to their own skin tone and hold it up for me. Again, some of the dark-skinned kids held up light-coloured selections. So we spent some time pulling out different options and holding them next to our skins to find the closest colour match for each child.

Experimentation charts. I painted the "mystery" colour
at the top of each page. Kids had 6 chances to match
it. Thanks to my awesome colleague Cassie Bensch
for sharing this strategy and this template. And to my
colleague Joanna Moen for the insight written on the
little chalkboard.

Then I showed them how to mix skin colours using tempera paint. The recipe includes white, red, yellow and blue -- in varying proportions for varying tones. I gave them the task of matching my skin colour, which I had earlier produced as the "Mystery Paint" sample. Periodically as they were experimenting, I called them over to paint a circle of their colour-in-progress on a grid of 100 circles. The challenge was to mix 100 different skin tones.

Kids' learnings.
Left: "You have to mix red, blue, yellow and white."
Right: "The primary [colours] can make a skin colour and rainbow
colours too."

Through a process of trial-and-error they each came to the closest approximation they could of my own colour. Then I challenged them to make it darker. Again the experimentation began.

Clockwise from left: Chauvet, El Castillo, La Cueava de las Manos,
Peche Merle.

Some of the oldest paintings in the world are of the maker's hands.

La Cueva de las Manos, Argentina.

Finally, we looked at early cave paintings of people's hands. Then the kids traced their own hands and painted them in with the first colour they had mixed, adding shadows around the edges with their darker shades.

Hands painted by the grade ones.

Hands I painted with the leftover paint the kids had mixed.
Wendy Stefansson

After the kids went home for the day, I used some of their leftover paint colours to paint a pair of hands of my own. Then I tried to document the learning that had gone on that afternoon on a bulletin board outside our class room.

This is how it turned out.

Bulletin board, a.k.a. the documentation of learning panel.