See what I saw on my driveway last night!

A beautiful, wriggly bull snake!

51 inches long!

Isn't s/he beautiful?

What a coincidence

Last week I held class 1 of 4.......'I am a scientist'.....for parents and children.
Over the weekend, I put together my Starbucks Dragster.....and emailed the parents, asking them to bring a couple of empty Starbucks cups to the class on Wednesday.

This morning I was getting my morning coffee. Standing behind me was one of the young scientist from my class......his mum had come to THAT Starbucks to ask for two coffee cups!

She told me how much her young scientist enjoyed the class (he came with his dad). The mum and the dad and the young scientist's sister are all coming to this Wednesday's class!!

WHAT a coincidence - and what great feedback for me!

For teachers.......Jeannine's speech at this year's graduation at BRE....

This was taken last year at McKinley Thatcher Elementary School's graduation

Here is this year's speech at Buffalo Ridge:

"The scholar, Eleanor Duckworth, once said, ...”the development of intelligence is a matter of having wonderful ideas. In other words, it is a creative affair. When children are afforded the occasions to be intellectually creative--by being offered matter to be concerned about intellectually and by having their ideas accepted--- then not only do they learn about the world but as a happy side affect their general intellectual ability is stimulated as well.

This year, my fifth graders have been presented with many opportunities to problem solve together. From creating marble runs to explaining why we have less minutes of daylight at the winter solstice, they have worked to brainstorm, think, evaluate, and question. They have marveled at the examples of great scientists and inventors---from Galileo to Einstein.

I have been fortunate to be surrounded by these bright-minded fifth graders each and every day--and observed as they wondered and questioned----in pursuit of--- and involved in--synthesizing their own understandings of the world in the having of ‘wonderful ideas.’

What I know as an educator is that “the development of intelligence is a matter of having wonderful ideas and feeling confident enough to try them out, and that schools can have an effect on the continuing development of wonderful ideas.” One of my greatest passions (and pleasures) as a teacher is to observe students as they wonder, discover, and understand what catches their curiosity.

David Hawkins, an eminent CU Boulder philosopher and educator, once said, “You don’t want to cover a subject; you want to uncover it.” How fitting for the young scientists in my class.

My hope for this class of fifth graders as their education continues---is that they are encouraged to ‘have wonderful ideas.’ As a country, the U.S. is producing far fewer scientists and mathematicians than we know we will need to meet the many challenges of the future. Those future problem solvers will need scientific literacy---as well as the ability to formulate new ideas in response to problems not yet even imagined by the current scientific community.

So, my advice to you, fifth graders, now is....

As you now go on to middle school....and beyond, NEVER stop wondering, questioning, and having WONDERFUL IDEAS."

The students each gave a speech, some individually, some with their closest friends.
Elizabeth and Lale.

After the presentation of certificates, Jeannine showed a film about a book created by her class.....

She was presented with wonderful gifts

The parents gave J a well deserved standing ovation......

 Here's the full text:

The Having of Wonderful Ideas

By Eleanor Duckworth

    

With a friend, I reviewed some classic Piagetian interviews with a few children. One involved the ordering of lengths. I had cut 10 cellophane drinking straws into different lengths and asked the children to put them in order, from smallest to biggest. The first two 7 -year-olds did it with no difficulty and little interest. Then came Kevin. Before I said a word about the straws, he picked them up and said to me, "I know what I'm going to do," and proceeded, on his own, to order them by length. He didn't mean, "I know what you're going to ask me to do." He meant, "I have a wonderful idea about what to do with these straws. You'll be surprised by my wonderful idea.”

 It wasn't easy for him. He needed a good deal of trial and error as he set about developing his system. But he was so pleased with himself when he accomplished his self-set task that when I decided to offer them to him to keep (10 whole drinking straws!), he glowed with joy, showed them to one or two select friends, and stored them away with other treasures in a shoe box.

   

 The having of wonderful ideas is what I consider the essence of intellectual development. And I consider it the essence of pedagogy to give Kevin the occasion to have his wonderful ideas and to let him feel good about himself for having them. To develop this point of view and to indicate where Piaget fits in for me, I need to start with some autobiography, and I apologize for that, but it was a struggle of some years' duration for me to see how Piaget was relevant to schools at all.

    

             I had never heard of Piaget when I first sat in a class of his. It was as a philosopher that Piaget won me, and I went on to spend two years in Geneva as a graduate student and research assistant. Then, some years later, I began to pay attention to schools, when, as a Ph. D. dropout, I accepted a job developing elementary science curriculum, and found myself in the midst of an exciting circle of educators.

    

   The colleagues I admired most got along very well without any special knowledge of psychology. They trusted their own insights about when and how children were learning, and they were right to: Their insights were excellent. Moreover, they were especially distrustful of Piaget. He had not yet appeared on the cover of Saturday Review or the New York Times Magazine, and they had their own picture of him: a severe, humorless intellectual confronting a small child with questions that were surely incomprehensible, while the child tried to tell from the look in his eyes what the answer was supposed to be. No wonder the child couldn't think straight. (More than one of these colleagues first started to pay attention to Piaget when they saw a photo of him. He may be Swiss, but he doesn't look like Calvin! Maybe he can talk to children after all. )

  

   I myself didn't know what to think. My colleagues did not seem to be any the worse for not taking Piaget seriously. Nor, I had to admit, did I seem to be any the better. Schools were such complicated places compared with psychology labs that I couldn't find a way to be of any special help. Not only did Piaget seem irrelevant, I was no longer sure that he was right. For a couple of years, I scarcely mentioned him and simply went about the business of trying to be helpful, with no single instance, as I recall, of drawing directly on any of his specific findings.

The lowest point came when one of my colleagues gleefully showed me an essay written in a first grade by 6-year-old Stephanie. The children had been investigating capillary tubes, and were looking at the differences in the height of the water as a function of the diameter of the tube. Stephanie's essay read as follows: "I know why it looks like there's more in the skinny tube. Because it's higher. But the other is fatter, so there's the same."

My colleague triumphantly took this statement as proof that 6-year -olds can reason about the compensation of two dimensions. I didn't know what to say. Of course, it should have been simple. Some 6-year-olds can reason about compensation. The ages that Piaget mentions are only norms, not universals. Children develop at a variety of speeds, some more slowly and some more quickly. But I was so unsure of myself at that point that this incident shook me badly, and all of that only sounded like a lame excuse.

   

I do have something else to say about that incident later. For now, I shall simply try to describe my struggle.

Even if I did believe that Piaget was right, how could he be helpful? If the main thing that we take from Piaget is that before certain ages children are unable to understand certain things--conservation, transitivity, spatial coordinates-what do we do about it? Do we try to teach the children these things? Probably not, because on the one hand Piaget leads us to believe that we probably won't be very successful at it; and on the other hand, if there is one thing we have learned from Piaget it is that children can probably be left to their own devices in coming to understand these notions. We don't have to try to furnish them. It took a few months before that was clear to me, but I did conclude that this was not a very good way to make use of Piaget.

   

An alternative might be to keep in mind the limits on children's abilities to classify, conserve, order, and so forth, when deciding what to teach them at certain ages. However, I found this an inadequate criterion. There was so much else to keep in mind. The most obvious reason, of course, was that any class of children has a great diversity of levels. Tailoring to an average level of development is sure to miss a large proportion of the children. In addition, a Piaget psychologist has no monopoly here. When trying to approximate the abilities of a group of children of a given age, able teachers like my colleagues could make as good approximations as 1.

