Two and Three Olds Experiences With String

I wondered if Madison was trying to understand circularity when he explored the pumpkin.  He was persistent in trying to cut long enough lengths of tape to join all the way around it. He repeated this process several times and seemed to continue his thinking whenever he found string or rope.  Children were drawn to him and actually invited by him to participate in his quest.  

His fascination with long "string" seemed to be a shared interest among

the Forest Room children as they discovered a root in the garden.  They explored its various properties as each child held onto the root (which they called string as they kept pulling, trying to free it from the ground.) 
                                                                                                                         

Another day he found a black rope in the garden and invited a friend to join him in exploring his find.  "Come on!  Let's tie up that tree!"  They ran to a very large tree. Scarlett helped him wrap the rope around the tree and they attempted to tie it.  They chanted, "Tie up that tree!  Tie up that tree!  Tie up that tree!"  They began pulling on the rope together as hard as they could.  Were they trying to pull the tree behind them?

                                                                                         
                                                               

Other children joined them. They created a form resembling an amoeba of bodies running from tree to tree.  They lassoed each seemingly with the intent of pulling the tree as hard as they could behind them. "Tie up that tree!", they shouted. 

Each effort appealed to more children as they surrounded a tree pulling the rope into points of a square which morphed into a rectangle.  I pointed out the shapes they formed with the rope. Did they notice them? Were they interested in tying or pulling the trees?

          




   I decided to explore my questions with Anna (our Alterialista). 

We discussed the children's explorations in the garden and we decided to have the children visit the studio and see what would happen if there were many different kinds of string.   The first visit, Anna  provided them with a variety of spools of different kinds of rope and string.  Balls of string were available to them among the other materials in the studio. 

 This child who took leadership by inviting so many children in the garden into his play,  pulled a wooden figure and an empty plastic bottle across a table with string.  I noticed that the plastic bottle was easier to pull and fell over. This seemed to be frustrating to him and his attention shifted, searching the studio for something else to explore. 

He saw the bowl of string and chose one, wrapping the string around a door knob. He pulled on it and then turned his body pulling as he had the trees in the garden. Was he trying to figure out the amount of force needed to move different objects?  Was he making connections between the ease or difficulty of puling  a tree to moving a plastic bottle across the table? 

His attention shifted to wrapping the legs of tables in the room. He connected each leg  as he circled the room with his ball of yarn.  Other children joined him as they found their own yarn.  His experimentation continued to whirl them into contagion, connecting the legs of each table. What was he trying to figure out?

Anna and I asked Cat our math specialist, to join us in our thinking.  She was immediately struck by the children's fascination with wrapping the rope to pull on trees, door knobs and  table legs. She told us that she thinks of  "mass as resistance to acceleration" which is a  description of how humans really interact with objects.  Pushing and pulling on a tree feels different from pushing and pulling on a small sculpture.  One takes a lot of effort and gets you nowhere and makes you tired.  The other takes little effort, and the item might actually move.  To be fancy, the acceleration of an object is inversely proportional to its mass.  (Newton's F = ma can be rewritten as a = F/m.)  Assuming the force stays the same, as the mass increases, acceleration decreases." 

Anna and I continued to put our heads together to come up with new provocations.  We decided to explore the idea of circularity based on their interest with tying around something.  You will read about our learning in the next blog. Two and Three Year Olds String II.