“I found GOLD!” squeals Laura. Four little friends are quick to join her in the latest gold rush in the sandbox. In the wee hours of the morning, often when the sun is barely above the horizon and the coffee is still being brewed, gold will magically appear in our sandbox. Spray-painted rocks that will give our young friends hours of digging, collecting, hoarding and, hopefully, sharing.

Once upon a time back in 1886, the first sand garden was created in the yard of the Children’s Mission on Permenter Street on the North End of Boston. In the late 1800s, sand gardens were viewed as safe places for immigrant children to play in during the summer months while their parents worked in factories. Today, these early sand gardens are often referred to as America’s “first playgrounds.” As we reimagine education during the pandemic, perhaps we should harken back to a simpler time and create sand gardens for our young learners!

A sandbox seems so simple, but it is truly a blank canvas—inviting curiosity and creativity, exploration and investigation. It offers a soothing sensory experience and an opportunity to experience natural textures while experiencing the peace and simple pleasures of sand play. Peer pressure will entice wary friends to strip off their shoes and tentatively join in the fun. Placing a big “Shoe Basket” near your sandbox is essential for your own mental health. It will save you hours of searching for socks and shoes. When we add loose parts to our sand, we create opportunities for counting, collecting and designing. We can explore symmetry and patterns. By adding baking tools, we can explore measurement and estimation. Opportunities abound for vocabulary growth and lessons about location and position.

“Joseph, can you get the trucks to drive under our castle?” The children have been busy building and decorating large mounds of sand. Now they have moved on to cautiously digging out tunnels. Tunnel digging builds engineering knowledge as the children predict, problem-solve and collaborate with friends—all while spending long periods of time engaging in what appears to be play. Are you documenting this? Check those early math and science learning standards off of your list!

We can encourage children to mix sand with water to see how adding water changes the physical properties of the sand. This sand play allows the children to create models of their own making. What they imagine, they can create. They create plans, make observations and experiment with ideas. This is science!

As educators and parents, we often miss the opportunities and possibilities that sand play presents. It took me years to figure out that if I took three minutes to rake the sand and make it more inviting, my effort would be rewarded as more children engaged in hours of deep learning and exploration every single day. Consider preparing your sandbox as essential as prepping any other area of your classroom. If the sandbox is full of leaves, too many loose parts from yesterday’s play or any other undesirables, it won’t be, well…desirable! Make sure your sandbox is inviting, and you will “invite” the children to explore math and science concepts with a soothing blank canvas. Unless, of course, there is a major construction project underway. On those days, I gently place a tarp over the sandbox to protect the project until our pint-sized “construction crew” returns the following morning.

If sand is a new adventure for you, recognize and remove any obstacles early on. One important tip is that you must have a water source nearby to make the sand packable. A garden hose, gallon buckets of water or nearby rain barrels will open up a treasure trove of opportunities that are not possible with dry sand. Shade is another important element to consider. You can create shade with a large umbrella if you do not have a tree to shade your sandbox. Or you can use parachutes from the gym, which can be strategically placed with a little bit of ingenuity to create shade.

I know educators who are allergic to sand in the same way that they are allergic to playdough. Ha! I know who you are! But, in this year of uncertainty, let’s allow our students to enjoy the serenity, sensory pleasures and myriad possibilities of outdoor sand play.

I promise you, it will buy you hours of calm, hands-on learning. If you build it, they will come. Just do it!

“Can we go to the park today?” asks three-year-old Benjamin.

We are actually in the park when this comment is made. We spend many of our days at the park. It takes me a second to understand that he is asking if we can leave the “forest” section of the park and head to the playground.  As often as we head to the park, we very rarely make it to the actual playgrounds. We tend to be the “forest gang,” but today we follow his lead.

“Yes, let’s head to the playground!” I reply. Six little friends scream with delight and dash up the 60-foot hill to the slides and swings.