 What I found most appealing was that the people with whom I was working judged the merits of any suggestion by how well it worked in classrooms. That is, instead of deciding on a priori grounds what children ought to know, or what they ought to be able to do at a certain age, they found activities, lessons, points of departure, that would engage children in real classrooms, with real teachers. In their view, it was easy to devise all-embracing schemes of how science (as it was in this instance) could be organized for children, but to make things work pedagogically in classrooms was the difficult part. They started with the difficult part. A theory of intellectual development might have been the basis of a theoretical framework of a curriculum. But in making things work in a classroom, it was but a small part compared with finding ways to interest children, to take into account different children's interests and abilities, to help teachers with no special training in the subject, and so forth. So, the burden of this curriculum effort was classroom trials. The criterion was whether they worked, and their working depended only in part on their being at the right intellectual level for the children. They might be perfectly all right, from the point of view of intellectual demands, and yet fall short in other ways. Most often, it was a complex combination. As I was struggling to find some framework within which my knowledge of Piaget would be useful, I found, more or less incidentally, that I was starting to be useful myself. As an observer for some of the pilot teaching of this program, and later as a pilot teacher myself, I found that I had a certain skill in being able to watch and listen to children and that I did have some good insights about how they were really seeing the problem. This led to a certain ability to raise questions that made sense to the children or to think of new orientations for the whole activity that might correspond better to their way of seeing things. I don't want to suggest that I was unique in this. Many of the teachers with whom I was working had similar insights, as did many of the mathematicians and scientists among my colleagues, who, from their points of view, could tell when children were seeing things differently from the ways they did. But the question of whether I was unique is not really pertinent. For me, through my experience with Piaget of working closely with one child at a time and trying to figure out what was really in that child's mind, I had gained a wonderful background for being sensitive to children in classrooms. I think that a certain amount of this kind of background would be similarly useful for every teacher.

  This sensitivity to children in classrooms continued to be central in my own development. As a framework for thinking about learning, my understanding of Piaget has been invaluable. This understanding, however, has also been deepened by working with teachers and children. I may be able to shed some light on that mutual relationship by referring again to 6-year-old Stephanie's essay on compensation. Few of us, looking at water rise in capillary tubes of different diameters, would bother to wonder whether the quantities are the same. Nobody asked Stephanie to make that comparison and, in fact, it is impossible to tell just by looking. On her own, she felt it was a significant thing to comment upon. I take that as an indication that for her it was a wonderful idea. Not long before, she believed that there was more water in the tube in which the water was higher. She had recently won her own intellectual struggle on that issue, and she wanted to point out her finding to the world for the benefit of those who might be taken in by preliminary appearances.

  

            This incident, once I had figured it out, helped me think about a point that bothered me in one of Piaget's anecdotes. You may recall Piaget's account of a mathematician friend who inspired his studies of the conservation of number. This man told Piaget about an incident from his childhood, where he counted a number of pebbles he had set out in a line. Having counted them from left to right and found there were 10, he decided to see how many there would be if he counted them from right to left. Intrigued to find that there were still 10, he put them in a different arrangement and counted them again. He kept rearranging and counting them until he decided that, no matter what the arrangement, he was always going to find that there were 10. Number is independent of the order of counting.

             My problem was this: In Piaget's accounts, if 10 eggs are spread out so they take more space than 10 eggcups, a classic non- conserver will maintain that there are more eggs than eggcups, even if he counts and finds that he comes to 10 in both cases. Counting is not sufficient to convince him that there are enough eggcups for all the eggs. How is it, then, that for the mathematician, counting was sufficient? If he was a non-conserver at the time, counting should not have made any difference. If he was a conserver, he should have known from the start that it would always come out the same.

  

   I think it must be that the whole enterprise was his own wonderful idea. He raised the question for himself and figured out for himself how to try to answer it. In essence, I am saying that he was in a transitional moment, and that Stephanie and Kevin were, too. He was at a point where a certain experience fit into certain thoughts and took him a step forward. A powerful pedagogical point can be made from this. These three instances dramatize it because they deal with children moving ahead with Piaget notions, which are usually difficult to advance on the basis of anyone experience. The point has two aspects: First, the right question at the right time can move children to peaks in their thinking that result in significant steps forward and real intellectual excitement; and, second, although it is almost impossible for an adult to know exactly the right time to ask a specific question of a specific child-especially for a teacher who is concerned with 30 or more children-children can raise the right question for themselves if the setting is right. Once the right question is raised, they are moved to tax themselves to the fullest to find an answer. The answers did not come easily in any of these three cases, but the children were prepared to work them through. Having confidence in one's ideas does not mean "I know my ideas are right"; it means "I am willing to try out my ideas."

  

             As I put together experiences like these and continued to think about them, I started developing some ideas about what education could be and about the relationships between education and intellectual development.

  

Hank

  It is a truism that all children in their first and second years make incredible intellectual advances. Piaget has documented these advances from his own point of view, but every parent and every psychologist knows this to be the case. One recurring question is, why does the intellectual development of vast numbers of children then slow down? What happens to children's curiosity and resourcefulness later in their childhood? Why do so few continue to have their own wonderful ideas? I think part of the answer is that intellectual breakthroughs come to be less and less valued. Either they are dismissed as being trivial-as Kevin's or Stephanie's or the mathematician's might have been by some adults-or else they are discouraged as being unacceptable--like discovering how it feels to wear shoes on the wrong feet, or asking questions that are socially embarrassing, or destroying something to see what it's like inside. The effect is to discourage children from exploring their own ideas and to make them feel that they have no important ideas of their own, only silly or evil ones.

 But I think there is at least one other part of the answer, too. Wonderful ideas do not spring out of nothing. They build on a foundation of other ideas. The following incident may help to clarify what I mean.

   

 Hank was an energetic and not very scholarly fifth grader. His class had been learning about electric circuits with flashlight batteries, bulbs, and various wires. After the children had developed considerable familiarity with these materials, the teacher made a number of mystery boxesi[i]. Two wires protruded from each box, but inside, unseen, each box had a different way of making contact between the wires. In one box the wires were attached to a battery; in another they were attached to a bulb; in a third, to a certain length of resistance wire; in a fourth box they were not attached at all; and so forth. By trying to complete the circuit on the outside of a box, the children were able to figure out what made the connection inside the box. Like many other children, Hank attached a battery and a bulb to the wire outside the box. Because the bulb lit, he knew at least that the wires inside the box were connected in some way. But, because it was somewhat dimmer than usual, he also knew that the wires inside were not connected directly to each other and that they were not connected by a piece of ordinary copper wire. Along with many of the children, he knew that the degree of dimness of the bulb meant that the wires inside were connected either by another bulb of the same kind or by a certain length of resistance wire.

   

             The teacher expected them to go only this far. However, in order to push the children to think a little further, she asked them if they could tell whether it was a bulb or a piece of wire inside the box. She herself thought there was no way to tell. After some thought, Hank had an idea. He undid the battery and bulb that he had already attached on the outside of the box. In their place, using additional copper wire, he attached six batteries in a series. He had already experimented enough to know that six batteries would burn out a bulb, if it was a bulb inside the box. He also knew that once a bulb is burned out, it no longer completes the circuit. He then attached the original battery and bulb again. This time he found that the bulb on the outside of the box did not light. So he reasoned, rightly, that there had been a bulb inside the box and that now it was burned out. If there had been a wire inside, it would not have burned through and the bulb on the outside would still light.

              Note that to carry out that idea, Hank had to take the risk of destroying a light bulb. In fact, he did destroy one. In accepting this idea, the teacher had to accept not only the fact that Hank had a good idea that even she did not have, but also that it was worthwhile to destroy a small piece of property for the sake of following through an idea. These features almost turn the incident into a parable. Without these kinds of acceptance, Hank would not have been able to pursue his idea. Think of how many times this acceptance is not forthcoming in the life of anyone child.

             But the main point to be made here is that in order to have his idea, Hank had to know a lot about batteries, bulbs, and wires. His previous work and familiarity with those materials were a necessary aspect of this occasion for him to have a wonderful idea. David Hawkins has said of curriculum development, "You don't want to cover a subject; you want to uncover it." That, it seems to me, is what schools should be about. They can help to uncover parts of the world that children would not otherwise know how to tackle. Wonderful ideas are built on other wonderful ideas. In Piaget's terms, you must reach out to the world with your own intellectual tools and grasp it, assimilate it, yourself. All kinds of things are hidden from us-even though they surround us-unless we know how to reach out for them. Schools and teachers can provide materials and questions in ways that suggest things to be done with them; and children, in the doing, cannot help being inventive.

