 Hello, my name is Kathy Elliott. I'm from the Ministry of Education and I'm pleased to be the person who's moderating the webcast today on project-based learning. I have a few things to get you ready for our webcast today and I'd like to take you through some of the things. First of all, you'll find in your package, I hope you've had time to download some things, you'll find participants' agenda and notes. We'd like you to get that out if you have it available. We're going to be using this piece of Graphic Organizer throughout our webcast so it'll give you a place to write your notes and your thinking and the discussions. Also, you'll find that you will have downloaded a handout for participants and facilitators. The second page of this looks like this. I know, I think I know that you want to know so you'll need that with you too and you might also have downloaded the bibliography. I'd like also to draw your attention to your computer screen. The bottom right-hand corner of your computer screen will have a little box on it that says questions. That's where you become interactive with us. That's where you type in your questions and your thinking. Our presenter today, Sue Fraser will be glad to answer your questions at times during the webcast and again at the end when we take all the questions that we haven't quite had time for and if we have more questions then we have time to answer live on this webcast we'll definitely be answering them when we archive so please keep your questions coming into us. I'll be reminding you during the webcast to keep them coming in. We're a little bit fussy about how to send us your questions. It isn't hard. We'd just like you to say hi. My name's Kathy. I'm from Vancouver so if you'll do use that format, hi, what's your name, where you're from and what's your question to us. In this pre-time before the webcast starts at 3.30, I'd like to draw your attention back to the I know, I think I know and I want to know. There's a little box on the bottom and it says what have been your successes and what are your challenges in using project-based learning. We'd like you to do some pre-thinking for us and we're going to come back to you with our live webcast beginning at 3.30. Thanks a lot. Hello, my name's Kathy Elliott and I work for the Ministry of Education. I welcome you today to our webcast on project-based learning brought to you by the Ministry of Education our early learning branch team. It's a second in a series that we're bringing to you. The first series feature Jane Bertrand and Stuart Shanker. They talk to us about self-regulation. Today we have Susan Fraser with us and she's going to talk to us about project-based learning. This webcast will be brought to you in four sections. Each section will be followed by a reflection break where we will stop, reflect on the things that Susan has talked with us about and we will also be answering questions that you're sending to us from the audience around the province. It's easy to send us questions. If you look at your computer screen, the bottom right hand corner will have a little box that says questions. Type your questions in there to us. Tell us who you are, where you're from and send your questions to us. No silly questions. They're all great questions. Nothing is silly or unacceptable to us, so just send us what you'd like to know more about. Let me introduce our speaker to you today, Susan Fraser. Susan is an expert in the area of project-based learning in early and primary years. Sue is faculty emeritus at Douglas College in early childhood education. She's an instructor, lecturer, presenter nationally and internationally speaking about the Regio-Amelia approach to learning in the early years. Her book, Authentic Childhood Experiencing Regio-Amelia in the Classroom, is currently in its third edition. Thank you. Just out this week? That's great. This book has been embraced by community sites, colleges and universities in BC for instruction of early childhood educators in project-based learning. Sue and I just want to tell you if you'd like it, it's put out by Nelson Canada and it's in most college bookstores. Sue is a very giving person and volunteers and consults among those who develop our early and primary years educators. During this webcast, Sue will introduce us to project-based learning as a teaching method and explain how projects significantly impact the learning of our children. And remember, one doesn't need a Regio classroom to practice which Sue is going to share with us today. The same processes and concepts apply in any classroom with children of any age. So we're pleased to welcome Sue today. Sue will talk with us about four parts I was explaining to you. The presentation will come to you in four parts. The first part is what is project-based learning? The second one is what are the steps to project-based learning? Then how do you document projects and lastly how do you connect projects to learning outcomes? Sue, we're pleased to have you today. Welcome. Thank you, Cathy. Today we are here to discuss what are the most enjoyable and rewarding ways of working with children in the classroom. What is project-based learning? Two quotations, the first from Carol Ann Ween and the second from Steve Sadell, I think will help us answer this question or at least set the stage for us to think about it. Project-based learning, says Carol Ann Ween, is not a single plan for a unit to be followed by a pathway but a sense of multiple possibilities and multiple roots to learning and many ways that teachers and children might choose together. The second quotation from Steve Sadell, listening and teaching should not stand on opposite sides of the river and just watch the water flow by. Instead they should embark together on a journey down the river. I hope this afternoon we will embark together on a journey down the river not as presenter and teachers but as a learning group of people who will share knowledge and experiences in the process of co-construction of learning. Let us begin talking briefly about Regia Emilia, a small city in northern Italy in the Po Valley where they have created the most amazing approach to early childhood education. Much of what we discussed today will be inspired by the education developed in Regia Emilia. Some of you may have joined the thousands of people already who have come from countries all over the country in just about every country sent delegations to Regia Emilia. Even the little country next door to where I come from Namibia has sent a delegation to Regia Emilia. So it's become widely widely and people become from all over the world become very interested in it. We have to make schools a better place for children and when people return from Regia Emilia this is what they want to do. I visited Regia Emilia in 1993 with a delegation to travel to Regia Emilia. It's just amazing to think of it now but we tried all across Canada to get people to join the delegation and you know we could only get 18 people. Only 18 people wanted to go in 1993. Now there's a delegation this year and I believe it's over 250 people going. I could be wrong about my numbers but it's a huge delegation. The first delegation was very fortunate because we were able to listen to Lois Malaguzzi explain the approach. They started in 1945 so they had been developing for many years before they became internationally famous. Lois Malaguzzi was their leader in philosophy and he was an amazingly dynamic man and so passionately interested in making education really dynamic for children. When I returned from Italy in 1993 I went again by the way in 2001 but when I returned in 1993 I was teaching at Douglas College in U.S. Minster and I realized that I thought when I went I was pretty well knowledgeable about education but when I got there I just realized I knew nothing. I knew absolutely nothing. I had to start and recreate my practice right from the ground up. So when I returned to Douglas College the whole faculty had gone to Regio Emilia. We totally revamped our program and we started what was called Children Teaching Teachers in which we invited a grade one class, a kindergarten class and the preschool classes around the college to attend the college one morning a week which is quite amazing. Wednesday morning we have the children come and the students planned activities in the program for the children. The faculty watched and then from our observations we drew out the content for our classes. We began not from the top down as we'd always done from the theory to the practice but from the practice to the theory. So we didn't really know at the time but we actually were becoming very postmodern. We just did it because what we'd seen in Regio made us change our practice and it's done that to so many people. So these are the principles that I brought back with me from Regio Emilia in 1993. These are the ones that inspired me. These are not the only principles but they're the ones that responded to as I observed their programs. In my view these were the principles that I felt were woven through every aspect of Regio Emilia approach. Perhaps the most important thing to know about Regio Emilia is that they have really integrated the theory and practice and it's what they believe in and what their values are is woven into every aspect of their program. So it's very authentic and that's why I call my book Authentic Childhood because the whole thing you just feel is so authentic it's awe inspiring. So the first principle that I felt was really important to introduce into my teaching was respect. So respect is in many ways. Everything in Regio is sort of woven through so many different levels. Respect for families for each other, for children, for culture, for community, for environment and what I love because I wasn't our teacher was for the materials that they provide for children to use. The materials that genuine artists would use they don't consider children less worthy than a genuine artist. So beautiful natural beautiful authentic materials clay and paint and oh it's just amazing. But most important of all is respect given to each other's ideas and thinking. Children are seeing are respected for their intelligence and that's a really important point. Children are respected for their intelligence. The second is relationship and they would put relationship as the first principle. Relationship is the basis for collaboration between teachers, children and their families but it's also about placing learning in context and understanding the interconnection of all living things and I think that's so important for us in this time and place that we really care about all living things. Relationship is also an important principle in arranging environments that encourage children to work in small and large groups so nothing is in isolation everything is in relationship. Reciprocity is a difficult one for us because it it lowers the hierarchy removes the hierarchy in the classroom it's to co-construct understandings but this means that for teachers teachers listen to children and children listen to teachers teachers learn from children and children learn from teachers so there's this reciprocal going back and forth a mutual exchange and we know from practicing this that children teach us the most amazing things. We can learn so much more from them than they can learn from us. So the next one is representation and I love this being an art teacher representation means using many different symbol systems or as they say in Reggio Emilia 100 languages of children so let's go beyond the three Rs to let children learn from their kind aesthetic body movements, from music you know in the wide range of human endeavor let's broaden our base of representation they call it 100 languages which is metaphoric, right? and then the final one is one that I love as well is transparency and this of course is through the documentation but also in the way we communicate with us in the honest way we talk to each other