An Amazing Moment
We’d been using The Private Eye in my first grade class from the beginning of the school year. If you know The Private Eye, you know that students and teacher are on the lookout for how one thing is like another, and whether the similarity could shed an aha! into why something is the way it is. At least that is the purpose of using The Private Eye. But how far could first graders go in this kind of thinking? In early April an amazing moment occurred.
On our last half-day before report card prep this year, my first grade students and I were watching the Scholastic News video about seeds before we started to read the magazine. These videos always last about three minutes so we watch it through once and then return to watch it again, stopping it to talk about what we are seeing and what catches our interest.
That day, before I could even move to replay it, they said, “Can we watch it again?” “Can we say when to stop it?” To my delight they were taking over the process.
At our first stop we froze on the diagram of the plant with its roots, stem, and leaves. One child said that it reminded him of the water cycle (which we had previously studied) because it moved water from the roots up the stem and out to the leaves. Our next stop on a similar picture got the comment that it remind her of the food chain (we have been studying the penguin’s food web) because all the different parts gave things to the other parts and they were all connected that way. Another child pointed out that she really liked how you could tell where the seed used to be and how the roots went one way and the stem the other.
The next child wanted us to stop at the picture of the leaf absorbing the rays of the sun and he said that it reminded him of a solar panel. They both absorb the sun and use that energy for something else. Then he added: “I wonder if people thought about the leaf when they invented the solar panel?”
Another said, “Oh! I know all about that! The leaves give off oxygen which people need and people give off carbon dioxide, which the plants need, and it’s a circle.”
Under his breath, another student murmured, “Symbiotic.”
Needless to say, I was amazed at the minds of these 6 and 7 year olds. Not only are they absorbing information and understanding it an astonishing rate; they are able to understand more complex concepts because of the analogies they are making. The work we had been doing all year to make analogies using The Private Eye — to tell us what ELSE something reminds us of — has now given us a language for the depth of thinking that each student already has ready and waiting inside those incredible young brains. Thinking in analogies has become a habit of mind.
-- Chris Boyer