When we arrive at the playground, we discover a newly fallen tree with bark and branches scattered everywhere. I hear Ave call to her friends, “Who wants to make a creation?” But her friends are more interested in the playground equipment. I see the look in Ave’s eye. The tree is her playground today—her own personal treasure box. Her brain is on fire, and her creative juices are flowing. Ave quickly falls into a play buzz all her own. She starts collecting sticks, acorns, walnuts, rocks and large pieces of bark. She makes small piles and then settles in to start her “creation.” The blank sidewalk canvas is calling to this child. She begins to design, create and investigate, oblivious to her noisy friends on the playground.

Whenever I see a play buzz like this one blossoming, I offer my services.

“What do you need, Ave?” I ask.

“Bark, sticks, acorns, rocks…treasures!” she responds. “I need more treasures!”

Her “treasures” turn out to be discarded water bottle caps. Ha! I am sure that my brain is working as hard as Ava’s as I try to decipher her request. She never looks up and never stops to show me what she means. She is that deep into her play buzz. She has tuned out the world around her—and she is engaged in deep learning. This is the educational foundation that we strive for.

“Do you want STEAM? [Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math learning] I’ll show you STEAM,” I think to myself as this child creates her own curriculum. This is not teacher-directed learning. She owns this.

This nine-foot-long “creation” took our four-year-old friend 40 minutes of intense focus, determination and math and science investigation as she tried different pieces in different places before determining exactly where each piece belonged. She worked with an intensity that would make any early childhood educator dance with joy!

There are math and science benchmarks galore in this nine-foot work of art! Deep, brain-enriching, neuron-firing play. We have art, we have math, we have science and we have beauty. We have it all in this masterpiece from the hands of a four-year-old who used to worry me because I feared that she wouldn’t be able to sit for long periods of time once kindergarten began. Ave is a mover, a creator, an explorer, an investigator. She has been a hands-on learner from her earliest days.

Can Ave recognize her numbers from 1-20? She can’t. Can she count to 100? I don’t honestly know. I haven’t worked on these things with her. She hasn’t shown an interest in these benchmarks yet.

Do I struggle with that? Yes, I do. I am well aware of what that first week of “testing” in kindergarten will say about her “readiness.” Then I remind myself that Ave’s brain may not yet be ready for number recognition and counting, but her brain is ready for this! This estimation, this dimension-building and this logical, mathematical-thinking MAGIC that is happening before my eyes.

These interactions based on experience are truly the best way to lay the foundation for early math and science learning. These are the puzzle pieces that inspire children to keep learning. Ave has created shapes, worked with non-standard units of measurement, created sets and hit spatial reasoning out of the ballpark.

Math and science benchmarks are everywhere in this nine-foot work of ephemeral art! What exactly is ephemeral art? It’s art that is temporary and never expected to last. This masterpiece, in a city park where vandalism (sadly) is rampant, will be destroyed in a matter of hours. I feel a slight twinge in my heart.

I get down on one knee and say, as kindly as I can, “Ave, I am going to take pictures of your creation because I am worried that the wind or the raccoons or someone walking at night might accidentally break it. It is so beautiful, and I am sorry that it might get broken, but I promise to share a photo of your masterpiece with your family ….”

But, before I can finish my sentence, Ave stands up and says, “Oh, I know. Can we go back now? I am starving!”

This is a child who understands nature and ephemeral art. She engages in scientific exploration and mathematical investigation. The benchmarks for number recognition, when that part of her brain is ready, will come quickly and without effort. There is no doubt that her benchmarks in other areas of math are beyond her years. You can’t teach children what their brains aren’t developmentally ready to learn. Discover each child’s passion and learning style, and the benchmarks will take care of themselves.

Time has flown since Ave made her ephemeral art in the park—and she has just turned seven. As I write this, we are in the final days of the 2020 school year—a school year that has been disrupted by a global pandemic that has brought online learning into Ave’s life. It is not going well. Ave’s mother just texted me to say that online learning is not her daughter’s forte, nor is it hers. This is not how Ave learns, and it is straining their relationship and causing stress in the family. Ave is in tears, her mom is in tears and now her former preschool teacher is in tears.

