Every couple of months I find myself in a classroom with twenty or even forty 8 to 10 year old children as we try to understand atoms which are the essential building blocks of our world. I am always struck and made reflective by this experience. In the page that follows, I try to capture the essence of some of the most striking and impressive aspects of how children learn. My hope is that we can all learn from children learning.
Celebration and joy
Children beam and thrill with delight in questioning and discovering. They always explode with questions. Their ability to ask about the far reaching and the specific seems limitless. They are fearless and delight in creating big lists of interesting questions.
The joy is even more impressive when they discover something new that colours and extends their thinking about our world. The new idea may be that we are all made from atoms that have their origins in the stars or that there are as many atoms in the small 1cm metal cube beneath their fingers as stars in the visible Universe. When faced with such discoveries, their mouths form circles, their hands lift to their chests and they swell up, jump, skip, dance, spin around or run off.
Imagination and expression
Young minds seem to take an idea and deliver it straight to the imagination. Ideas are not something to remain squashed on the page in monochrome, they are immediately colourful and felt strongly. Children inhabit their ideas. They embrace them and take them out to the playground for savouring.
Children know that there are a myriad ways to capture and convey an idea and excel at finding them. Their notebooks picture the spectral musicality of atoms as boldly coloured keyboards, rainbow staves and colourful waves spanning corner to opposite corner. Those that like to write write, some will want to draw or paint or collage and others will make a comic, a podcast or a dance.
They can instinctively create economic images that powerfully capture multi-layered ideas. I remember the boy who collaged two blue circles into a balloon of helium and then repeated this image. The pale blue spoke of the friendly inertness of helium, the double pairing of twos revealed its contents and every child knows that it is helium that fills our sky-bound balloons.
Concentration
Picture a room of around 15 children. Scissors and glue sticks are at work and coloured paper is being collaged. Sometimes a mingling of quiet and delicate hummed tunes holds the moment. Hold this moment for ever, it is like gold dust. Or they may be intensely peering through spectroscopes trying to catch sight of the glorious spectral lines of neon atoms. Their seriousness is palpable.
You can hear a pin drop when they reflect on their insignificant and vitally important role in the Universe. Their minds are instinctively drawn to important ideas expressed honestly.
Sharing
There is always someone to help the small boy who missed the hour before lunch to attend a piano lesson. In minutes he will know how to read the periodic table and which numbers are best to understand first.