Arjan, three, had been playing with clay using a garlic press. As he pushed the soft clay through the press, the clay came out in a heap of glorious thin strands. Arjan looked at the clay, exclaiming ‘it looks like hair!’ This connection then led him to use the clay to make a portrait of his dad, who had lots of hair.
Clay invites children to touch it, to press their index finger into it, or to place their palms against it and lean onto it to change its shape. Charcoal encourages us to pick it up and draw crumbly lines against paper. Soft blue fabric might remind a child of a holiday to the beach and swimming in the sea, while a pile of small pebbles might evoke ideas about food or be interpreted as the elements of a face.
The type of material affects how children both use it and think while using it
Equally, the blue fabric might invite the child to wrap themselves up in it and the pebbles to be counted. A material’s affordances (what you can do with it) and physical traits, such as texture, colour and shape, meet with the children’s memories and prior learning experiences. This leads to new connections and ideas.
In their book Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood(2024), authors Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sylvia Kind and Laurie Kocher tell the stories of experimentation that emerged when children encountered seven intelligent materials: paper, charcoal, paint, clay, fabric, plastics and blocks.
They were interested in how these materials could take part in shaping the thinking of young children around how they ‘spoke’ to them. We could call this shaping of thinking and physical response to the materials as materials being agentic (having an active effect). For example, they considered how a wooden block was not just a tool for building but was able to evoke a particular way of thinking with it, which was profoundly different from how a child might interact with clay.
This is thinking with materials. It means both noticing what children do to the materials we offer to them but also what the materials offered do to the children, their thinking, actions and ideas (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind and Kocher 2024).
Thus, as educators, we need to think beyond how children can access intelligent materials and instead consider how these materials might:
- connect in symbolic ways to the children’s ideas and experiences
- evoke children’s memories and connections to prior learning
- suggest possibilities in their affordances and through combinations with other materials.
LINKING WITH CONCEPTS AND KNOWLEDGE
Simon Nicholson’s (1971) description of loose parts considered phenomena such as gravity, light, sound and magnetism alongside the more open-ended materials usually associated with this term. Jan White and Liz Edwards in their booklet Loving Loose Parts Outdoors (2024) point out that as children work out what these materials and phenomena are, they are figuring out ‘how it all fits and works together – including how they themselves fit into and “work” with their world (how the parts go together)’.
They give a wonderful example of how tyres and barrels worked well in an outdoor space that had a slope. The children rolled with the barrels and tyres down the slope, enabling an embodied and energetic exploration of gravity.
Young children’s interests develop in the context of their relationships with the people, places and experiences encountered through their daily lives. It is through these relationships which children build their funds of knowledge. These often relate to day-to-day experiences such as preparing and making food, taking care of others at home, or exploring shared leisure experiences such as going for a picnic, or shopping. Curating intelligent materials on these themes can help children build their understanding of the world.
Working theories are the ideas that children have about how the world works around them. These theories evolve and develop, becoming more complex as children discover and learn more. In giving children a series of materials and some lamps to play with, teacher Laura Wilding, from Phoenix Nursery School in Wolverhampton, says, ‘We wanted to enable the children to play around with their working theories about the effect of the light on these materials and their properties.’
The children looked at what colour the shadows would be when made with different types of blocks. Some found that coloured translucent blocks made a coloured shadow – was it the light source, the block or something else which was causing this? On discovering the opaque blocks did not make coloured shadows, working theories became closer to knowledge about how shadows behave with different opacities of material. Others played with the intensity of the shadows by moving the lamp closer and further away from the wall (see Case study).
REFLECTION POINTS
- Curating materials in intentional ways can amplify contexts for thinking, in which children can play with ideas, concepts and phenomena.
- In being clear in the possibility for learning of these curated materials, educators created a playful context to explore the effect of light on varied materials.
- Three-year-olds do not always understand the correspondence between object and shadow. The familiarity to the children of these animal forms and the differences between the shapes of the cow, giraffe and elephant enabled the children to easily see the relation between the light source and the shadow created by these animals.
CASE STUDY: Phoenix Nursery School, Wolverhampton
Claire Riley, an early years educator, and Laura had been working with three- and four-year-olds exploring the relationship between light and opaque and translucent objects. They had put out small plastic animals, wooden blocks and some translucent coloured acrylic blocks. A lamp was the light source.
Claire says, ‘We wondered how the children would think about describing what they noticed about the different kinds of shadows they were exploring and discovering.’
In creating this considered space, Laura and Claire were able to observe the children’s play, noticing the connections they were making, the development of working theories and the language used to communicate discoveries and processes of thinking.
Nirvair, aged three, was exploring the intensity of the light, which was creating shadows of a small cow, giraffe and elephant. In moving the light source forwards and backwards, and in positioning the animals nearer or further away from the white wall, Nirvair recognised that the intensity of the shadow created went darker the nearer the light source was to the animal.
The children were fascinated with the different coloured shadows the translucent acrylic blocks made. Rhiannon, aged three, was holding up different coloured translucent acyclic blocks to the light. She paused and looked carefully at each block and each shadow created. Holding the red block in her hand, she exclaimed, ‘It’s always red!’
Perhaps Rhiannon had realised that the colour of the shadow would always correspond to the colour of the block. Her original working theory might have been that it was the source oflight which gave the shadow its colour, rather than the colour of the acrylic block being the determining factor.
As Sam and Fateh, both four years old, played with the light and some white and black math cubes, Fateh said, ‘Let me see what happens when I stack them.’ Perhaps Fateh had hypothesised at this point that the colours of the shadows of each colour combination would be different. ‘Oh they [the shadows] are still black! Can I stack the cubes in a different way?’
Fateh then stacked the cubes using alternate colours of black and white.
Sam said, ‘It’s black then white… let me check… look… why does it make a grey colour?’
Sam seemed slightly confused by the results. The cubes were black and white, but the shadows of these cubes were grey. This was unexpected and different from how the translucent coloured blocks behaved. Sam and Fateh were beginning to explore their understanding about the effect of light on opaque and translucent materials. They were coming to know that light travels through translucent objects and is blocked by opaque ones. Sometimes their discoveries cause confusion because the results of their experiments are unexpected. With more time to develop their working theories, their understanding will develop further as they continue to ‘think with’ these intelligent materials.
