Kids Engineer!

Those of us who are teachers or parents have seen the phenomenon where children figure out rules and have trouble with the exceptions to the rules, which is quite understandable.  As adults, we should remember this, and correct them but do it understanding how amazing it is that they figured out the rule in the first place and how many exceptions we have.  This is most commonly seen with the past tense in the English language.  I recently heard my son do the same thing in math.  He is enjoying learning how to count to 100 or more and to read numbers over 20 where there is a regular pattern.  So he will count:  twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty-zero.  It took me a while to figure out that he was correctly generalizing a pattern and that, once again, our language did not follow the pattern.  I guess my point in all this is how amazing it is that kids’s brains can find these patterns and that it is helpful to understand what is going when kids generalize a pattern.

This week, in a small first grade class, I noticed that 8 kid were building out of some paper leaves the teacher left out, 3 kids were doing Legos, and 1 kid was reading.  I’m not saying we should not teach reading, but are schools sufficiently supporting the development of student’s natural interest in building and engineering?

This is not related directly to Kids Engineering but I had to share this example of second grade art created on the computer using HyperStudio 5.  We do a session where kids explore the tools and techniques to use them.  We got help from our art teacher Nancy Mahoney on how to help kids draw using the computer.