Try to Teach with Loose Parts

 I like taking Additional Qualification courses.  My last three AQs I obtained were for Mentoring (2015), Media Part 1 (2017) and Kindergarten Part 1 (2020). I plan on taking my Media Part 2 with AML when they offer it, even though I only have a few years left before I can retire. 

I find I learn a lot from the AQ courses I take. In my Kindergarten course, Kenisha and Gail taught us about how to use loose parts in our programming. Unlike my colleague Ashley Clarke OCT, who has incorporated it thoroughly into her pedagogical practice, it hasn't stuck as well with me. I decided to give loose parts provocations another try this year. The Library MakerSpace area is finally tidy and ready for visitors, and I noticed students didn't remember or know what to "do" in this area, so I set up some loose part prompts. I was also inspired by one of the Teacher Librarian AQ candidates in one of the courses I teach, who did their course inquiry on "passive programming" and I thought that'd be a clever and efficient way to review information literacy skills for my upper junior and intermediate students, whom I only see regularly for short periods of time outside of collaborative teaching time with their classes. These were my loose part centers.

I realized that the last two centers (the ones with the prompts "How can we locate books in the library?" and "What's popular to read in the Macphail library?" were too narrow in their focus and didn't allow enough options for playful exploration. I should have included more items (like the map covered in acetate for repeated drawing/colouring, or books around the series labels). I thought my first loose parts center, with the prompt "How do we express our culture?", would be more successful. It had a book prompt, more supplies, and even a clearly delineated work space.

Almost no one touched it. One student found other items in the MakerSpace and asked if she could make a key chain. Someone else asked if they could keep one of the fake gems / jewels. One person made a face with two of the wooden circles and a blue gem. That was it.

I hope Ashley and Kenisha see this post so they can give me some advice on how to make it work. I re-read my post from 2020 and when I was struggling back then, Angelique (a Kindergarten AQ guest speaker) had these suggestions:

We also tried a modified version of Angelique's steps to becoming comfortable with using loose parts for play. (She said to Observe / Think / Explore / Create / Document. Her guiding questions were "What do you see? What can you do with it? How might you use the materials?" and I used the first and third questions with the students.) I recorded their ideas on a paper I left at an empty table.

I will definitely need to provide guiding questions to help them understand the scope of the tasks. The ironic thing is that I used a similar loose parts strategy in two other separate occasions this past week and they were much more successful. 

Big Loose Parts for Grade 2-3 Social Studies

The students were the ones that initiated this lesson! Last week, I wrote about how the classroom teacher and I took the students to the library to build urban spaces and rural spaces. Since then, the students have requested to return to the library to do something similar. We made time and for this iteration, we asked them to create urban, suburban, and rural spaces in ways that demonstrated where they were in relation to each other. Because I didn't have time to grab all the supplies from the kindergarten classrooms, we had much more abstract objects to use for the build - just wood blocks and straws/connectors. It's challenging to get around to everyone to hear about what they have created, so we asked them to use sticky notes to label what they made. They did a wonderful job and our discussions with students about their builds helped us educators see where their concept understandings were at.

Jamboard Virtual Loose Parts for Media AQ

I was honoured to be re-invited as a guest speaker for AML's Media Part 1 AQ. My topic was on Comics, Cosplay, and Consoles as legitimate forms of study for media literacy. My daughter and I designed this workshop and we deliberately wanted to include moments for the AQ participants to "play with the concepts". It's hard to make costumes when you only have an hour to present and everyone isn't together, so we devised a Jamboard with "virtual loose parts" that the participants could use to create cosplay templates. I wonder if I've been inspired by the work of Jennifer Cadavez DECE, who has invented incredible loose parts prompts for virtual kindergarten classes for the past few years. Here is the starting page (everyone received their own space to experiment) that I used for the Media AQ guest stint.

Virtual loose parts don't have quite the same power as physical objects (which was part of the point I tried to make in a project I was involved with in late October - more on that in a future post). Still, participants seemed to enjoy exploring and creating. In a few weeks, you might want to check out https://www.journalofmedialiteracy.org/humanaiissue for an article I wrote about comparing physical and virtual games.

Speaking of AQs, in just a few weeks, both the York TL AQs (Part 1, 2 and Specialist) and the Queen's TL Specialist AQ course fall sessions will end. Big thanks to all the participants who increase my own knowledge and understanding of school library issues via their observations, questions, and insights. Appreciation also goes to the Fall 2022 guest speakers for the York AQ: Denise, Tania, Kim Davidson, Darren Pamayan, Diana Will-Stork, and Jonelle St. Aubyn.