and in Reggio Emilia we learn that they do not, they are not a frightened of conflict that's the dynamic that moves them along they really, the Italians are great at conflict, they really know how to deal with that. We tend to shy away from it, I know I would but they meet it head on so transparency is again an this is a beautiful part about Reggio Emilia it is an important principle in the arrangement of space in the room light is everywhere, it shimmers it glistens, it is played within the mirrors on the walls, mirrors even on the climbing frame that the children use in the classrooms, the little children it's in the glass partitions between rooms classrooms are not shut away with the door shut, they open they have taken walls out and put glass in you can look into the classrooms children walk past and see their brothers and sisters working in the classrooms it's very open it is in transparency and reflected in the beautiful shiny objects on the mobiles everywhere they are mobiles twinkling in the rooms it is most apparent in art materials for the children to use they are light tables clear plastic sheets for murals transparent inks and everywhere you just sense this beautiful lightness it gives you, you come away with such a joyful feeling so those for me were the principles that I loved about Reggio Emilia can you see why when I came back and dreary old art activities that I had had children painting caterpillars on egg boxes without the door stretch now at the very heart of the Reggio Emilia program and this is something all of us have to really really think carefully about is their image what they call the image of the child it is the most important I think if we are to do project based learning it's at the very core of what we have to do we have to think deeply and reflect on the image that we hold of children do we view children as competent of capable and rich in ideas that are really worth listening to or do we see them as needy and needing to be taught if this is our view of children they are competent, capable, rich and worth listening to then it will have a great impact on our role of teachers because what it's going to do to us it's going to turn us into listeners and not what I'm doing to you talk we will want to hear what children have to say because they have amazing ideas as can be seen from the following projects truly amazing it will affect the materials we provide for them because we want these to support their capabilities and intelligence and I think if you take one idea away from this think about materials as being intelligent don't give children gimmicky things to do give them really solid intelligent materials the clay, the paint the graphic tools that's what children really need to be real artists it will mean to create environments then to allow them to be inventive and represent their ideas their ideas not the teacher's ideas, their ideas this has an impact on timetables of course because children will need flexible time to work on their projects in both small and large groups for project work to be a satisfying experience for all concerned the teacher has to value the children's ideas and contributions and set up procedures to ensure all these factors are incorporated into the everyday experiences in the room so can you see why that image of the child is so important the next point in project-based learning is to careful consideration of the values we hold about working with children values are indeed personal and we know that in Reggio Emilia they have values maybe that we were not our values but we were on the same page but maybe different interpretations but what to give you some examples we were made aware of how much the teachers in Reggio Emilia value democracy and when they talked about democracy in Reggio Emilia they really meant democracy everybody in the room had a voice and were listened to you know in our rooms it's a teacher's voice that's the strongest but if you're thinking about reciprocity all voices are equal in the room so democracy for the Italians was really an important value the other one that we loved and I had never given any consideration to was aesthetics you know the children deserve beautiful environments and they provided them for the children they thought about every single square meter of the classroom and in the sense of does this reflect our values of beautiful environments for children if we respect children we have to provide them with those beautiful environments and in the activities they offer children and in the way they arrange their classroom space as I said earlier when I worked with schools not even the parents want to leave the classroom they're so beautiful as aesthetics becomes a part of their value system so you can see why we came back stunned absolutely stunned by the beautiful classrooms we had visited our classrooms were practical but they're not beautiful they're changing though awareness of what children bring with them when they step through the door of the classroom the values of the culture, community and families of the children come from when they enter your classroom consider now the values you believe are important in working with children think about how you manage space and time for instance do you take time to listen to children's thoughts and ideas have you arranged your classroom space for group work does the environment you create for children's learning reflect the values that you think are important so perhaps begin with one small area of the classroom and ask yourself what message does this area of the classroom convey to children for instance if it's filled with commercial posters rather than the children's own work whose thinking is valued in your classroom do the materials you provide for children to support the values you have identified as important for instance for me I have learned because of my inspiration from Regiomelia I want to see materials that are open-ended and support children's intelligence authentic materials like clay and paint and graphic tools I've covered that already I would want to see children's own intelligence at work in the way each child responds to the materials I wouldn't want to see a teacher's idea and 20 snowmen on the wall I'd want to see the children's idea of what a snowman was and their idea of what a snowman is is amazing so examine your schedule to ensure that it reflects the values you've identified for instance if collaboration is a value have you made time for group work so the following two projects help us think about the way culture, community and families can affect the interests that children bring with them when they enter your classroom door the bean project the bean and bridge project both show how the interests of children who live in the country the bean project and the bridge, children who live in the city might differ so you'll be thinking of the children who come into your classrooms and what they bring in through the door the bean project was carried out by a group of children on Quadra Island and the teacher just started off with the thing that I've done a thousand times we planted beans in jars and then when the jars began to grow because the children were following Regiomelia and thinking about questioning how high do you think your beans are going to grow and the children had all sorts of different ideas about how high their beans were going to grow so we observed the beans I was working along with the teachers at this time for a couple of weeks or two or three weeks and the beans began to grow and began to get wriggly like this so we asked the children what do you think we should do with the beans now well most in my day we just sent them home and said you know parents you deal with it but now we have respect for living things right so we thought about how can we look after these beans how can we care for these beans huh let's build them a teepee said the children that they oppose it we can climb up and turn into a teepee so out the children went they designed the teepee with the teacher and then they got to work to build it they planted it and it turned into the most beautiful shelter as the weather got warmer for children to sit in and read books or share snack and then the children started asking what else they could do to their playground we've made this part so beautiful and it came from them what else can we do to our playground and who else lives in our playground they became really interested in their playground and redesigning their playground and so started the project and the second project took off from this the invitation to the garden project and this was really fun because the children started talking about all the things that they could invite into their playground and they wanted to invite the birds and they thought how could they invite the birds and they decided to build clay bird bars for the birds but these bird bars were so delightful they actually were what the children would want in the bird bar and they became like little miniature swimming pools with slides and balls and floaters and anyway they had a wonderful time but can you I hope these show you how they followed the children's lead and who would think for children of creating bird bars it became little swimming pools for birds now the bridge project was the one in the city early in the school year the Vancouver Child Study Center noted the children interested in building bridges with the blocks now the blocks they built the bridges they built with the blocks we don't know where the idea of bridges came but they were all using them were very wobbly bridges and we talked with the children I was again working with a group of children and they had no ramps there was a lot to learn about bridges so the teachers read the Three Billy Goats Graph story and the children began to think seriously about things that go over bridges and how you get on to bridges in fact we asked one little girl how you get on to a bridge and she says you go one two three hop and you're on and after the children had read listen to the story of the Three Billy Goats Graph their bridge building became really intense they were very interested in it so the teachers thought of a wonderful idea and this is called a provocation and involve the families which is another principle we really like to do they asked the families to take the children to visit bridges in Vancouver this is Vancouver right and we have wonderful bridges in Vancouver so the parents set over the children during the next couple of weeks to look at bridges in Vancouver which is a wonderful way of involving the parents and they brought photographs back to school to look at bridges but the children had one bridge in mind and that's our most famous bridge right Lionsgate Bridge they wanted to build Lionsgate Bridge which was daunting for the teachers how do you actually what have we done here how do you possibly construct a suspension bridge anyway they brought in books in no time at all the children actually had developed had built a suspension bridge it was amazing that four year old children could really you know if you can see from the slide they worked on it and they figured it out and you'll see the book in the background they were looking at the book figuring out how to do it and then one little girl came running up with two lumps of clay in her hands you know what they were the Lions right she had made the Lions totally spontaneously so I think you might be able to just see on the photograph the Lions so it was a wonderful project the children went ahead and built a big bridge in the classroom out of chairs and ropes and things but the funnest part of all was this summer time was coming the end of school year and the teachers took the whole building project outside you know when a project really gets going it keeps going for quite a long time if there's real energy and enthusiasm so out the bridges went into the playground and we made a stream for the children we invited an expert in bridge