Seeking Inventive Ways to Capture Change and Growth (continued)

Buy this book »

Taking pictures or drawing pictures of a sequence of events is helpful for children to experience change. For example, children can take pictures of planting beans. Then every third day or so take another picture until the bean sprouts and becomes a plant. Examining these pictures helps children to re-create the growth that they witnessed. Keeping track of the number of sprouts adds quantification to this exploration.

Cooking with children can also help with sequencing and is an activity children enjoy. Use recipe cards that show the various steps for making play-doh, muffins, or fruit salad. Teachers may want to access children’s cookbooks to support these activities.

Another good activity is to gather three to six cartoons depicting change and have the children put them in order. Cartoons like Peanuts with several squares depicting a sequence of events such as building a snowman can be glued to cardboard and cut out so that the children can put the squares in the correct order. Such an activity can be enhanced by having the children tell the story of change or growth. Prompting children with questions such as “How do you know?” “What would do you think comes next?” “What would the next picture show?” “Why did the picture change?” can help children organize their thinking and enhance their ability to reason and predict. Captions or text can be added to the seriated sequence of photographs. Appropriate language of description, comparison, ordination, gradation, and seriation should be emphasized.

A good example of a gradation would be to put in order shades of a color, say, green, from the lightest to the darkest shade. Have the children carefully drop green food coloring into clear plastic, water-filled bottles. Put one drop of green food coloring in the first bottle, two drops in the second bottle, three drops in the third bottle, and so forth, up to five or six bottles. Cap the bottles for extended use. Then, mix up the order of the bottles. After the bottles are mixed up, the children can put them in order from the lightest or least dense shade of color to the darkest or most dense shade of the color. Paint chips from your local hardware store can also become a good classroom resource for comparisons of brightness. Again, asking children questions about what they see and what they predict helps them to develop logical thinking and reasoning skills.

Another activity for children to experience that demonstrates gradation would be volume of sound. Children could begin a hand-clapping or tapping sequence. First, they would clap only their pointer fingers together or tap them on the edge of a table or desk. They would then add their middle fingers, then their ring fingers, their little fingers, and finally their thumbs. As a whole class does this experiment, they can hear the increase of sound. Reversing this sequence allows the children to hear the gradation of sound reverse from loudest to softest. When using this experience with children, you might relate the sounds to the sequence of a rain shower. Other contexts for gradation besides shades of color and volumes of sound include textures of softness, speed of the wind, bounciness of balls, and brightness of light.