   There are two aspects to providing occasions for wonderful ideas. One is being willing to accept children's ideas. The other is providing a setting that suggests wonderful ideas to children-different ideas to different children-as they are caught up in intellectual problems that are real to them.

  

What Schools Can Do

    I had the chance to evaluate an elementary science program in Africa. For the purposes of this discussion it might have been set anywhere.

              Although the program was by no means a deliberate attempt to apply Piaget's ideas, it was, to my mind, such an application in the best sense. The assumptions that lay behind the work are consistent with the ideas I have just been developing. The program set out to reveal the world to children. The developers sought to familiarize the children with the material world-that is, with biological phenomena, physical phenomena, and technological phenomena: flashlights, mosquito larvae, clouds, clay. When I speak of familiarity, I mean feeling at home with these things: knowing what to expect of them, what can be done with them, how they react to various circumstances, what you like about them and what you don't like about them, and how they can be changed, avoided, preserved, destroyed, or enhanced.

            Certainly the material world is too diverse and too complex for a child to become familiar with all of it in the course of an elementary school career. The best one can do is to make such knowledge, such familiarity, seem interesting and accessible to the child. That is, one can familiarize children with a few phenomena in such a way as to catch their interest, to let them raise and answer their own questions, to let them realize that their ideas are significant-so that they have the interest, the ability, and the self-confidence to go on by themselves.

  

             Such a program is a curriculum, so to speak, but a curriculum with a difference. The difference can best be characterized by saying that the unexpected is valued. Instead of expecting teachers and children to do only what was specified in the booklets, it was the intention of the program that children and teachers would have so many unanticipated ideas of their own about the materials that they would never even use the booklets. The purpose of developing booklets at all is that teachers and children start producing and following through their own ideas, if possible getting beyond needing anybody else's suggestions. Although it is unlikely to be completely realized, this represents the ideal orientation of the program. It is a rather radical view of curriculum development.

   

            It is just as necessary for teachers as for children to feel confidence in their own ideas. It is important for them as people and it is important in order for them to feel free to acknowledge the children's ideas. If teachers feel that their class must do things just as the book says and that their excellence as teachers depends on this, they cannot possibly accept the children's divergence and creations. A teachers' guide must give enough indications, enough suggestions, so that the teacher has ideas to start with and to pursue. But it must also enable the teacher to feel free to move in her own directions when she has other ideas.

   

             For instance, the teachers' guides for this program include many examples of things children are likely to do. The risk is that teachers may see these as things that the children in their classes must do. Whether or not the children do them becomes a measure of successful or unsuccessful teaching. Sometimes the writers of the teachers' guides intentionally omit mention of some of the most exciting activities because they almost always happen even if they are not arranged. If the teacher expects them, she will often force them, and they no longer happen with the excitement of wonderful ideas. Often the writers include extreme examples, so extreme that a teacher cannot really expect them to happen in her class. These examples are meant to convey the message that "even if the children do that it's OK! Look, in one class they even did this!" This approach often is more fruitful than the use of more common examples whose message is likely to be "this is what ought to happen in your class."

   The teachers' guides dealt with materials that were readily available in or out of schools, and suggested activities that could be done with these materials so that children became interested in them and started asking their own questions. For instance, there are common substances all around us that provide the essential basis of chemistry knowledge. They interact in all sorts of interesting ways, accessible to all of us if only we know how to reach out for them. This is a good instance of a part of the world that is waiting to be uncovered. How can it be uncovered for children in a way that gives them an interest in continuing to find out about it, a way that gives them the occasion to take their own initiatives, and to feel at home in this part of the world?

  

   The teachers' guide suggests starting with salt, ashes, sugar, cassava starch, alum, lemon juice, and water. When mixed together, some of these cause bubbles. Which combinations cause bubbles? How long does the bubbling last? How can it be kept going longer? What other substances cause bubbles? If a combination bubbles, what can be added that will stop the bubbling? Other things change color when they are mixed together, and similar questions can be asked of them.

  

            Written teachers' guides, however, cannot bear the burden alone, if this kind of teaching is totally new. To get such a program started, a great deal of teacher education is necessary as well. Although I shall not try to go into this in any detail, there seem to be three major aspects to such teacher education. First, teachers themselves must learn in the way that the children in their classes will be learning. Almost anyone of the units developed in this program is as effective with adults as it is with children.

  

            The teachers themselves learn through some of the units and feel what it is like to learn in this way. Second, the teachers work with one or two children at a time so that they can observe them closely enough to realize what is involved for the children. Last, it seems valuable for teachers to see films or live demonstrations of a class of children learning in this way, so that they can begin to think that it really is possible to run their class in such a way. A fourth aspect is of a slightly different nature. Except for the rare teacher who will take this leap all on his or her own on the basis of a single course and some written teachers' guides, most teachers need the support of at least some nearby co-workers who are trying to do the same thing, and with whom they can share notes. An even better help is the presence of an experienced teacher to whom they can go with questions and problems.

An Evaluation Study

            What the children are doing in one of these classrooms may be lively and interesting, but it would be helpful to know what difference the approach makes to them in the long run, to compare in some way the children who were in this program with children who were not, and to see whether in some standard situation they now act differently.

             One of my thoughts about ways in which these children might be different was based on the fact that many teachers in this program had told us that their children improved at having ideas of what to do, at raising questions, and at answering their own questions; that is, at having their own ideas and being confident about their own ideas. I wanted to see whether this indeed was the case.

   

             My second thought was more ambitious. If these children had really become more intellectually alert, so that their minds were alive and working not only in school but outside school, they might, over a long enough period of time, make significant headway in their intellectual development, as compared with other children.

   

              In sum, these two aspects would put to the test my notions that the development of intelligence is a matter of having wonderful ideas and feeling confident enough to try them out, and that schools can have an effect on the continuing development of wonderful ideas. The study has been written up elsewhere (Duckworth, 1978), but let me give a summary of it here.

    

            The evaluation had two phases. The procedure developed for the first phase was inspired in part by a physics examination given to students at Cornell University by Philip Morrison. His examination was held in the laboratory. The students were given sets of materials, the same set of materials for each student, but they were given no specific problem. Their problem was to find a problem and then to work on it. For Morrison, the crucial thing is finding the question, just as it was for Kevin, Stephanie, and the mathematician. In this examination, clear differences in the

degree of both knowledge and inventiveness were revealed in the problems the students set themselves, and the work they did was only as good as their problems.

             In our evaluation study, we had to modify this procedure somewhat to make it appropriate for children as young as 6 years of age. Our general question was what children with a year or more of experience in this program would do with materials when they were left to their own resources without any teacher at all. We wanted to know whether children who had been in the program had more ideas about what to do with materials than did other children.

  

            The materials we chose were not, of course, the same as those that children in the program had studied. We chose materials of two sorts: on the one hand, imported materials that none of the children had ever seen before-plastic color filters, geometric pattern blocks, folding mirrors, commercial building sets, for example. On the other hand, we chose some materials that were familiar to all the children whether or not they had been in the program-cigarette foil, match boxes, rubber rings from inner tubes, scraps of wire, wood, and metal, empty spools, and so forth.

  

             From each class we chose a dozen children at random and told them-in their own vernacular-to go into the room and do whatever they wanted with the materials they would find there. We told them that they could move around the room, talk to each other, and work with their friends.

  

             We studied 15 experimental classes and 13 control classes from first to seventh grades. Briefly, and inadequately, summarizing the results of this phase, we found that the children who had been in the program did indeed have more ideas about how to work with the materials. Typically, the children in these classes would take a first look at what was offered, try a few things, and then settle down to work with involvement and concentration. Children sometimes worked alone and sometimes collaborated. They carried materials from table to table, using them in ways we had not anticipated. As time went on, there was no sign that they were running out of ideas. On the contrary, their work became so interesting that we were always disappointed to have to stop them after 40 minutes.