building an engineer we made these materials in wood and metal and scraps and we built bridges for the rest of the school year out in the playground and they were amazing we had a miniature of Vancouver with millions of bridges out there in the playground so in the last few slides we have seen how the image of the child is competent inventive and brimful of interesting ideas was fundamental in each of the projects we looked at but how important it is to those children's ideas we would never have gone we would ever have thought of building a suspension bridge in the classroom and where it led us and the joy of it the joy of those children and those bridges so you can see how the children who live in the country were excited by the country things and the children who lived in the city were excited about the city things and it's not as though sometimes the children who live in the city would be interested in growing beans or projects I followed took those different paths so I think we have to realise how the community the culture in which children live affects their interests now Kathy I think it's a time for a break I've talked too much you definitely have not talked too much what a wonderful way to bring project based learning to life it has such a clear vision to me now it's very very remarkable thank you so much Sue so in section one Sue talked to us about what is project based learning we'd like you to take a few minutes and to ponder the young people in your care and think about what kinds of interests do the children currently have we'd like you also to think about how you can translate these interests into projects so we'll let you have a few minutes and in our studio audience we'll be doing the same thing I urge you to keep your questions coming in I know that they're coming in at our printer at our back of our room so keep those questions coming to us and Sue we'll have a little break while people ponder these questions thank you we've got some questions that have been coming into us we thank you for that the first question that Sue has chosen to answer is from Sarah from Nanaimo she said I'm currently an early childhood educator and my passion is the Reggio Emilia philosophy but can you tell me how do I get my staff motivated and interested in this philosophy how do you motivate people the way I have worked with this question in the past is to get the group to meet at a comfortable time for them so there's lots of time we're not hurried and to talk about what we really value for children to think about what our values are and this is a long process it doesn't happen in one meeting two or three meetings we need to go well into depth about what we really want for our children and it's amazing again you see the different the country schools I work in the city schools you have different kinds of values but they were all important and once they have come up with a shared value and that takes a long time to get a shared value with the team of teachers you're working with of course I'm talking our preschool teachers who work in a team but you could also do this in a school and have the different grades to join you then you begin to look at as I talked earlier look at your environment and see whether the values that you think are important are reflected in every square meter of your environment you then look at your schedule or you can do it in any order you want and you see if the values are reflected in the schedule so if you believe that children should have a long time to work on their ideas then you think about your scheduling you know are there long passages of time in the day when children can work on these ideas of theirs so it's just looking at your values and then seeing that these values are reflected in every part of your program this is the way Regia Emilia did it and they say to us you can't accept our values as your values you have to do it from the bottom up yourselves the way they did it and it's a slow process but it's a very very rewarding process and it's a very important relationship process I found that the teachers that I worked with during this process are still working together because they have a real trust and a strong relationship with each other it works so thanks Sarah for that question now we have a question from our studio audience we have a nice contingency here of people from Maple Ridge and Sheila from Maple Ridge asks you Sue how do we support teachers to trust that children will be motivated and that children will progress how do we ask teachers how do we support them so that they can trust that I think the first thing is become listeners to children and when you listen to children there are some ordinary moments that just motivate you this is incredible I remember watching a little fellow just tracing some sand that the storm had bounced up with the sand onto the fence around the playground and he was tracing the pattern so I took a photograph of it we brought it inside and we started a project on sand it was just a simple little thing like that so that was just would you think that would motivate everybody but the whole class became interested in sand doing art with sand investigating sand we even found that the sand on the beaches around up there is magnetic in the Gulf Islands in the northern we made some incredible discoveries ourselves just investigating that just from a child tracing a sand picture so it's very exciting to listen for ordinary moments and motivate them and what is the other one will be motivated and progress will they progress they don't even need to progress because when you start an exciting project like this you left behind and they they suddenly designing a suspension bridge that's way beyond anything we as people can do it's astonishing so I just think this way of working with children in the classroom is just very exciting and the things you want to happen happen trust it and I think we have time for one more question this comes from our studio audience also Norley from Maple Ridge asks do you apply regio concepts in the BC context well this is interesting because once again the people in Regio Amelia have handed it over to us and say you have to work this out for yourself you can't take our program and dump it down on top of you you have to do this from the bottom up and I find that it's through the materials I think for me because I'm an art teacher that you can apply regio concepts I think if we provide children with really intelligent materials this leads us into looking at the aesthetics at the relationship at the respect all the principles of regio come together I know this is very personal but this is a personal way of teaching and I would do it myself through having beautiful authentic materials that you really support children's intelligence that's the way I believe of course the one you'd have to do for you I think it's becoming familiar with the regio approach there are wonderful, wonderful books written about regio really read about it learn about it and attend conferences we bring in 100 languages of children here in 2012 that will be a wonderful way to learn about regio so it's so joyful and people enjoy it's just a very joyful process I hope I've answered that yeah I think so and we also are going to be re-answering these questions and all the other questions that come in when we archive the materials so you'll get another chance to actually take a look at that so we're getting ready now to head into section 2 of our webcast where Sue we're looking forward to hearing you set out some steps to guide teachers as they begin to plan for these projects with children so over to you for section 2 well now we have looked briefly at how project learning emerges from listening, observing and responding to children's interests let's just think about what kind of environment promotes project based learning and I think if we look closely at the slides the few slides that we have following and think of all the possibilities it has for engaging children in collaborative project work notice the raised platforms for children to work on this is a very respectful way because if children build an interesting building nobody is going to run through it and knock it over and if children build on a platform it can stay up when the cleaners come in and clean the room so it's a respectful way of valuing children's work note the mirrors on the walls around where the children are building so the children are I've seen buildings built on mirrors so you get the perspective of looking down naturally, horizontally, vertically so it's encouraging children to have multiple perspectives of their work note the documentation on the walls without documentation I don't really believe we can be effective with project learning but we'll come to that later on look at the easel and we talked about relationship you see so many of us have used easels single easels for painting but this is a three person easel to encourage the relationship to encourage the talking back and forth the next slide shows the painting area and I love this one because there's a provocation it's set out on the middle of the table called taking flight it's an art print and this is set up perhaps to stimulate children to work on I think it's a collage print so there's a lot of collage materials paper and so forth that the children can bring many different mediums to their art and I loved it because the teacher's not too concerned about messiness it's okay, you know the paint might spill over onto the table on the other slide there's a light table with transparent materials which encourage children to explore light and color as they do so many times in regiomelia this reminds me of the the transparencies the teachers provided for the children to familiarize themselves with the buildings in toronto before they went on their field trip downtown so this is a way you can involve older children to have a light table and transparencies so the children examined the important buildings that they were going to visit I don't know toronto very well but you'd know that probably the buildings they'd visit through transparencies on the light table so an interesting way we'll talk about that later to continue before beginning a project therefore create spaces where children are encouraged to work in groups and spaces where children can work quietly on their own encourage involvement ensure that families feel welcome in the classroom all the projects I refer to in this presentation were enriched by contributions from the families of the children involved it was the potters on quadra island who fired the children fired the children's beautiful birdbars everybody pitched in to help ensure that relationship is the heart of all that happens in the classroom for groups both small and large to work well there has to be a sense of we as somebody talked about trust early on we have to trust each other the team of teachers has to trust each other because quite often you hand over power back and forth we have to get to know each other's strength well enough to know who would be the best person to do this work and children have to get to know each other's strengths as well because they'll be working with them as they continue on with the project which person would be the best person to take this job on and then of course also to help each other when child needs help in one of the projects I was looking I was observing it was a circus project and one of the little children was voted in as the circus what do they call the circus master and the other children knew that she was a very shy little girl so one of the children stood up and said we'll have a double circus what do they call the ringmaster we're a ringmaster we're a two hat you wear one an owl you one an owl hold your hand and I thought there was a tremendous empathy because you know this little why they voted in we could never figure we were practicing democracy right and she was the one voted in but it's wonderful when children