Maybe it’s time for all of us to pause during this pandemic to take a good, hard look at what education could look like in America—without screens, without testing, without walls. It could be the treasure box that we give to this next generation of young minds. Another silver lining of the pandemic.

Oh, and Ave’s art creation in the park? It was left untouched for more than two weeks. I guess the raccoons and the would-be vandals appreciated it, too. So share the love and share the foundation of education through play! Trust me, it’s STEAM learning at its finest!  Stay safe, my friends. 

For this activity, the teacher put marbles in a large glass vase.  The children each then had a turn to “estimate” how many marbles were in the jar.  Seems simple enough.  However, let’s take a look at how this differs from Monday’s example and why these distinctions are important. 

The first thing to notice that even as an adult, you couldn’t possible estimate how many marbles are in the vase.  It really wouldn’t even be an estimate as much as it would be a guess, and a pretty random one at that.  The smaller jars with fewer items makes far more sense for young children.  Most three and four years olds can’t even imagine what 45 or 70 marbles look like since they probably haven’t developed a solid sense of number that big.  And remember, just because children can count to 45 does not mean they have any concept of what 45 is.

Each child had an opportunity to write their name and their guess on a large graph that the teacher hung in the classroom.

I love that the children wrote their names and their numbers but you can see that their “estimates” are not even close.  This takes us back to the original intention of the activity.  If the learning outcome for the children was to write their names and a number then the learning outcome was met. If the learning outcome was about estimation, I am not so sure.

The teacher wrote the word “Predictions” on top of the first column.  Was this a prediction activity?  A prediction is a guess about the future, so this language is not quite correct.  We want to be sure to use exact and correct language with children all of the time.  This is especially true when we design an activity and the results of that activity will be a part of the classroom over time.  Having this graph up in the classroom may reinforce misunderstandings about what a prediction is, and it doesn’t say anything about estimation.

Thoughts?

We discussed ways of creating the jars so the children’s number and counting skills would be challenged appropriately; enough to be stimulating but not too much to be frustrating. My student decided to stick with small items that fit easily into empty baby food jars and chose items that at first glance, seemed easy enough to count.

The children came over to the table at their leisure during free choice and my student explained the game to them.  She defined estimation and explained what they should do.  Each child estimated how many of each item were in each jar.  They then wrote the numbers on small pieces of paper and stuck them to a graph next to their names and under the items.

What I found fascinating was how the careful choice of the items created a challenging math exercise for the children.  The pom pons were large and nearly filled the jar but because two of them were red they looked almost like one, making it hard to see where one began and the other ended.  Many children counted the five pom pons as four as they were “tricked” by the red ones.

The beads were straightforward; seven beads in seven colors, easily discernible and easy to count, as evidenced by the chart above.  The marbles were harder as they rolled around the jar a lot and it was hard for the children to know which marbles they had counted and which ones needed counting.  The really challenging jar was filled with Cheerios.  First, there were 8 Cheerios in the jar, which was the biggest number they had to count to.  Second, all of the Cheerios looked the same, so it was nearly impossible for the children to know if they had counted each one once, or if they had recounted some.

These small challenges are important to consider when setting up an activity.  For children with a secure sense of number and solid counting skills, the jars did not allow the children to point to each individual item or to line them up or to separate them for counting.  Many children still use these strategies to ensure they are counting correctly and following the counting rules.  One-to-one correspondence provides a framework for counting so that children know that each separate item has a one number attached to it, no more and no less.  One bead = one and the next bead = two, and so on.  The Order Irrelevant Rule  says that as long as each item is only counted once, it doesn’t matter what order the items are counted in.  This activity challenged both of these rules which is what made it really engaging and interesting both for the teacher, the children, and the observer (me)!