  

             By contrast, the other children had a much smaller range of ideas about what to do with the materials. On the one hand, they tended to copy a few leaders. On the other hand, they tended to leave one piece of work fairly soon and to switch to something else. There were few instances of elaborate work in which a child spent a lot of time and effort to overcome difficulties in what he was trying to do. In some of these classes, after 30 to 35 minutes, all the children had run out of ideas and were doing nothing.

             We had assessed two things in our evaluation: diversity of ideas in a class, and depth to which the ideas were pursued. The experimental classes were overwhelmingly ahead in each of the two dimensions. This first phase of assessment was actually a substitute for what we really wanted to do. Ideally, we wanted to know whether the experience of these children in the program had the effect of making them more alert, more aware of the possibilities in ordinary things around them, and more questioning and exploring during the time they spent outside school. This would be an intriguing question to try to answer, but we did not have the time to tackle it. The procedure that we did develop, as just described, may have been too close to the school setting to give rise to any valid conclusions about what children are like in the world outside school. However, if you can accept with me, tentatively, the thought that our results might indicate a greater intellectual alertness in general a tendency to have wonderful ideas--then the next phase takes on a considerable interest.

   

             I am hypothesizing that this alertness is the motor of intellectual development (in Piaget's terms, operational thinking). No doubt there is a continuum: No normal child is completely un-alert. But some are far more alert than others. I am also hypothesizing that a child's alertness is not fixed. I believe that, by opening up to children the many fascinating aspects of the ordinary world and by enabling them to feel that their ideas are worthwhile having and following through, their tendency to have wonderful ideas can be affected in significant ways. This program seemed to be doing both those things, and by the time I evaluated it, some children had been in the classes for up to three years. It seemed to me that we might-just might-find that the two or three years of increased alertness that this program fostered had made some difference to the intellectual development of the children.

   

             In the second phase, then, we examined the same children individually, using Piaget problems administered by a trained assistant who spoke the language of the children. A statistical analysis revealed that on five of the six problems we studied, the children in the experimental classes did significantly better than the children in the comparison classes.

   

             I find this a pretty stunning result on the whole. But I want to insist on one particular view of the result. I do not, in any way, want to suggest that the important thing for education to be about is acceleration of Piaget stages (see chapter 3). I want to make a theoretical point. My thesis at the outset of this chapter was that the development of intelligence is a matter of having wonderful ideas. In other words, it is a creative affair. When children are afforded the occasions to be intellectually creative-by being offered matter to be concerned about intellectually and by having their ideas accepted-then not only do they learn about the world, but as a happy side effect their general intellectual ability is stimulated as well.

             Another way of putting this is that I think the distinction made between "divergent" and "convergent" thinking is oversimplified. Even to think a problem through to its most appropriate end point (convergent) one must create various hypotheses to check out (divergent). When Hank came up with a closed end point to the problem, it was the result of a brilliantly imaginative-that is, divergent-thought. We must conceive of the possibilities before we can check them out.

  

Conclusion

            I am suggesting that children do not have a built-in pace of intellectual development. I would temper that suggestion by saying that the built-in aspect of the pace is minimal. The having of wonderful ideas, which I consider the essence of intellectual development, would depend instead to an overwhelming extent on the occasions for having them. I have dwelt at some length on how important it is to allow children to accept their own ideas and to work them through. I would like now to consider the intellectual basis for new ideas.

             I react strongly against the thought that we need to provide children with only a set of intellectual processes- a dry, content-less set of tools that they can go about applying. I believe that the tools cannot help developing once children have something real to think about; and if they don't have anything real to think about, they won't be applying tools anyway. That is, there really is no such thing as a contentless intellectual tool. If a person has some knowledge at his disposal, he can try to make sense of new experiences and new information related to it. He fits it into what he has. By knowledge I do not mean verbal summaries of somebody else's knowledge. I am not urging textbooks and lectures. I mean a person's own repertoire of thoughts, actions, connections, predictions, and feelings. Some of these may have as their source something read or heard. But the individual has done the work of putting them together for himself or herself, and they give rise to new ways to put them together.

   

             The greater the child's repertoire of actions and thoughts-in Piaget's terms, schemes-the more material he or she has for trying to put things together in his or her own mind. The essence of the African program I described is that children increase the repertoires of actions that they carry out on ordinary things, which in turn gives rise to the need to make more intellectual connections.

             Let us consider a child who has had the world of common substances opened to him, as described earlier. He now has a vastly increased repertoire of actions to carry out and of connections to make. He has seen that when you boil away sea water, a salt residue remains. Would some residue remain if he boiled away beer? If he dissolved this residue in water again, would he have beer again-flat beer? He has seen that he can get a colored liquid from flower petals if he crushes them. Could he get that liquid to go into water and make colored water? Could he make colored coconut oil this way? All these questions and the actions they lead to are based on the familiarity the child has gained with the possibilities contained in this world of common substances.

   

              Intelligence cannot develop without matter to think about. Making new connections depends on knowing enough about something in the first place to provide a basis for thinking of other things to do--of other questions to ask-that demand more complex connections in order to make sense. The more ideas about something people already have at their disposal, the more new ideas occur and the more they can coordinate to build up still more complicated schemes.

   

             Piaget has speculated that some people reach the level of formal operations in some specific area that they know well-auto mechanics, for example--without reaching formal levels in other areas. That fits into what I am trying to say. In an area you know well, you can think of many possibilities, and working them through demands formal operations. If there is no area in which you are familiar enough with the complexities to work through them, then you are not likely to develop formal operations. Knowing enough about things is one prerequisite for wonderful ideas.

   

            I shall make one closing remark. The wonderful ideas that I refer to need not necessarily look wonderful to the outside world. I see no difference in kind between wonderful ideas that many other people have already had, and wonderful ideas that nobody has yet happened upon. That is, the nature of creative intellectual acts remains the same, whether it is an infant who for the first time makes the connection between seeing things and reaching for them, or Kevin who had the idea of putting straws in order of their length, or a musician who invents a harmonic sequence, or an astronomer who develops a new theory of the creation of the universe. In each case, new connections are being made among things already mastered. The more we help children to have their wonderful ideas and to feel good about themselves for having them, the more likely it is that they will some day happen upon wonderful ideas that no one else has happened upon before.

   i[i] "This activity is from the Elementary Science Study's Batteries and Bulbs. This and the other ESS units are currently available from Delta Education, Nashua, New Hampshire.

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Benji, Tiger, Sophie, Penelope..........

A very beautiful but very agitated wolf spider.......I soon released him so that he could resume normal life...hunting and eating small prey.....and looking for the right mate.

On Thursday, a second grader gave me two spiders he had caught in his yard. And, today I saw my first spider in the bathroom sink....a sign that it's spider season.

Before I start, though, doing some spider field work, here's a blog posting. 
Perhaps some of you have already read my post, TIGER, the story of the moody adolescent and the spider in my first classroom.

Well, here's a spider tale from 1969......

The story of Benji and the Spidernaut

John Paull 1969

Background:

• In 1969, when working with David Hawkins at The Mountain View Center for Environmental Education, at the University of Colorado in Boulder, I visited a number of elementary schools in Boulder School District. At the time of the first landing on the moon, I was spending at least one day a week in the second grade classroom at Lincoln School.

•  The Apollo 11 mission was the first human spaceflight to land on the Moon. Launched on July 16, 1969, it carried Mission Commander Neil Alden Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene 'Buzz' Aldrin, Jr. On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans to land on the Moon, while Collins orbited above.The mission fulfilled President John F. Kennedy's goal of reaching the moon by the end of the 1960s, which he had expressed during a speech given before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

Benji and the spidernaut – my reflective journal, 1969

Lincoln Elementary School reminds me of the best of English schools. Every time I went I saw children working individually or in groups, alone or with a teacher. They were reading, writing, constructing with blocks, cooking, painting, exploring science or mathematical materials, watching animals in a terrarium, making electrical circuits to light bulbs for a building, making paper airplanes – and much more.