work in groups that they get to know that about each other and teachers as well so before beginning a project to continue encourage a sense of partnership between children and teachers in the classroom and we've been talking about that ensure that there are many opportunities for the exchange of ideas among the group so you can see how this is going to affect the scheduling and the way you organize your space setting up desks in lines is not going to work if you're going to be sharing and exchanging ideas with each other and then as we talked about earlier document ordinary moments it's from these ordinary moments that amazing things happen so you probably need to be flexible about story or circle time sometimes these times can become a time for discussion about future plans or ideas for another project or sub project but very important is an opportunity to revisit documentation to perhaps seek a new direction for a project so it's to ground us all the documentation during the discussion times grounds us in where we are at and where we need to go next so ideas for projects teachers often ask how do I find out about what might be an idea for a project well from my experience it's of course documenting those ordinary moments but observe children's play and involvement in the classroom and we'll see this in the cost of that project that I'll discuss a little later on listen closely to children's conversations they often have amazing ideas and then ask children questions for older children setting up a thinking table start with possible ideas such as photographs, books, transparencies as they did in the Toronto the unit on the city in Toronto may help the teacher discover what topics or subtopics that children might become interested in and as I said in the unit on the city with Caroline Wiensburg putting the transparencies of the buildings out test your ideas by setting up one or more provocations or challenges that may include suggestions by the teacher to draw or paint what the children appear to be showing interest in so in the bridge project we got many children to do some of the children rather to draw pictures of how they imagined the bridges to be we figured out that they really didn't know much about bridges they didn't know that bridges had ramps and that's when we got the wonderful story about one, two, three jump that's how you get on a bridge carefully selected materials that encourage children to make their thinking visible so I found that bringing in wire in the cost of night project was a wonderful project for making crowns for the African the children make wire toys in Africa right so I've had a lot of experience with wire and I took the wire into the cost of night project and that set off a whole new direction for the project using wire crowns and so forth the planned activity based on the teachers hunches about what could be engaging to the children each year a quest to parents to take the children to visit the bridges in Vancouver so this is a hunch you have children really interested in bridges so let's go and visit bridges and see if they come back really inspired after testing ideas for potential projects with children assess the children's level of interest to enthusiasm for the topic in question are children really enthusiastic about this topic listen carefully to their conversation what were they painting watch their play and then a good idea is to co-create an idea web to determine possible sub topics and you can do this as a team just on your own or you can do this with the children we found that we had a wonderful time with the cost of night project because we got the children to make a material web themselves to think about now if we're going to build a castle in the classroom what materials do we need and they came up with these amazing ideas and then they took these ideas lists back to the families and the family started sending in other materials that they had listed on the list sometimes a web will allow children from different cultural backgrounds to make their own unique contribution that you may never have thought of the children on Quadra Island were making masks out of paper mache and one of the Aboriginal children said I'll ask my my uncle if he'll come in and show us his masks so Max Chikai came in to show us his masks which was amazing the most amazing thing is he enjoyed his time so much he didn't want to leave so he stayed and this was a miracle he stayed and the children went down with him to the beach and they brought back a piece of driftwood and he made an octopus for the school and he said in our culture an octopus means change and for me to see a school like this means so much change I never went to a school like this and my niece and nephew were going to wasn't that wonderful so they have one of the best Aboriginal artists carvings in their classroom which is treasured I can tell you the following four slides will give you an example of quite a simple project the children in Marpole Oak Ridge Preschool in South Vancouver carried out with their four year old children the project was called a rainbow came to play well you know we get an awful lot of rain in Vancouver on one sunny day when the children could go out into the playground and the teachers who are amazing to me they gave the children clear materials that they could look through so they collected a basket of different kind of materials transparent materials for the children to go out and look through and they just wondered where this would lead well it had the most amazing result because the children suddenly discovered they could make a rainbow with some of these materials it was sunny for the first time in weeks they were so excited now you must remember these children there were many of them immigrant children this is Marpole Oak Ridge in South Vancouver so they don't share a common language but they could make rainbows together and so the excitement and they were sharing their excitement they were so excited about this that they came back into the classroom back and wanted to make rainbows everywhere and one of the ways they did that was to hang cellophane paper on the fence outside their the deck outside their classroom and the sun made rainbows on the deck of the classroom outside then because Vancouver has so much rain they thought they better invite the rainbow inside so they invented a black box with a flashlight and CD discs inside and the children had a wonderful time making their own rainbows then they built clear plastic objects in the room on an overhead projector and projected a rainbow on the wall and had a great time with that in the meantime they were really exploring color they had colored water mixing color colored paper collages and really investigating color and how to mix color and then the teachers decided that they wanted to take it into another language remember Reggio Emilia with his 100 languages so they set up beautiful fabrics from the ceiling and the children danced with the rainbow and sang rainbow songs it was the most joyful exploration of rainbows and it continued on for nearly a month and the learning was amazing because while all this joy was happening there was some real solid learning about colors but also because these children do not share a common language it was a wonderful way to get them communicating with each other as they say in Reggio Emilia nothing without joy just to walk into the classroom was so joyful so what is the successful project what are the characteristics and I'm taking this from Giovanni Piazza who's one of the most amazing teachers in Reggio Emilia who does incredible projects with the children he's the one that did the amusement park for the birds that has gone on now for a decade in the amusement park for the birds the children made the teachers wanted the children actually to build bird houses for the birds and the children said no that's boring we want to make an amusement park for the birds so Giovanni said what is an amusement park for the birds they said well we've got to have roundabouts and fountains and a big wheel and a cafeteria and so he said to work with the children to make that he's amazing man so when we went to Reggio Emilia in 2001 he did a presentation for the Canadian delegation and it was talking about exactly the topic we're talking about today and what is a successful project and he says for a successful project and I think this is one of the most important pieces of information to come out of Reggio Emilia in my opinion and a successful project has big overarching ideas there needs to be a big idea that energizes the group something that was really important to the children something that if children really need to know the answer to something like how do you build a bridge they're going to become very motivated to find out but they have to really have some investment in the answer how do you do it the second point he said is ideas that generate passion in both the children and teacher it's not much fun for children of the teachers how I'm about it the teacher has to be really passionate itself and then it becomes a learning group that just moves along at a great interesting enthusiastic pace it has to have a lot of surface area and that what he meant by that is the topic must sustain the children's interest over a period of time and give them lots of different pathways as you can see from the bridge project you know they built bridges a suspension bridge and they built a classroom bridge and then they took the whole bridge outside and they built many different kinds of bridges outside so it had lots of surface area and topics that have many different paths for children to follow so children might do sub projects that go this way or that way but they are usually a unifying major idea that they move along together and I have got time to talk about the window project this is Giovanni's I'll do this very quickly when we were in regia I think one of the most interesting projects other than the music park for the birds that we saw was Giovanni's window project and I love it because it began at the end of the school year when the children went home for the holidays he sent them all home with a little bag and writing on the bag bringing us back some memories of your holiday in your little bag so when the children came back in September to school they bought their little bags they put them on the floor and guess what not a bit interested in them but what they were interested in was talking about what they had seen through the train windows of when they journeyed up in Italy you have go everywhere on the train and there was interesting discussions about what they had seen through the train window and what people had seen in the train window as well so Giovanni who is very flexible tossed the idea of the bags and mementos and went with windows and he began to think now how can we investigate windows and I love this because he gave the children cameras and he sent them out to take pictures of windows you know Italy has wonderful windows right but this the school that he teaches in is La Vietta school I don't know if any of you have ever been there it's a very old building it was one of the original schools and it's four or five floors and there's a basement floor and an attic floor and he suggested to the children that they took pictures from the different floor windows so from the basement windows and then compare their windows well the children were just so interested in comparing their windows and they began to talk about windows and they talked about windows that were sunny windows green windows fresh air windows a window for a cat this is what they had found out of their investigated windows they had found a friendship window a friendship window is a double window that opens right and they were so excited about windows so Giovanni said it puzzled him where to go next with this and then he thought why don't we make windows why don't we make windows in to the room and out of