Making Connections

Can a five year old grasp the concept of millennia? It’s possible, but it takes a skilled teacher to explain it in terms that relate to a child’s limited experience, says Sue Cowley...

When you teach small children you have to go back to basics. You need to unpick what you know now, as an adult, and figure out how you came to know these things in the first place. With small children, knowledge by itself is not enough. In order to make sense of new knowledge children must also be able to place it within their growing understanding of the world. And if they’ve had a limited range of experiences in their lives thus far, it will be harder for them to conceptualise the new ideas you share with them.

Take, for instance, the linked concepts of ‘time’, ‘time passing’ and ‘a long time ago’. As adults we have an understanding of yesterday, tomorrow, a week ago, 10 years ago, thousands of years ago. But what happens if you try to teach the Stone Age to a child who has a limited conceptual understanding of time? While they might remember the facts you teach them, the knowledge will have to float around without an anchor until they ‘get’ what we actually meant when we said ‘thousands of years ago’.

My first teaching practice was in a Reception class, in the pre-National Curriculum days. After some initial observations, I was asked to set up and run a small group activity. I decided that we should do some learning about ‘Our World’. I dutifully got hold of a globe, and planned an activity looking at some of the different countries. Within moments of starting my explanation, I realised there was a massive problem. The children I was working with had no grasp of what ‘the world’ was. These children had never travelled beyond the next town. Conceptually they had no idea there was even ‘a world’ out there. This was a very instructive lesson for me, both about the necessity of thinking on your feet as a teacher, and also of figuring out what children already know before you try to teach them new things.

One of the best ways to help children build conceptual understanding is to make the ideas you need them to grasp as concrete as possible. The children come to understand the concepts by ‘living through’ them, either in a real or imagined context. For instance, here’s a lovely way to teach the concept of ‘long ago’, and of how archaeology reveals the past to us. The teacher dramatises a story for the class: “Once up a time, five hundred years ago, a young woman was walking across a field. On her finger was a ring. Her finger was small, and the ring was big, and so it was that the ring fell off and tumbled to the ground …”. At this point the teacher drops the ring from her finger to the floor.

Then the story continues … “Time passed, and the winds blew, and gradually the ring was covered in a layer of soil.” Now the teacher brings out a long piece of material and shakes it out, as though it is blowing in the wind. Then covers the ring with the ‘soil’. The story continues, with other people crossing the field, and dropping something on their way. Each lost item is covered with another cloth of ‘soil’, until we reach the present day. Finally, the children work as ‘archaeologists’, uncovering the lost items from the past, one by one, until they reach the ring that was lost 500 years ago.

The story of the Paperclips Museum, shared with me by a teacher from the USA, is another wonderful illustration of making concepts more concrete. The students were struggling to conceptualise the horrific scale of the Holocaust – they knew that there were an estimated six million Jewish victims, but they could not conceptualise the idea of ‘six million’ in their minds. And so they decided to collect six million of something, to help them understand. They chose to collect paperclips, because some people wore these in Norway as a silent protest against the Nazis. They ended up collecting over 30 million paperclips and creating a Memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. A film was made about their story.

When I look back on my first, stumbling attempts to teach, I can see now that learning is not simply about telling children what we want them to know. Instead, it is about using our creative powers to help them grasp concepts, ideas and knowledge for themselves – and in doing so, to build their own conceptual maps of what ‘their world’ actually looks like.

About the author

Sue Cowley is an experienced teacher, author and presenter. Her mini guide, The Seven P’s of Brilliant Voice Usage, is available on Amazon.