Seeing the world differently

Talk back! Please feel free to comment using the form at the bottom of the page. If you are a teacher trying these ideas, let me know how it's going.

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Seeing the world differently at the 2013 Early Childhood Conference, July, Johnson City, TN

I had the pleasure of presenting some thoughts to an engaging group of early childhood teachers at the national Early Childhood Conference in Johnson City, TN, on July 27. I was delighted and surprised to greet a room nearly full—between 30 and 40 teachers. Half of these folk were preschool teachers. I asked what the draw was, why did they chose this as their last presentation of the day.

The answer overwhelmingly was, "ketchup." I had promised in my conference blurb to talk about seeing the world like a physicist using a bottle of ketchup. And so we did.

The red team examines their ketchup bottle while
the pink and the white persons prepare to twirl a bear.

If you try something, let me know!

I would love to hear back from any of the teachers who attended and who experiment with the things we talked about. Or if you have questions or comments, leave them here.

Please leave comments on this page. If you are interested in any of the materials—flipbook masters—or the powerpoint from the talk, please check out the downloads page of this blog.

Seeing the world differently at the Project SEE Summer Institute, July, 2013, Johnson City, TN

I had the good fortune to work with Dr. Gary Henson, professor of physics at East Tennessee State University, and a group of 24 elementary education teachers from East Tennessee, on bridging the way normal folk see the world of motion with the way physicists have come to see it over the last 400 years of wrestling with how things work.

Together, we had our own struggles using close observation, representing our thinking in "flipbooks" and "storyboards", and talking through the differing ways of seeing the same thing.

Me getting a kick of of how strange it is to someone
to actually think about how to "flip" a towel to fold it.

Comments and questions are welcome.