the room so he brought in materials and this is why I think selecting materials are so important he brought in plexiglass clay and wood for the children they began to build their own windows and then the child who was wanting to build a fresh air window he thought now how it was easy to build a green window because it was a window box but what would be a fresh air window how would you give children the materials to build a fresh air window and Giovanni is such a a master at this he thought wispy woolly material and sure enough when he brought that in that child said that was his fresh air window and the wispy woolly material was the fresh air coming into the window you see how important materials are and it's not only the children have ideas but it's also the teachers who have ideas and support the children so I love that story I wanted to share it because it just shows the importance of windows and also where the teachers ideas go nowhere but the children really have wonderful ideas so once a topic has been decided on educators can reflect on the following does the project provide opportunities for children to collect lots of information that will further their interest in the topic and Giovanni said if children begin to think in a metaphoric way about a topic as they did in the windows when they thought of friendship windows then you know that you've really hit the jackpot with your project right metaphoric thinking thinking is amazing it's what we want to encourage with children according to him we learn so much from the educators and the media and then does the project give the children opportunities to use a wide variety of materials to create representational work for the languages of children and will the topic provide lots of opportunity for collaboration because remember we said that relationships are the heart of all we do so I think again I've talked too much it's over to you Kathy now would be a good time for a break everyone in our audience is just kind of looking at you with rapture but how authentic is this work and how genuine are the teachers and so diverse so we're going to give you a few moments in the province and in our studio audience a few moments to reflect on some of what Sue has been sharing with us we've got some questions that we'd like you to ponder although you've given us lots to think about so these are just our guides for you if you have other things to discuss please do but the first one we'd like you to think about is think about your classroom and the schedule what changes would you make to ensure there is time and space for this project based learning second one you could think about how can you support project based learning in a classroom where space is limited so I think you've given us lots of ideas and the third one what are strategies you can think of for involving families in the project and when we come back Sue's going to take us into thinking more deeply about some of those things and about families involvement so we'll come back to you in about five minutes send your questions to us we'd love to take your questions so we'll see you again in about five minutes thank you we're back with you I think we have an anonymous email either that or we can't quite figure out who this is from multiple questions here but let's just start with the first one Sue it said so many of our preschool slash daycares limit the types of projects they do because they feel that children will be challenging behaviors the children with challenging behaviors either do not respond or do not respect the work of others do you find that the ratio environment and the way that children's learning is viewed helps to decrease the behavior that adults find challenging well my experience is that when you create a regional environment with relationship at the core and respect for children honestly challenging behaviors disappear just to give you a quick example I remember we tried to have more authentic materials in the housekeeping corner at the Vancouver Child Study Center so we went down to Chinatown and brought beautiful you know Chinese bowls all of China and we put them in the housekeeping corner and we thought we had a very rambunctious group of boys and we thought you know they won't last very long it was so sweet the first day they came to school they had one look at the China the China dishes and they tiptoed through the housekeeping corner and we had no more rambunctious boys from then on that's really a true story so I just know if you put relationship and respect at the core of your program it just seems to work magic with challenging behaviors I've seen it in every single school I've worked with and you may have just answered the next part of this question but it's a cool question so I'd like you to have to just tell me if you have the second part of this question from Anonymous is is it the regio belief that challenging behaviors are a clue to change the child or is it the view that challenging behaviors are a challenge for the adults to look at the environment and make changes that support children I think that it's the environment absolutely the environment if you look how we changed the housekeeping corner to make more authentic materials and the children I think we respected the children they respected the materials and the behavior disappeared immediately I think it's the adults have to change it's definitely the adults and the environment and the scheduling not harrying children giving them more relaxed time it works, it honestly works in every school I've worked with in fact it's a long time since I've seen challenging behaviors because I've been working in a regio-ameleon environment I don't think I've seen it for a long time I think the beauty in the environment when you made the housekeeping corner beautifully beautiful the children's behavior responded to that beauty it's amazing great just before we proceed with the next segment of the webcast we've had some questions about technical support either the sound or the picture if you look underneath the picture you'll see a link for technical support we just urge you to go to that link link on and it will guide you through for technical support any of you having difficulty so now we're going to go deeper into the next section here about how to expand on material selection how to support groups of children and my favorite one is how families can participate in this so, where you go? well, I'm going to leave out the list of selection materials because I've covered that quite extensively and I'd like to move to Katherine McCain's kindergarten program culture modern power river that I visited last year when I arrived at the door I had tears in my eyes because I was welcomed at the door by a butterfly on a beautiful panel outside the door that the children had made all out of natural materials it was truly beautiful Katherine told me that she believes if art is a child's first literacy then nature is their classroom and I thought how important that is in the world again because we want children to really respect nature and care about it every week because this is a country environment again Katherine takes her children on a walk through the forest that surrounds the school and in this way the children gather their own materials and replenish the ones in the classroom when the children create art using these natural materials natural materials, she says they're learning to look closely to pay attention to details to discover patterns and textures to think about possibilities to make transformations all essential to the creative process in her classroom to quote Mara Krochevsky in the book Making Learning Visible which is on your reading list Mara writes beauty and pleasure are strongly integrated into the knowledge building process and I think that's a really important quote for us and it's certainly very evident in Katherine's classroom in Power River beauty and pleasure are strongly integrated into the knowledge building process I think how many times in our schools do we I mean in my schooling knowledge was a painful process what about making it a beautiful and pleasurable process isn't that amazing in the photographs in this slide note the birds made from pine cones that the children themselves had collected from rose hips and feathers note particularly the alphabet and number lines made from natural materials such as sticks and albutas, berries etc and the documentation I'm afraid I'm going to read this documentation she's Katherine wrote on her documentation panel apple seeds, linden leaves, one red Japanese maple one cotton isaberry and one pumpkin seed were all that M needed to change these natural materials into something magical this fairy with the apple seed hair is becoming a mother because inside her tummy is a baby says M emphatically it is magic M spent 19 minutes working on this fairy she was totally engaged and lost in another world apart from this one she worked meticulously on placing each seed individually in place she was quiet and very self contained never looking up from her work at hand when she finished her face shone with pride and she said to me she is very beautiful the other children worked on their fairies but spent far less time I was amazed at the variety says Katherine of composition some of the fairies sport wings others do not have wings some of the fairies have legs and arms most have faces with features Katherine wrote in the documentation this is the analysis part of the documentation that she believes using the natural material suits the subject of fairies she states that it needed something soft, ephemeral and transitory in nature Katherine herself is an artist Gospel wings made of linden leaves that are almost skeleton seeds that hint at what they might become like a wish necks made with the stems of leaves delicate and fragile almost too smooth to hold up the pumpkin seed heads of the fairies so many children chose the pumpkin seed for the heads of the fairies isn't that a lovely piece of documentation it just reads like a poem this is another very important piece coming from Reggio Emilia who inspires us and relates to Katherine's classroom Titianna Filippina, one of the Atelier Risters in Reggio Emilia interviewed in the book in the spirit of the studio she says more or less everyone in the autumn explores leaves pedagogy suggests working with children on how to represent the leaf and on the leaf relationship to the tree through observing the leaf in the natural world in fact pedagogy supports an idea the knowledge as a reproduction of an object i.e. scientific facts instead in Reggio Emilia in our Ateliers we encourage the child to enter into a relationship with the leaf and activate processes of re-elaboration and reinvention metaphoric expression using analogies and poetic languages to build a personal image of the leaf that is what i feel Katherine McLean does in the fairy project re-elaboration reinvention and developing a personal relationship with that leaf that's what i feel passionately, that's what we want children to do rather than learn the scientific facts about leaf which is an objective let's have a subjective relationship with the leaf so we care about leaves, we care about trees we care about our forests that's where it begins i just feel it's so important in this world that we do that with children so for me that's one of the most important pieces of information that spoke to me so so largely and then Rodari also from Reggio Emilia says to neglect imagination is to empower rich children's worlds and to narrow their hopes and that's what Katherine McLean doesn't do i think that's so important so also working with found materials i had such fun a couple of weeks ago i visited Michelle O'Shackano's grade 2 class at Richmond and i took in my collection of wire toys made by children in Africa which i've had since i was a little girl we had a long discussion with the children about why in Africa children have to make their own toys which