The two teachers, Jeanne and Patti, thought very carefully about the mechanics of running their classroom, just one part of a teacher’s job. They knew their students, they trusted and respected them and they expected them to learn.

Jeanne and Patti spent time before and after school preparing the room for each and every day. They used materials creatively, feeding off the excitement that was generated when teachers and children work well together – in short, everything that made all the hard organizational tasks worthwhile.

I came to observe, to learn and to interact with the kids and the teachers.

One afternoon when I was working with a group of kids, one of them spotted a spider walking across the carpet. I picked it up and held it safely in my hand.

The kids were fascinated. They asked a thousand questions. “What is it? Where does it live? Can we touch it?”  We put the spider into a jar and talked about making a ‘real’ home for it. The questions continued. “What did it need? Where would it sleep? Did it need a friend? How and what does it drink?”

There was an old bookcase in the corridor that no one seemed to want, so, that evening, Patti, Jeanne and I took it apart. We took out the shelves, lined the inside with plastic sheeting, added soil, plants and a light, screwed a huge sheet of Perspex to the front, and, hey, there was the most beautiful spider home for our spider you can imagine

When the kids came in the next day, they were SO excited.                                                   

The excitement grew when the spider, now named Willie, built her first web.

Man on the Moon

 On July 16^th, the Apollo mission was launched and was televised live. We watched its launch in school.

A few days later (July 20^th) we watched the moon-landing. There was such excitement as the astronaut bounced around on the surface of the moon. The kids were absolutely spellbound.

 One student, 8 year old Benji, was so taken up with the landing on the moon that he constructed a large rocket from boxes, with perfectly fitting nosecone.

He was soon joined by another lad who wanted to build a Russian Rocket, hearing that the Russians, too, were thinking of launching a rocket to the moon (his family was from Russia, I believe).

  Eventually, they decided to combine their talents and work together to build the BEST rocket.

When the rocket was close to being finished, the boys came to me and asked if they could fly a living creature in their rocket. We talked about it and asked the class. Everyone agreed we should fly Willie, our classroom spider, providing that there was no possibility we would hurt her.

Another question, for me, in particular, was HOW could we fly a huge cardboard box rocket? Robin Hood provided the answer! We would launch our rocket in the same way an arrow is launched from a bow!

Outside the classroom were two big trees – we could launch our rocket by sitting it on a length of rubber suspended between the trees.

Willie the Spider successfully completed her training, was carefully placed in her matchbox (lined with soft felt and a moth for dinner) container, placed in the nosecone, and was subsequently launched in the rocket at 4:00 p.m. on July 20th. A crowd of forty plus children cheered as the rocket took off, headed toward the late afternoon sun.  The rocket 'flew' to a height of, say, two feet, tumbled, and fell to the ground. The crowd applauded, then went quiet. “Willie!! Where's Willie?“ they shrieked.

 Benji ran to the fallen rocket, took off the nosecone and removed the matchbox, and shouted, 

"Willie's alive!" The crowd went wild.

After the rescue, Willie the Orb Spider, and, for a minute or two, the Astrospider, was retired to the huge (and very appropriately designed) spider container in the back of the classroom.

After the children were satisfied that the home was just right for the spider, we gathered around in a circle on the carpet, and we wrote Willie’s story on a large sheet of paper and hung it on the wall.

The Poster

We knew where to get a spider to send up in our rocket.

We found the spider and we named him Willie. We put him through lots of tests, seeing how much roughness he could take, the heat test, and the falling test. Willie passed all the tests and he we sent him up in the rocket.

It tumbled in the air and fell down.

And he was alive. 

Willie then went back in his home and lived a long time.

The following day, I helped Benji write to NASA. He described his rocket launching experience and asked:

Dear Nasa and dear astronauts,   

We launched a spider into space. 

WHY don't you launch a spider into space?  We did!!  We can show you how to do it!!  

Love, Benji.

We never got a reply.

When I went back to England, I celebrated the launching of Willie the spider, flying another in a hot air balloon, over the top of a school I was visiting. And there’s another story!!

Spiders in space

·       Anita and Arabella, two female cross spiders were launched into orbit in 1973 destined for the Skylab 3 space station. They were used in experiments that evaluated their web building skills in near zero gravity among others things.

• And, more recently (November, 2008) another space mission carried another spider in space. Like all astronauts, the two spiders aboard space shuttle mission STS-126 went through a rigorous selection process, fitness tests and hours of training to prepare them for their scheduled launch tonight. 
• 
  
• Joining a human crew of seven, the orb-weaver spiders were strapped into a special compartment aboard the shuttle Endeavour when it blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Their destination was the International Space Station, where they remained for the next three months, circling Earth more than 1,300 times at 17,500mph.



The spiders were one of two educational experiments designed by The University of Colorado-Boulder's BioServe Space Technologies that flew on Endeavour's mission to the ISS. 

The purpose of the spider experiment was to compare the web spinning and feeding of spiders in space with that of spiders on the ground. Over a dozen Colorado middle schools monitored the progress of the experiments through the videos, data, and images sent back from the ISS. 

• While the astronauts set to work on expanding the space station and plumbing in a new system that will allow future crews to recycle urine as drinking water, making them less dependent on fresh supplies from Earth, the spiders were busy dealing with the issues of near zero gravit. They eventually worked out how to make a perfect orb web and caught the fruit flies that had emerged from the larvae placed in the dog food at the bottom of their special home.

Animals in space

•  Fruit flies were first sent into space in 1947, aboard a V2 rocket launched by the US to explore the effects of radiation exposure at high altitudes
• Albert I, a rhesus monkey, became the first primate in space in 1948 but died of suffocation.
• Albert II, launched the following year, died on his return journey
• A stray mongrel from Moscow called Laika became the first dog to go into orbit in 1957 but died a few days into her mission

• France launched a stray black and white tomcat into space in 1963. Felix, the first cat in space, had electrodes fitted in his head to measure neural impulses. He returned safely.
• Another satellite launched by the US in 1970 carried two bullfrogs.

They were kept in a water-filled centrifuge to test the effect of gravitational fields on them and the inner ear's balance mechanism. 

They were never recovered.

Spiders – and their impact on education!!

Thank you, Tiger

I started teaching way back in the early 1960s. Well, teaching is perhaps too grand a word. It would be more honest to say that I began to be paid for standing daily in front of loads of bored adolescents, opening a well-thumbed science text book, and reading aloud. Then, scribbling science words on the blackboard to be copied into science notebooks.

13- year-old Tiger always sat alone at the back of my science lab. He did not sit politely through each lesson. Tiger was always looking for trouble. Sometimes he smiled benignly at the thirty-two other boys and girls, six of whom had recently emigrated from India and could speak but two words of English (‘lav, sir?’). Sometimes Tiger shouted, “S’boring, boring…….science is pissin’ scabby.” Sometimes, to prevent himself from falling asleep, he’d run his fingers through his greasy hair, scratch his head, and interfere with anyone sitting close to him working diligently through the science textbook.

My science lessons on Mosquitos and other insects didn’t interest Tiger. School didn’t interest him and science didn’t engage him. Nothing I did in my science lessons made any connection to Tiger’s life experience or appealed to his sense of curiosity. The science I read from the textbook was irrelevant to his world – especially the way I presented it. His Dad told him that he’d have a job with him as a bricklayer on the building sites when he was fifteen, so why should he ‘do his best’ in school? What was the point of it all?

In the first week of October, the miracle of miracles happened - a big change for the better came over my teaching. Tiger, of all people, and a small garden spider, were my divine inspirations.

Walking back from shopping at the Coop for the weekend food, I spotted the most beautiful spider sitting in her intricate silky web in the black currant bush outside the steps leading up to my flat. Surprised to see one so late in the year, I fetched a jar, popped the spider inside, and took her upstairs.

