My third graders have been delving into philosophy, of all things. Because if little minds deserve ANYTHING, it’s the ability to wrestle with BIG ideas.
I’ve been using resources from The Prindle Institute to support our work. Our questions lately have focused on: what is alive? what is real?
After an AMAZING webinar with my hero Ellin Keene and her co-conspirator Dan Feigelson, I decided that today, I’d try taking their strategies for a spin.
Rather than falling into the question-answer-response rut, I took Ellin and Dan’s advice and posted a thought statement to see how kids might respond.
Some context. Last week, we read Lio Lionni’s Let’s Make Rabbits, which challenges our ideas about what is real, about what is ALIVE.
On Monday, I gave kids a list of different things and asked them to explain if they were alive or not. The most interesting discussion came from those grey areas: a flower in a vase, a turtle in the egg, an apple that fell to the ground. Their conversation led me to think about the idea that life may not be a binary concept.
The thought statement I posted? “I wonder if being alive or not is like an on-off switch, or more like a dimmer switch.” (Yes, I demonstrated the two from my kitchen today. =)
Things I’ve learned:
1) There’s an ART to teaching this, and to structuring it for student success.
2) I didn’t quite get there.
3) Even the messy results were still pretty cool.
Some student thoughts/reflections from the day that made me smile:
-I am now wondering how people started.
-Something new I thought about today is what is real and not real.
-A dimmer light is like a person growing up.
-When you turn a dimmer switch, it’s like a person getting older and when it gets to the darkest point it’s like the person dying.
-Can life be pain?
-Is your imagination alive?
This, from eight year-olds. Friends, the world is in good hands.
Soapbox: The Way I see Things 