got into consumerism and what fun it is to be producers of the culture consumers of the culture big idea right and the children were just absolutely fascinated by this and they all settled down to make wire toys really amazing they never had wire before and because we talk about the image of the child they could do it they did some beautiful work you see the little car that the one little fellow made to me that was like a little James Bond car could have been in a James Bond movie and this was his first exposure to wire and then he wrapped it all up in gold thread to make it shimmer and by the way the hood could open and the trunk could open and i was expecting sort of wings to come out the side he was amazing and Michelle had told me that this little fellow has a great deal of trouble concentrating you know in class he has a shorter tension span well he started working on his car as soon as i put my wire toys out he connected to them right to the end of the afternoon on that car never left his working spot and then the one next to it is a little girl who made that her mother is a jeweler and when she came to pick up a child at the end of the afternoon she said oh i've never let my child use wire before but you just think of the tension that child must have paid to the mother i mean some of those strategies that she used, the techniques she used in making that were amazing i mean the twisting of the wire was just amazing i mean you could sell her little cat figures she made, they were so beautiful one child had wandered off early in the presentation and i just thought she wasn't interested Michelle has an area you talk about how you arrange your room she has an area for group work and we were working in that part of the classroom and then she has the desks arranged in sort of islands two or three desks in groups and this child wandered off and we packed up all our things and it just happened to look down at this child's desk and you know what she had made she had signed her name with wire and embellished it all with beads it was absolutely beautiful and i just wish i had a photograph of it but we were scooting out the door right but you know that's a child who just wandered off and think was not interested but it's done this absolutely beautiful work so working with found materials i think is a really working with those kind of materials and now we get for making opportunities for families to participate so i think it's really important you know like i went into that school i'd done it in my i'd taken my wiring to all my children's classrooms i think it's really important to invite families to contribute their ideas and as Kathy said many of the emigrant families have special skills that they can share like my african toys right i have this wonderful collection to share with people and then ask for helpful family to have special skills related to the project set out written messages on cards in conjunction with activities in the classroom to invite family participation these strategies are especially useful for strong start teachers and the last point i got from Kate Dawson's strong start class she's in the audience today she'd use the strategy to invite parents to help their child trace a spider as part of a small project on spiders a simple but effective documentation panel so you think of documentation as being very complex but it also can be very effective and perhaps even more effective it's quite simple but to walk into that classroom and see that documentation gave us just a sense of what was happening in the room and how important that was for a visitor supporting the group encourage the group of children to take ownership of the project within the envelope of safety established by the teacher this was difficult with the wire when i went into that classroom to give the children permission to take ownership of working with that wire i wanted to have all sorts of safety factors but because i believe children are competent i let them within the safe we had a few safety rules but it worked for instance a teacher to encourage a group of children to take ownership of a project might ask questions like what do you think we could do as opposed to asking a question that has one right answer handed over to the children to think what could we do in this situation and we did that with the wire we said how can we be safe using this wire and the children had some good ideas we didn't sit too closely next to each other and we kept the wires to ourselves they came up with some very good ideas allow the children to establish their own code of behavior within acceptable limits by the teacher i have found that the regiomial environments working it's not a problem behavior is not a problem at first teachers may if there is a difficulty with a group at first teachers may participate as a group member and encourage children to share ideas with each other as opposed to teacher to child the ideas go child to child and then slowly the teacher can withdraw as children begin to pose questions and become protagonists of their own learning so it takes time to get a group to function well but it's very rewarding and the teacher develops these skills as she works along with it supporting the projects projects do not always run smoothly sometimes they end for no reason and you're left with all these materials and what do you do about it i think teachers learn to have different provocations to last side ideas to come up and we'll talk about this more in the project where it happened the teacher needs to accept that there are lulls and births is part of the progression of the project so don't despair if there's a lull because it might generate again at times however the teacher will need to use creativity to think of ways to keep the children interested in the project so in the castle night project we thought maybe dragons might be a good way to go but you'll see what happened sometimes a provocation like a visitor, a field trip or introducing some different and appealing material like wire as we did in making the crowns will rekindle the children's interest. I'm a great one believing in materials moving a project along children love to use materials in the bridge project when the engineer bought in all those lovely materials to build bridges just exploded again then it's important I think for everybody's satisfaction to bring the project to a close in a satisfactory way there's some signs that tell us when a project is near closure for instance when a major task of the project is complete we did it, we built the castle now and children do not come up with any new ideas related to the project to explore further it didn't happen in the castle night project that way and when the children no longer seek books on the topic you bring in all your books I used to bring them in every Saturday I mean I collected them every Saturday and on Monday and the books stay on the shelf nobody takes them out they're into something else now and the artwork no longer reflects the ideas of what the children are working on on the topic and then I think from the documentation is perhaps the biggest indication you can tell from the documentation that it's time to end the project as there's a sense of the beginning the middle and the end it's like a complete package right and then you know it's time to move on so with practice I think teachers get a feel for when a topic ends I think we've covered the next one to test assumptions you can try a provocation and so forth but one of the great ways to bring a project to an end is to plan a celebration and then the next set of slides you will see how a Chinese dragon was invited to attend a picnic to celebrate the end of the cost of night project okay this is the cost of night project this is the one the project that I've worked with them for the longest it lasted for six months at the Marpole Oak Ridge preschool with four year old children early in the school year the teachers at Marpole Oak Ridge decided that they would encourage the children many of whom as I told you before did not speak English as a first language to engage in an in-depth exploration of authentic art materials like clay and paint and I was all for this you know because of my interest the children however had a totally different idea and with the teachers and me as a part as an observer we never could figure out how a whole class of preschool children decided they were going to build a castle in their classroom right from the beginning of the school year and if anybody can help me answer that question I would be really happy I wrote about it in my book but they chose this topic right from the beginning of the year the children's play was all about dressing up as princesses or play fighting with swords which the children would come in first thing they did make themselves a sword out of interlocking blocks and we'd have fights when the teachers put our clay to begin an in-depth exploration of this art medium what happened the children immediately made castles it was incredible and it sophisticated castles the found materials that we had in the room on the shelves were used to build castles and even the parents started sending in castles they had made with the children at home so all these little castles were arriving and we had them on all the shelves I think we must have had 15 little castles sent in by the families everybody was saying do something about this the teacher decided something had to be done with all this enthusiasm for castles so they had a brilliant idea they invited the actors in from the society for creative anachronism do you know that society? they are amazing and they came dressed in their medieval clothes and bought all the artifacts from a medieval castle and the teachers were just astonished at the absolute rapt attention of the children they just sat there literally with their mouth open looking at everything amazing information well when I arrived at the next door the next day I tried to go as often as I could guess what? all the little fellows were lined up with their swords and they did a courtly bow for me and they learned quite a new way of using swords we never had sword fighting again we now had courtly, nightly behavior so this is maybe to show you how the behavior changes when you change the scene so the teachers felt well they had really not wanted to build a castle but now they just had to build a castle so they started they asked the parents to send in materials and they just talked to the children about what the medieval actors were they learned from the medieval actors and what a castle needed so note the wide variety of materials that children use to create their castles isn't it amazing? the children themselves made a moat which they designed and the moat had to have alligators in it which they insisted upon they made the most beautiful clay horses for the stables they were absolutely beautiful they made a vegetable and a flower garden and a garter robe if you know what a garter robe is which emptied into the moat children were very interested in where people went to the toilet in the castle and this was many conversations about that every single room in the castle was furnished by the children they worked hard on the castle furniture they made beds they made thrones they made dining tables and as I said the castle even had a drawbridge that lifted up and down so there are multiple ways to explore the project this is when I took my wire in and the children made beads on a wire frame they invented their own individual crests and painted them on shields displayed on my right they sewed tapestries absolutely exquisite tapestries to hang in on the castle wards they were just amazing just like the actors had shown them the children then made a display of all the people who lived in a castle the princesses, the king and so forth and amongst these was a knight one of the little boys, Josh and Joe who had all along been rather on the fringes of the project in fact he