Sugar Skulls and Snap Cubes

On this morning's admissions tour I lead a group of prospective parents into the Laurel Creek classroom during what turned out to be Project Time. In one corner, Middle School Spanish teacher Tanya Madrid-Campbell was sitting with a table full of K/1 students making sugar skulls to celebrate Dia de los Muertos. A few children sat at a nearby table doing a coloring activity with sugar skull designs. Julia and Lyssa were working with two more tables of children doing three-addend addition with a Halloween theme (the children drew skeletons, pumpkins and candy, counted up each group, and then added them together to a single total). And in the block area, two children were animatedly talking and putting together dozens of snap cubes into large blocks. At the time, I wondered to myself why everyone in the class seemed to be engaged in the projects provided, except those two children, but the structure of the tour didn't allow me to check in with the teachers.

Later in the day, during the ECC-3rd grade faculty meeting on Core Competencies after school, Lyssa brought up those two children as an example of the competency of initiative. She explained that after they had finished the other pre-set activities for the day, the two had decided to try to build sugar skulls out of snap cubes - great examples of the "awareness" and "motivation" components of the disposition of learning that we talk about at TBS. They had come up against some challenging design problems that spoke to the "skill" component of the triangle of learning disposition; how to create indented eyes, as sugar skulls have, and how to create the curves of the skull using the cube shapes? The discovery of these questions was itself a critical learning moment that directed the next step in the children's visual-spatial development, and arose at exactly the right time and in just the right way - from their excitement in building on the activities provided by the teachers, and applying their own creativity to the central idea. Hearing her retell this incident, I also reflected back on my jump-to-assumptions, and how important it is to sometimes be able to see without thinking, and ask before assuming. Wow!