Curriculum Responsive to Children's Interests: Video 2

Curriculum Responsive to Children’s Interests: Video 2

Teacher: I'm going to pass out a roly-poly. The reason that we decided to do the roly-poly as an activity, was because I noticed the children, during outside time, found roly-polys, and they discovered that they were under the ground, and they discovered that they could be picked up, and they put it on their hand. So they were trying to figure out why they rolled. Why did Gina's curl up in a ball?

[Inaudible]

Girl: Teacher, mine went under the grass.

Teacher: They went under the grass? So I wanted to bring the outside environment to the inside of our classroom. And so, what we decided to do was that on Monday we just, for example, talked about, what is a roly-poly? What do we know about the roly-poly? Are they insects? What are they?

Boy: Crustaceans.

Teacher: They're crustacean animals. What are crustaceans?

Girl: We read about them.

Teacher: That's a crustacean animal. It's like the cousin of the crab or the lobster, right? How many eyes does it have?

Girl: Two.

Boy: Two like humans.

Teacher: Two, like us. It has two eyes like we do.

Boy: Two like a lobster.

Teacher: And lobsters. Yeah. And then the next day we decided to go out and find them in their environment, and then we decided to explore them in our classroom.

So, it was hands on; the children were able to touch them, use their senses, to really look at them with their eyes, to really explore them, and if they had any other questions that they wanted to learn about the roly-polys, then we were there to answer those questions, and if we didn't know, we were going to find out as we explored.

So, as a result of what I saw today, I asked them if we would do roly-polys again, what would they like to add to this activity? What do you want to know about roly-polys?

Girl: They eat.

Teacher: What they eat? So, I asked them what kind of foods that they would eat, and some of them gave suggestions like, tomatoes, strawberries, oranges.

Girl: Apple? Strawberry?

Teacher: Apples and strawberries. So, we're going to bring those in the classroom, and we're going to explore how roly-polys eat. That's what they want to find out next.