didn't speak English as a first language when he came to school he was learning it fast though he made the knight and then he told us or he demonstrated that he wanted to build a knight taller than his dad for Father's Day isn't that amazing that came from perhaps the quietest child in the room so thus began the second part of the project building Josh and Joe's knight Josh and Joe who had instigated the idea became the leader in building this larger than a life size knight out of recycled materials it was actually one of the most amazing things then he had built it for Father's Night so you can see this project had started way before the break at Christmas and was now getting to Father's Day so the teachers talked to the children and they said Josh and Joe wants this knight to be a surprise for Father's Day so it would be a good idea if none of us told our family, anybody about it it was a secret so of course being a secret everybody was motivated to work really hard so they built the knight and then when the Father's came for Father's Night the room was in darkness and suddenly they turned on the lights and this huge enormous knight that the children had built themselves came out well there was a huge gospel and the Father's were just thrilled especially little Josh and Joe's family because it was his idea at the end of the project the children recorded the experiences on paper and the sheets were compiled into a book that told the story of the project from beginning to end and then it was Xeroxed and the books each family received a copy because they had been so interested in it so the knight was finished the castle was finished and the teachers decided to have a celebration of a picnic in the park and they asked the Chinese parents if they would like to bring a dragon to the park the reason they did this is they felt that the children's interest was still really high in working on it and they were also very concerned that much of the work had been very gender stereotypes the girls had worked on the tapestries and the boys had worked really and we were really concerned about that but somehow the children earned this project and it was very difficult to shift tasks but we were concerned that the castle would be more gender neutral so this was our plan but not the children's the dragon arrived at the picnic and it was amazing he came out of the bushes and they screamed and they danced with the dragon it was just amazing really amazing introduction of cultural values into the group but when we went back to school not a single word about the dragon not a bit of interest in it so that was the end of our idea so we knew we knew the topic was going to end with a picnic seasonal change seasonal change in my experience often brings about a change of interest and projects that have been carried on with great enthusiasm suddenly die and the children sense a need for change of pace and many more outdoor activities so take another break you definitely don't as you were speaking Sue I thought how very much the work we're doing now in personalized learning really is reflected in your piece the child, the teacher and the family together and making it so so individual and personalized for the children it's quite remarkable so I have Mia Culpa in the next piece of material questions for you for the reflection break don't look at the stuff in your package because we've just replicated the reflection break two instead of giving you break three so if you look on the slides that are on your computer you'll see the actual questions you'd like you to tackle the middle question I'm going to start with first and it's what learning do you see happening in these projects what do you see happening in the things that Sue's been talking to you about second one reflecting on the example projects what ideas do you have to further expand the learning some rich, rich, incredibly rich ideas there and number three how might you approach such a project with students who are older grade three etc or even older how might you explore the possibility so keep your questions coming in to us we're going to come back to you in about five minutes with some questions we'll be back to Sue thank you Sue we have a question that came in from our audience in Victoria and Sue's thinking that we paid them for this question but we didn't but it's exactly where she's going in the next piece but we'll just give a tease here the question is how can we reassure parents and other community members that project-based learning has the kind of rigor, bracket assessment standards that they expect for their child well for me because I'm regionally inspired through documentation and careful documentation of the projects I think when parents read the documentation they understand the depth that we are doing, we are reaching with their children's learning documentation is an absolutely essential part of a project it is a complex process as can be seen from the following quotation documentation is not about the reorganization changing of material with the aim of assembling a descriptive linear story rather documentation is a narrative pathway with arguments that seek to make sense of the events and processes so it was from the documentation of the Castle and Knight project that we became concerned about the gender stereotyping it was through the discussions of the documentation that we started to think where should how can we go in a different direction here we were getting worried about it documentation is essential it turns the teachers into researchers and critical thinkers we think of documentation as a big problem but in actual fact it can be done in a very simple ways in the Castle and Knight project for instance when the little Alvin designed the drawbridge we just sent a small email to all the parents with a photograph of the drawbridge that he designed to all the families and said this is where we are going next of the Castle project so we kept them up to date with the documentation and when they saw the plan that that little fellow had designed it could have been the plan of an engineer he thought about springs for the bridge he thought about levers and pulleys absolutely amazing well no parents would question the learning what learning was going on when they saw the depth of thinking in that child's work so it can be just simple that was just a simple email to all the parents in the school so documentation provides for all of us a record of the learning experience in the classroom it provides children, parents and teachers an opportunity to reflect review and plan future experiences and documentation reveals connections between events, experiences and learning goals and outcomes if the documentation is done very carefully and we'll see this in the Ferries project that Catherine McClain does in Powell River the documentation gives you ample information to complete the learning outcomes that are required where the Ferries Live project here we return to Catherine McClain's kindergarten class to experience where the Ferries live we have already read some of the documentation that beautiful piece of documentation she compiled notes the extensive use of natural materials and how the children have used them not only to make Ferries but also the numbers and alphabet so all this is documented for parents to see the depth of the learning that's growing Catherine also did a unit on the enchanted forest she used many found materials in the classrooms can be seen from the trees made for the enchanted forest in the slide Catherine told me that the children develop early literacy by using the materials to explore color texture size shape pattern and sequencing and classification and to learn about numbers on the alphabet she said all this provides with information to complete each child's learning outcomes as can be seen in the following slide as you have gone through the documentation fairly quickly because we have had examples of it all the way through and I know we are running rather late but I just did want to emphasize that it can be quite simple but it can also be very complex and if you think about the journal or the book, the portfolio that the children made at the end of the Castle of Nine project that was a record, a narrative record of the whole project but then the simple looking at the drawbridge was just a simple use of documentation but I think it is absolutely essential, I think without documentation it's very difficult to make a project based learning a satisfying experience so as you read through the list of learning goals from ELF and for kindergarten grade one and three which we are including which we have listed in the following slides you will note that they were all covered in Catherine McCain's fairy project or sections of it were covered I should say so I'll just read them very quickly to build, create and design using different materials and techniques to be creative and expressive in a variety of ways to express their own points of view and reflect on others' views and understand how their actions affect nature and the planet and then for kindergarten to use imagination, observation stories to create images to experiment with a variety of materials technologies and processes to make images and to build and describe 3-G objects and to describe the features of local plants and animals and then the grade one and the grade three outcomes become ever more complex but I think you can see from the documentation from the projects that we have that we have discussed that there is plenty of material there to answer these learning outcomes sharing descriptions with others add to and deepen the interpretation to link your pedagogical narrations to the BC Early Learning Framework evaluate plan and start the process again that is from the the diagram right? and finally I'd like to end by showing you an amazing project that the teachers and children carried out a year ago during the Olympics at Mar Polo Quedridge you can sit back and just enjoy this and watch this so the project began when one child spontaneously built out of blocks a rock structure used by the innuers as a direction master a marker that became the emblem for the Olympic Games and the other children became interested in Evan's enthusiasm especially as at this time the Olympic flame luckily for us passed here by the school and the children went out to see it or the parents took the children to see it in the evening Evan told the class that the Inuk shook us to make it look olympic-y so all his work is paying off the teachers brought in photos from the newspaper every day from this point on and of course most of the children were watching the events on TV enthusiasm was like a wind horse that swept the room this is a Buddhist term that Caroline Wien in her book refers to to raise the positive energy to the life force that whirls through us Katherine Wien uses the term wind force to describe the atmosphere in a classroom when a project takes hold I think it's a beautiful way of thinking about it there's a lot of confidence in this project and the following photos tell the story for themselves so children because I think the teachers had done, set it up so well they brought in the photographs they brought in the newspaper articles they discussed with the children what they were seeing on television so interest was really running high and representation was very very beautiful for instance families also sent in their own experience, their own personal experiences during the Olympics the children added these venues to the map that they had decided to create of the Olympics isn't that amazing that four year old children would think to do something as abstract as a map but they wanted a map to record all their experiences the children were very interested of course in the Olympics as a sporting event so they in their own play were representing the sporting events they had seen so there was a great deal of speed skating they mimicked the postures of the speed skaters