It amazes me how a kid’s general curiosity and need to touch and tinker with everything can translate into the perfect teachable moment. As a parent, I get frustrated sometimes when Nusayba won’t focus on a task. But then days like today remind me that there are opportunities in those tangents and distractions your kid veers towards.
Today, Nusayba was helping me rinse some rice to prepare for lunch. Of course, I made it into a mini-low effort lesson about how rinsing rice removes the starch that would otherwise make our rice too sticky. I set a glass of drinking water next to us so she could compare the water in the rice to the water in the glass in terms of opacity. Nothing organized, just helping her make observations and find new ways to describe things.
Suddenly, she has the impulse to plop a strawberry into the glass and it floats. My brain instantly sees the opportunity for a lesson. I give her a grape tomato and ask her to drop it in the glass to see what happens. It sinks.
Next we try an apple slice which also floats. I ask Nusayba why she thinks the strawberry and apple slice floated while the tomato sunk. She asks me if she can have a smaller piece of apple. She doesn’t yet have the words to communicate it, but she is hypothesizing that smaller objects must sink since the tiny grape tomato fell to the bottom while the clearly larger fruits floated.
We break for lunch and I put together this worksheet to help her understand buoyancy and density.
This organic experience in discovery learning follows beautifully Jerome Bruner’s theory of development and the three modes of representation. Bruner theorized that you can teach any child anything at any age at some intellectually honest level if the information is presented in the following three ways:
1. Enactive: hands-on, doing
2. Iconic: some visual representation of the thing being taught (in this case the image of the strawberry and tomato in the glass)
3. Symbolic: words/language to make sense of the first two
Sometimes it takes extensive planning to develop the right hands-on activities, but sometimes it’s a matter of recognizing the teachable moment. I certainly didn’t wake up today planning to teach any physics.
I hope my recent posts are getting you all as excited about pedagogy as I’ve become lately. If you read these blogs, thanks for following along on my homeschool journey!
Golden Butterfly Books 