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| Clip art from Microsoft Word 2007 |
For those of who don't know what PBL is it is Problem Base learning. This is when you (the teacher or parent) gives you child an essential question. Then your children will work through the question to come up with their own solution. In my group we are all early childhood majors and for our project we decide to go with kindergartners it is the age group that is right in the middle of our major. We choose to come up with a scenario and that is the children of China have lost their bikes. Our essential question /statement is create a new form of transportation for the children in China. The reason we choose go with transpiration is that most young children know what a few different types of transportation and the reason for choosing bikes is that we the teachers know that one of the main forms of transportation in China are bikes. The reason for choosing China was that our professor is going to China for a week.
From my perspective doing this project is a great way for students to be exposed to another country and be able to use their imagination at the same time. The philosophy of where I work now is the same as my own and that is "The CDC recognizes the uniqueness of each child by providing a developmentally appropriate, child-directed learning environment in which the child can construct his/her own knowledge through teacher-guided, hands-on experimentation and exploration in the areas of social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development" (from Child Developmental Center at Price Lab and is taken from the student handbook). Using this philosophy and PBL would work well together, PBL is student directed. I think that PBL should be used with young children but not one essential question yearlong. If you take the year and dived it in parts and each part get an essential question than you can do it all year long but if the children want to build on one question than follow their lead.
In the future I plan to use PBL in my classroom. As I develop my skills and become comfortable with using PBL I want to be able to do PBL full out. There was an example that was found that was amazing and was done all out. The name of the school was Auburn Early Education Center in Alabama. One of the main PBL was about Brazil and the essential question was who do we get to Brazil. Then children learned a lot about Brazil and a lot about different forms of transportation. A member of the group found it on Edutopia.