I took the spider to school the following Monday, put her in a large bell jar with a little soil, some greenery and a forked tree branch, I set the new home on a small table, away from direct light, at the back of my science lab.

The following day, I noticed a silk egg sac dangling from near the center of the spider’s orb web. Sensing the spider was hungry, I caught a small silverfish darting around the base of my desk, unscrewed the top of the spider home, and dropped the small creature on the web. Immediately, the spider came running towards her prey. I sat and watched, fascinated by the spider’s eating habit, until Tiger’s class came through the door, breaking the atmosphere by noisily throwing their satchels under their stools. They were ready for yet another particularly dull science lesson (all chalk and talk, then reading and writing, and no ‘hands-on’ science investigation). Before I even started, the kids looked bored. I got up quickly, pushing the spider home to one side.

As I walked towards the blackboard, Tiger came through the door. He looked upset. He stared at the floor, mumbling he’d been sent to Mr. Thomas’ office because, he said, “I was caught looking through a dirty book, sir. ‘Fore school started. T’ain’t fair.”

 “Who caught you?’ I asked. I wanted to know more about what had happened. Tiger’s tone changed, and he glared across the room at me, and shouted belligerently:

“Mr. Jelbert, you know, Mr. Paull, he looks at us lads through his telescope from the class upstairs. He saw me. Looking at pictures. You know. Dirty pictures. Naked girls and stuff. Weren’t my book, though, Mr. Paull. It’s Fatty’s, Fatty White’s. Now Mr. Thomas has it. Fatty’ll murder me. I’ve got to go back to the boss’s office after school. And I’ll get caned. I’ll get six, I know I will.”

I calmed him down as best I could. Tiger turned and went to his usual spot at the back of the lab. He looked sulky and angry.

I read a few lines about gases from the science book, closed it, and picked up the chalk. As I was writing on the blackboard, asking the kids to open up their journals and copy my notes, there was a loud shout of “CHRIST!” from the back of the room. Startled, every head turned to see what was going on. Tiger was standing up and pointing his index finger and thumb at the bell jar. His eyes now were wide open. ‘F*#     ‘ell! Look!’ “Mr. Paull, Mr.Paull, there’s a spider ‘ere! It’s killing a creepy-crawly! It’s f*^** killing it! Look!!!”

I raised my hand. ”Tiger, watch your language!”

” Mr. Paull, Mr. Paull, Can’t ‘elp it. I can’t f*ing believe it. Look at THAT! The spider, f*+** great!! Fz+** GREAT!!

I told him to sit down, leave the spider alone, and get out his science journal. I turned to the class, some standing near their seats, wanting to know what was going on. “Wassup wiv Tiger, Mr.Paull?” asked Michael. “’e sick or summat?” “’E swore. Used the F word, sir. Wot you goin’ to do?”

I tried to settle everyone down. “C’mon. Everybody. Thank you, Michael.  Never mind Tiger. He’s just having a moment.” “Get on with your writing.” “C’mon everybody, no big deal.”

The spider eating her lunch, of course, was, for Tiger, far more interesting than my science-reading lesson. Tiger swearing loudly was much more captivating than my science-reading lesson for the class. “Let’s see. I wanna see,” shouted David.

I gave in. “Go on, then, everyone, take a look.” “Go and see what’s in the jar – then get back to your seats.”

The class didn’t need telling twice. Everyone rushed to join Tiger at the back of the room. He pointed at the spider in the jar. “Look at that,” he shouted. “Bloody great!” The kids stared at the jar and started chattering excitedly about the spider – excited chatter was something I had never heard in one of my science lessons.

“Ain’t never seen a spider like that! What is it? Wos it doin’?” someone asked. One of the girls, Diane, said the spider was so beautiful. “Can I look at it, sir? Please? Can I get a maggy glass from the drawer?” she asked.

I thought for a moment. Why not? “‘Course. Go on. Get the tray of maggies.” Diane fetched the tray and chose a magnifying glass and held it close to the jar, peering at the spider. “It’s great, Can I draw it, sir? Please?” “Can I?” she asked.

 “Of course.” I answered,  “Use your pencil, not your pen. Oh, don’t, though, draw it in your science book. That’s for science. Here, there’s a piece of scrap-paper on my desk you can use.”

Dianne looked at me, and asked, drily, “Aren’t spiders science, Mr. Paull?”

“’Course, Dianne. Sorry.” I replied, kicking myself.  “Do it, drawing, oh, go on, put it in your science journal.”

The idea caught on and a few more girls also wanted to draw the spider, sitting in her web, clasping the poor silverfish. Tiger did not draw the spider in his journal. He sat very still, ignoring me and everyone else, watching the jar, mesmerized.

Tiger stayed behind after class, and, with a warm grin and an impish twinkle in his eye, said,  “The spider’s great, sir, ain’t it great? You like ‘em? Spiders? They’re brill!” 

He looked up at me. “Sorry I swore, sir, sorry. Won’t do it again. ‘Onest!! Don wanna draw, Mr. Paull. Can’t draw, you know. Scabby drawer.”

 “Well,” I said, “I think you can draw, but your pictures are a bit rude, you know. Really rude.”

Tiger smiled and then said he was going to get some spiders of his own as soon as he got home.

“Good, but now get off to your next class. Don’t be late,” I said. “Oh, and don’t forget to see Mr. Thomas………….and be sure to give the book back to your friend.”

The next day, there was Tiger waiting for me, before school started, with that impish smile on his face. “Found ‘em, Mr. Paull, found ‘em.” Tiger had a jar in his satchel. “There were stacks of ‘em. Tiny ‘uns. Babs, I think, ain’t they? I got free or four. Can I keep them in the lab, Mr. Paull?”

“ Go on! Can I? Next to yours?” Then, he added: “Found out about ‘em, too, Mr. Paull. My dad knows what they are – they’re Garden Spiders, and they eat flies and stuff. You know what? You’re ok, Mr. Paull. Sorry, sorry, I swore.”

 “Thank you, Tiger, thank you. I appreciate that.” I said. “I’m sorry you swore, too.”

I gave him four jars, telling him that spiders can’t live together without paralyzing and eating each other. “Make a home for each one, ok? Quick, school’s starting soon. OH, and you can tell your class what you know about spiders, ok?”

When his class came for science, Tiger stood by the blackboard,  looking sheepishly at the front of the room, and told a very respectful, quiet, surprised, and very attentive audience what he had learned about spiders. I was fascinated to see how Tiger caught everyone’s attention with his excited, twitchy, body movements. Tiger had at last discovered something in my science period that made him feel that wonderful, inside –your-head glow when the brain is alive and alert. His classmates felt it, too.

“Spiders, “ he said, “ are dead good.” “Look at this one. It’s a beaut.” He held up one of the jars.

 “Guess what I found out………….spiders suck their food after they’ve crushed and made it watery…….ain’t only the gals that make silk……..the fella spiders make silk, too, but only when they’re young………..then they stop and go looking for a spider girl-friend. They mate on the web………….sometimes the gals kill and eat the fellas.” “Some spiders chase after stuff they want to eat.”

He’d really done his homework. I was taken aback by how much Tiger knew, thinking: “Where did he learn that from, then? All from his dad?” “Well, I know for sure it weren’t from me in science lessons.” Tiger told his audience that, if anyone wanted to watch, he was going to release the spiders and their eggs in the school garden at lunchtime. “They’re goin’ to die soon, y’know, and the eggs will ‘atch, next year, spring, right, Mr. Paull?”

When he’d finished, everyone clapped. This was Tiger’s finest hour. “Any questions for Tiger?” I asked. The hands went up, and Tiger was asked a million questions, some of which he could answer. What a wonderful lesson about teaching and learning, I thought.