Small children love guessing games.  They want a turn to guess, even if their guess is way off. They don’t care and neither should you.  The purpose of estimation in the early years is to give children a chance to guess at the quantity of something or the frequency of an occurrence.

The fun part of pumpkin seed estimation is that you can do it in stages.

First, I would have the children estimate how many seeds there are inside the pumpkin BEFORE opening it up.  That way, they can simply put a number out there as a complete guess.  You can write down their estimations on a large sheet of paper so they can see who guessed what.

Next I would open the top of the pumpkin and have each child look down into it.  That way they can get a sense of how full the pumpkin is with seeds.  Then they can estimate again.  Write down this number next to their first guess.  You can then talk about why their guesses are the same or different, bigger or smaller.

For the third stage, I would have the children scoop the seeds onto a large baking pan and then rinse them off.  That way they can see the separate seeds, without all of the pulp attached to them. Have them estimate a third time.  Write this number down next to the first two.  Are they the same or different?  Are children changing their estimations based on observations or are they still guessing?

Finally, you count the seeds.  It may be easiest to put the seeds into piles of 10, even though I wouldn’t expect the children to be able to count by tens.  They could help you count to ten several times and you could then tell them the total.  Compare this number to their estimations and discuss.

Even though children may eat the seeds at home, do NOT cook them at your center.  Seeds are a choking hazard for young children.

Learning Standard C – Begin to make reasonable estimates of numbers.

There is only one Benchmark for Learning Standard C

6.C.ECa  Estimate number of objects in a set

The Example Performance Descriptors are:

Make reasonable estimates of small quantities of objects (e.g., goes “four” when asked how many peach slices are in the bowl).

Tell whether a set is more or less than 5.

Tell whether a set is more or less than 10.

This is interesting to me since I know that children like to “guess” at how many, or how old, or how long… However, we often see that children are not quite successful at most of their estimates.  Remember, if a child is confused by appearances, that objects that are “big” may appear to be “many” and objects that are “small” may appear to be “few”.

With small sets, young children will have more success at estimating.  However, looking at a group of around 10 objects and being able to “tell whether a set is more or less than 10” is a fairly lofty expectation.  I can barely do that, depending on the objects in the set.  I often have to count.  Now, if they mean that I can reasonably know that 2 objects in a set are less than 10 and 100 objects in a set are more than 10, I can do that.  It is when the set is around 10, that I would have difficulty estimating without counting.

I also think it is important for young children to verify if their estimate is correct.  You can do this with simple counting.  Frequent experience with estimation and counting will support both Learning Standard B and C.

Learning Standard D

Compare quantities using appropriate vocabulary terms.

The Benchmarks

6.D.ECa   Make comparisons of quantities

6.D.ECb  Describe the comparison with appropriate vocabulary, such as more, less, greater than, few, equal to or same as.

The Example Performance Descriptors

Match sets of things that go together 1-1 and determine whether one set has more, less, or an equal amount (e.g., compare the number of napkins to place setting at the table).

Demonstrate an understanding of equal when dividing materials (e.g., divide cars equally between self and friend).

Use appropriate vocabulary to make comparisons of quantity (e.g., acknowledge that another child has more blocks).

“More” and “less” are really interesting mathematical constructs for young children because they are deeply important to the egocentric child.  Who has “more” and who has “less” cookies or Legos matters to the egocentric child.  They care deeply about themselves and this construct feeds right into that part of their psyche.

Remember, using mathematical vocabulary, whenever you have an opportunity will reinforce the acquisition of the terms as well as the absorption of the meaning.

My husband told me that his father had a system for dividing fairly for he and his sister.  If there was one cupcake left in the house his father would tell them that one had to cut and the other had to choose.  That system required the cutter to think about dividing as equally as possible, fully knowing that if there was one side that was bigger, the chooser would select it.  We use this system in our house and, for the most part, it works.

Children also have a deep sense of justice and fairness.  This mathematical concept will also appeal to that system of “right” and “wrong”.