with the arm behind the back absolutely perfectly there was ice skating and all these became their favorite pastimes and the wonderful thing, these are all immigrant many many many of these children are immigrants and they wanted the Canadian flag on the goalposts and they wouldn't play their ice hockey game unless a Canadian flag was on the goalpost smart it was amazing to see how carefully the children must have watched the figure skating and to recreate the postures and movements so accurately in the figure skaters pictures that they made they recreated these with paper strips and decorated them with sparkly materials they'd obviously paid a lot of attention to the costumes because they demanded sparkly material for the costumes in documenting the Olympic projects the teachers noted and this is in their critical analysis how powerful media is in children's behavior how much of what you've seen in these slides had come from the media from the newspapers and from the TV they noted how powerful a shared experience is in motivating children's learning and how these shared memories provoked complex collaborative group work the children teachers experienced again and again the power of being caught up in the emotional experience, the windows effect the whole project just swept the group away it was to go in and sense the energy in that room was just so powerful the project demonstrated how important it is to have available and for me this is critical a wide variety of materials you saw a number of materials that the children used in creating the map and all the other things for the Olympics and it's very important for children who do not speak a common language to have these materials to communicate with I think I've said that earlier because it helps them cross language and cultural barriers in the group the teachers noted how helpful it would be to introduce cues such as photographs and newspaper articles to support the children and families during the project so these would be the provocations that move the project along the powerful effect of collaboration between teachers, children and families especially sharing their memories was evident throughout the project I mean they had gone on the zipline together they had taken the sky train out to Richmond where many of them live so documentation captured the experience of the project as a whole and enabled the teachers to debrief and think together what had happened and why so this is where the teachers become the researchers and the project seems to demonstrate how strongly children strive for a part of the culture surrounding them observing what's going on in their neighborhoods in their communities and this seems to be especially important for children from immigrant families who are entering the Canadian culture for the first time so I think we have to think about that to give children opportunities to feel part of the culture and I think a project like this is a wonderful example of how it helped them feel part of the culture we need the Olympics every year here for all the money so the child has a hundred languages and a hundred hundred more and they steal 99 no way the hundred is there says Laura Smaligutzi so I would like to thank all the teachers and children whose work has been part of this presentation so we've come to the end of my presentation but these are the key concepts I'd like you to take away with you I hope that you feel that project-based learning is a powerful learning tool for me it's just the way to go with children the way to work with children it engages learners based on personalized interests, you've seen how that's happened especially with the Olympic project project-based learning enables every learner to feel their contributing members of the class it supports children in developing lifelong learning skills such as collaboration, inquiry and problem solving it puts children in touch with their center of the universe it grounds them in the community in which they live projects can be co-created, investigated by both small and large groups you don't have to feel the whole group has to be part of a project a small group can continue on with it and as you've seen projects can be brief they can extend for a day my wire project was a day project it can go for weeks or months or even decades as it did in regiomelia not amazing just depending on the children's and students' interest and project-based learning is a method for teaching students of all ages using an interdisciplinary approach for me it's worked in preschool it's worked in kindergarten, it's worked in primary school and it's worked with the students in the college system so it's gone right from the earliest to the older, we've done wonderful projects with college students as well so I just I think you can as you see how passionate I am about it I really believe it's a wonderful, wonderful way to work with children in classrooms so thank Kathy for supporting me through all this it's my pleasure do you have the energy to do a few of these questions? yes I do, I'm very happy to do I love answering questions how about this one from Brandi school district 83 I'm not sure I know where Brandi is but thanks Brandi when you have a diverse group of ages and interests how do you choose the one to focus on? is that the age to focus on? I think so, the age why don't we start with the ages? I like multi-age groups because you have many different ability levels to help each other and children like to help each other if you give them the opportunity they're very collaborative and if you've collaborative collaboration is one of your key principles of course they'll be collaborative so I don't think you have to focus on any one age I think I think in what we've seen in these projects you can't put children in developmental stages in boxes anymore because they've gone soaring way beyond what we've thought as a typical developmental ability so some of the younger children sometimes just have surprised us like Josh and Joe in his building of the night he was probably the youngest child in the class and he became the leader so I don't think you have to worry about that in fact I think multi-age groups are probably quite an advantage I would love to have done the window project in Italy should we go and do it? absolutely this is from Vivian from Vancouver Vivian is wondering how she can develop the theme of superheroes into a project in her kindergarten classroom every person is a superhero I think it's a challenge but when we were in Reggio Emilia they were doing a project on Disney characters and they said you have to respond to the children of interest and to the kind of community they come from and if they're interested in Disney characters then let's explore Disney characters so I think with superheroes I think you look for the positive things the positive behaviors that superheroes have heroes of wonderful qualities right, let's focus on that and I actually have I haven't been part of a project but I have heard of a number of schools of course who have done superheroes because there's a driving passionate interest of the children I just, I think these projects make teachers creative right, there's absolutely no boredom they challenge us to think very, very deeply about things and our values, right but from Reggio Emilia and the Disney characters we saw them exploring they do it because part of the children's culture we just have to think of ways of doing it to match our values so that's not a very satisfactory answer but I think it's where we have to go with it absolutely, there are many little superheroes in my life and they would really like that answer Hi, my name is Barb and I'm from Maple Ridge, I'm curious about how to manage more than one project at a time, oh my goodness I think you have to choose, I mean I think that's very, very hard to manage more than one at a time and I think it's a question of sitting with a group and talking about it and figuring out where you want to go with it to see if there's a way of blending them, you know I'm very flexible about things like that in Reggio Emilia they will have just the regular program in the classroom but they will take the children who are working on a project into the atelier to work on it so that they can have a disturbed time and the materials there that they need if we had space like that maybe you could manage more than one project at a time but I would find it hard I would want to focus on one project and do it well but some people might be able to their minds might work in that way different personalities it's like it's a wind horse effect the children get caught up in the one idea and they run with it so usually one of the projects falls by the wayside and the other project takes off now this one's an interesting one I think because it gives us a bit of a strong start emphasis here hi my name's Kate and I'm from Richmond my question is how do other how to offer project learning opportunities with a highly variable drop-in clientele I think I think we've learned from Kate Dawson that you can do it you know you can do it by doing simple things like I loved your investigation of spiders and involved I think with the strong start teachers you have this wonderful resource of parents and grandparents and I think you can really put them to work if you find strategies for putting them to work and I love the way you did it with cards I went to see a wonderful strong start program in North Vancouver where the facilitator had read the Little Mitten book you know to the children and they were very interested in the Little Mitten book so the facilitator got the parents to make mittens for the children and then the children made the little animals that went into the mittens so it became really involving the parents and then they all there's a lot of songs about mittens and stories about mittens so mittens became a great project involving the parents because they had made the mittens they embellished the mittens with beads and it was a beautiful thing to watch I was thrilled to see it so I think parents can bring huge richness to a program I came away so excited from that program in case of a spider I think to see parents involved is one of the things that's very rewarding I think we're coming to a close here take off my glasses I know have a drink of water could point to share yourself thank you so much Sue it was absolutely a remarkable time to spend here with you this afternoon your passion and your determination to actually see this through and to see you know the love of children grow it's just quite amazing I can't believe how much I've enjoyed this hahahaha you saw at the beginning I'm sure I just love being here with all of you and felt the energy in the room and from out in the province what a thrill for me and I just want to be able to share these teachers work with you absolutely it should be shared because it's so very special absolutely so this material and this webcast will be archived and it'll be on the Ministry of Education website it'll be coming up in the spring and the spring will be coming up too I hope because it's not very nice weather out there right now but it'll be available on the Ministry of Education website and again Sue it's just been a pleasure being with you here today it's been a pleasure to be with you all I loved it thank you I'd like to also take just a minute here to thank our behind the scenes team we have our early learning branch people from the Ministry of Education my colleague Paige McFarland my colleagues Carolyn Henson Melanie Bradford and the person who coordinated this for us today with Sue Angie Callenberg thank you so much for coming and being part of this and coordinating this and bringing it to the province our camera team today is New Lion and of course our resident expert Audrey Hobbs Johnson what could we do without them so thank you for everybody for making this possible and Sue maybe we'll be doing more of this thank you so much and goodbye