That night I checked my spider’s identity in a spider book, learning that it was Meta segmentata, a common garden species related to the garden spider. Its courtship routine was different, though. The male, I read, drives off other male suitors, but doesn’t advance towards the female until an insect is caught on the female’s web. Both spiders then move towards the struggling insect. The male’s front legs are larger than the female and he uses them to push the female away from the insect.

He then gift-wraps the prey. As the female tucks into her dinner, the male wraps silk around her legs and then mates with her.

The following day, I went to school early in the morning, an hour or so before the official start of the day, and went to the science storeroom. I gathered a box full of microscopes, racks of test tubes, flasks, and other scientific equipment.  I set them out in the science lab. I made the room look like, well, a science lab. Oh, and rearranged the stools so that the kids could sit in groups.

When Tiger’s class came through the door, the boys and girls looked at my displays of science equipment.

“Hey,” said one, “look….look at all this science stuff……..and hey, look, we ain’t sitting alone. He’s put us in groups.

Mornin’, sir, this stuff looks great. Can we touch it?”

Tiger showed me a picture he’d drawn at home of the beautiful orb-web spider. “Look, sir, Mr. Paull, see what I did. Can I glue it on the cover of my science journal, Mr. Paull?”

“Hey, Tiger, Tiger,” I said,  “you did it. You drew your spider. You can draw, see? And you can draw pretty good.”

Seeing Tiger operating like a young scientist, was a first-time experience in my classroom.

I had learned, by sheer luck, what motivated and engaged my most challenging pupil: observing and studying a small spider.

It was, in fact, an incredible teachable moment.

It was THE first ‘Come on, John Paull, be a REAL teacher. Be professional. Earn your pension.’ wake-up call.

Thank you, Tiger. Thank you.

You helped shape my teaching.

From that day on, I thought as much, if not more, about how to bring my pupils into my lessons, how to capture their curiosity, how to engage and motivate them.

Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. But it certainly made me more interested in my teaching.

The Story of Sophie

Jeannine, currently a 5th grade teacher, reads the Tuesday Science section of the New York Times with her students first thing every Tuesday morning. She knows how and what to read from its contents and how to raise discussion and activity about its contents.

‘Everyone knows that the best times in teaching have always been the consequences of some little accident that happened to direct attention in some new way, to revitalize an old interest which has died out or to create a brand new interest that you hadn’t had any notion about how to introduce.

Suddenly, there it is.  The bird flies in the window and that’s the miracle you needed…’ [1]

In my first year of teaching in a public school, half of my multi-age first/second grade class (26 students in total) children had already spent one year together. I replaced a teacher who had left in the early spring on maternity leave.

The school year had been interspersed with stints with long term substitutes and was punctuated by disorder.  The school building was being renovated and the classroom had been moved to the basement level. The windows were covered with plywood until only two days before the school year began.  There were boxes, bookshelves, desks, and all signs of classroom life covered under a tarp in the middle of the room.  Inside, I found mishmashes of supplies, crayons, books, and math materials, obviously packed by students.

                 

In my class, there was a large group of challenging, bright, disengaged boys, one child with special needs who had a full time paraprofessional, and half a dozen students performing well below grade level.  The first month of school was hard.  There seemed to be little to hold the children together as a community, and I seemed to spend much of my time trying to figure out curriculum that was new to me.  

There seemed even less time to reflect on what was working well with my students or how I might make each day more interesting…

Then, along came a spider……………………

I found a large house spider on my basement steps and took her to school the following morning.

At our morning meeting, I showed my students the little creature that was soon named “Sophie,” after a character in one of our favorite books.  We built a habitat for her, caught and fed her small insects, and thus began a journey of learning about spiders that would change my classroom forever.

Sophie lived in our classroom for several weeks.  During that time, she spun a beautiful an intricate web, and suspended an egg sac.  The children checked on her daily, read about spiders, drew spiders, and wrote books about spiders.  Early in November, Sophie died, as spiders do as the winter approaches.  But weeks home was filled with dozens of spiderlings.  Sophie’s life cycle was complete, and her magic new again in our classroom.  

Since that time, seashells, petrified wood, bark beetle twigs, wishing rocks, arrowheads, caterpillars, sea lion whiskers, wishbones, lightning stones, and ammonites have enriched and enlivened the morning meeting ritual.  One morning, a black widow entranced us all!  Such things inspire my students to think more deeply about science and the natural world in which we live.  Natural curiosity about these things is followed by the desire to know more.

 In the fall, a science journaling project encouraged the children to document, through word and picture, their own interests in the natural world.  Their experiments constantly amazed me—especially the level of thinking that went into the observations—from noticing the upside down reflection in a spoon to finding out that a boat can carry a heavier load if floating on salt water.  There was no end to the discoveries made and the excited chatter that always followed…

Subject: spiders and stuff!

Well, my classroom is 'abuzz' this morning with excitement about Sophie, the spider, and her web, and what appears to be an egg sac... And now, I know you're right, John...this is the 'real' stuff, the stuff that excites kids (and teachers, for that matter). I'm learning as much as they are--but the part I love is that the kids want to know more...and they're excited. And the kids who thought Sophie was 'scary' yesterday are now fascinated along with the rest of us. Life science is an amazing thing for all of us to watch up close--what a buzz there is in here today!

And another email, some time later……

Sad news this morning...Sophie is dying. She began to spin a new web during the night (her weight was pulling the other one down!). And this morning, she is lying at the bottom on a rock—legs still moving, but she's done for, I think...the kids are very sad...but you were right, it is that dying time for them, isn't it?  And judging from her size, she's been around a while...the end of an exciting era in our classroom...

And then another……..

You cannot imagine the excitement in my classroom this afternoon when we discovered the emergence of 40-odd spiderlings from Sophie's egg sac. I had, only this morning, added water to the habitat and wondered to myself when or if we might actually see the baby spiders appear. The discovery was made when the students were lining up to go home, and it caused quite a commotion!  What a great opportunity it has been for the students to observe the life cycle in full circle - with Sophie dying a little more than a week ago, and now seeing her babies hatch in the now empty little habitat that sits on my desk.....the kids were in absolute amazement, as was I......

Four years later…….

My classroom had become a place where children were engaged in the study of science in real world contexts.  The science table was always covered with things that children brought to school and were curious about….rocks, seashells, petrified wood, seeds and leaves, twigs etched with bark beetle tracks, dead insects in cups, bones collected on hikes, experiments with water, chemistry, and air pressure, and once a sea lion whisker…

Typically an elementary classroom Workshop: Science!!  session in my classroom begins with

·       About fifteen minutes that focuses on describing the session’s focus (telling a story, recounting an experience) and highlighting a skill the students will need in the session's investigations (say, modeling how scientists write in a journal) or a previously taught skill that needs revisiting.

·       How to get help from other students, library books, Internet, teachers, and, importantly, where the resources are stored - and how to clean up.

·       Showing how to use scientific apparatus, such as the hand lens, a balance, a timer.

Next a period (whatever when students work independently or in small groups. When appropriate, students make entries in their Scientist's Journals as they explore and investigate. During this time, the teacher supports and prompts each student by listening, questioning, and offering resources. Finally, students come together again for a Scientists' Meeting and present before the community of scientists (classmates).

Ideas come thick and fast. Sometimes from me. Sometimes from my kids.

Sometimes because we find a spider’s egg sac in a quiet corner of the classroom.

What follows offers opportunities for each student to ‘be a scientist’, and to make sense of natural phenomena; develop knowledge and understanding of scientific ideas, processes and skills; and learn about researching and communicating ideas.

Here's an interesting 2011 spider story.

As I was watching a teacher with her children in a school library, I noticed a black widow in the corner of the room, dangling from a strand of silk.
I quickly gathered the creature, and its egg sac, and placed her in a small plastic container.  Later, when I returned to my car, I put the container on the back seat, and promptly forgot about it.

A couple of weeks later, when teaching at UCD, I offered a student a lift when his car had broken down. As he sat down on the passenger seat, he let out a shriek: "Wassat? There! Look!"
The black widow had escaped from my container and made her home in the dashboard of my car.....

The black widow that made its web in my car.........

Isn't she beautiful?

The Story of

   Penelope the Spider

Paula collects and studies spiders. She’s a scientist.

Because she studies spiders, she is called an Arachnologist, a Spider Scientist.

Paula knows everything there is to know about spiders.

Paula searches in her garden, in her garden shed, in her garage, and out in the countryside.

When Paula catches a spider she hasn’t seen before (there are, after all, over 35,000 different kinds of spiders in the world and Paula hasn’t seen them all), she notes in her Spider Journal when and where she found it, and then, very carefully picks it up and takes it home to study.

Because she’s an arachnologist, Paula wants to find out everything she can about the new spider. She starts by looking at it through a big magnifying glass. Then, Paula puts the spider into a special spider home (she calls it a Spider Motel) so that the new spider is really comfortable and has plenty of food and water.

Paula then sits patiently and watches to see what her new spider likes to eat and to see if it spins a web.

When Paula has filled up her Spider Journal with all her observations, she takes the spider back to exactly the spot where she found it, and says,

 “Thank you, spider, I appreciated the time you spent with me. It was really good getting to know you.

Now, go and enjoy the rest of your spider life.”

Paula’s favorite spider is her tarantula, PENELOPE.  Penelope lives in a really big, beautiful spider home that Paula calls a Spider Hotel.

Every morning, before she has her own breakfast, Paula feeds Penelope one big juicy green cricket. 

Every evening, she takes Penelope out of her Spider Home to do her 8 leg-stretching exercises on the carpet.

Not long ago, Paula decided to move to a new house. She arranged for two strong men to come and take all her furniture to her new home in a really big, white moving van.

They were surprised when they saw Paula’s spiders in the jars. When they saw Penelope sitting in her Spider Hotel they said they were frightened of spiders. “We’re not takin them! What happens if they escape?”

Paula smiled, and said, ”That’s OK. My friend John will help me. He’s not frightened of spiders.”

John was delighted to help, so, on the day of the move, he went to Paula’s house.

When John arrived, he saw the two strong men carrying Paula’s furniture, her computer, printer, television set, her books and journals, and carefully stacking everything in the back of their big truck.

When the truck was filled with furniture and all of Paula’s personal belongings, John and Paula carried all the spider motels to their cars. They tucked them close together in a big box so the jars wouldn’t bang into each other and crack the glass. They didn’t want an accident that would set any of Paula’s spiders loose!

Paula strapped Penelope’s Spider Hotel into her car passenger seat.

When they arrived at Paula’s new house, the men were already there, carrying in the furniture.

After an hour or so, the men told Paula they had one more chair to bring in. Paula went to her car and carried Penelope’s Spider Hotel safely in her arms.

Just as Paula was walking through the door, her cell phone rang. She carefully put Penelope’s glass motel on the top of the bookcase and took her cell phone from her pocket.

Just then, the men came up to the front door with Paula’s very large office chair.

They tried to get it through the door. It wouldn’t go at first, so they laid the chair on its side and tried to wriggle it through. As the last leg of the chair was pushed inside the door, it caught the bookcase and made it wobble.

Then the worst thing possible happened.

Penelope’s Spider Hotel lost its balance and came crashing down to the floor, smashing into a thousand tiny pieces.

Paula and John were horrified!

Paula rushed over to see if Penelope was hurt.

Penelope was lying on her back, her eight legs trembling.

Very upset, Paula bent over, picked up Penelope very, very carefully, and turned her over. Penelope had been stabbed in the back with a sharp piece of glass.

Paula then did something a spider scientist should never have done. Forgetting how fast Penelope’s heart was beating, Paula put her right finger and thumb together, got hold of the glass dagger, and gently pulled it out,.  As soon as the glass point came out of Penelope’s body, greeny blue blood spurting onto Paula’s hand.

Greeny blue blood! 

John had never seen a spider’s blood before. He didn’t know it was blue.

Paula told him later it’s because spiders have green copper in their blood, not red iron like us.

Paula pressed her right thumb over the wound to stop the green blood from flowing out of the wound.

She looked up and pleaded:

 “Help me! Help me! Help me save Penelope’s life”

There was silence.

Then, surprisingly, one of the two men blurted:

“I know. I know what we can do. I’ll get a band- aid. That’s what I use when I cut myself. It’ll work. It’ll save Penelope’s life!”

It sounded like a really good idea. The man ran to his truck and quickly brought back a band aid, and cut it to size with his sharp scissors.

“Right,” he said, “when I count to three, take your thumb off the cut and I’ll stick the band aid on. Right on the wound, ok? One, two……”  

At the count of THREE, Paula took her thumb off the wound, and, before the blood could spurt out again, the man quickly stuck the band aid in place.

The green, sticky blood stopped oozing out of Penelope’s back. Penelope began to move her legs. Paula gently put her on the floor. Everyone relaxed and smiled at Penelope as she stretched her 8 legs and walked around the room.

Thank goodness. Penelope looked as if she was OK.

The big man looked pleased with himself. He had saved Penelope’s life.

But, after a minute or two, the blood began seeping under the band aid, dripping down Penelope’s front legs.

Paula picked Penelope up again and gently peeled away the band aid, and blocked the wound again with her thumb.

It was then that John had the BEST idea he’d ever had.

 “Hang on, I have a really good idea. I know what to do!“  he said, as he ran out the front door to his car. He returned, holding a small tube of super glue.

“THIS will work.”

Paula took her thumb off the wound. Quickly, John squirted the super glue on Penelope’s back.

As soon as it touched Penelope’s skin, the glue hardened………………and stopped the flow of green blood.

The glue WORKED. Penelope was saved. 

Paula put her back on the floor, and, after a minute or two, Penelope slowly walked around the room.

The house-movers smiled. They had never seen anything like this before in their lives.

They said goodbye, and went off in their truck, talking to each other about Penelope the Spider.

That night, Paula took Penelope out of her Spider Hotel, let her walk around for a while on the carpet, petted her, and then gave Penelope a special treat: another big, juicy cricket.

The next day Paula ‘phoned John.

” Penelope’s doing well.” “I’m going to give Penelope one cricket for breakfast, one cricket for lunch and then another for her dinner. If I do that every day,  then she’ll shed her skin as all spiders do when they grow. And she’ll shed the blob of glue.”

So, for the next ten days, Penelope had three green crickets a day, one in the morning, one at lunchtime, and a really big one in the evening.

Then, it began to happen, just as Paula hoped.

Paula ‘phoned John and said: “Come quick. Come over right away. Penelope is shedding her skin.” 

John was excited to see the new Penelope emerge, leaving her old skin and the glue blob behind.

Penelope’s body was wet and shiny, and the wound had disappeared.

Penelope was, thank goodness, as good as new.

About Tarantulas

Tarantulas are the biggest of spiders. They have eight legs, are often hairy, and have two big fangs.

The oldest spider, according to Guinness World Records, was a female Tarantula that lived to be 49 years old.

Most species taking 2 to 5 years to reach adulthood, but some species may take up to 10 years to reach full maturity.

Upon reaching adulthood, males typically have but a 1 to 1.5 year period left to live and will immediately go in search of a female with which to mate. Male tarantulas rarely molt again once they reach adulthood.

Some Tarantulas are dull brown, while others are brightly colored. The sizes range, too, from as small as a fingernail, to as big as a dinner plate.
Tarantulas live in rainforests and semi-deserts. They hunt and eat insects, rodents and small birds.
They leap onto their prey and stick their hollow, furry fangs into the prey. Venom is pumped in and liquefies the prey’s insides.
Then the spider eats it like bug soup.
When they’re not hunting, Tarantulas spend a lot of their time hiding.
Lots of animals will try to eat them although some do not succeed, for the tarantula has a few good defenses.
The hairs on the back legs and the abdomen can break off with the slightest touch; borrowing into an enemy, causing immense pain.