An Integrated Approach to Project-Based Learning
by Tawny Dovico and Renee Marcy | photos by Tawny Dovico
Throw the lever! Flip the switch! Spin the bobbin! Drop the hitch! Blast four weeks into the past. When the frothy smoke dissipates and the magic time travel dust settles you’ll find yourself in the second-grade classrooms among young mathematicians working in small groups of four. The young thinkers are hovering over elaborate oil paintings by Beth Peck from The House on Maple Street. Having learned that artists, like storytellers, use varied modes to share stories, such as picture, symbol, line, and color, the students attempted to interpret the paintings and sequence them from past to present. “Why is there a horse-drawn carriage and a car in this picture?” one curious mind puzzles. Such was the buzz and hum as students collaboratively problem-solved and negotiated their various notions of “time.” In the background, suspended at eye-level, was a newly hung, and still bare, timeline for future discovery.
The construction of the timeline in each classroom was deliberately interactive, tangible, pictorial, and dynamic. The kinesthetically friendly timelines provide a rich concept-developing experience.
The second-grade project-based learning this year revolves around America’s Family Stories. Not only do students explore and excavate their own family stories, but also learn, interpret, and discover others’ stories. We have titled our project-based learning as “Our Connections” because it is our aspiration that these second graders will utilize storytelling as a means to understand and interpret history, but also foster empathy for their future.
In math, we began exploring perceptions of time and experimenting with non-standard measurements of time. As a whole group we used a life-size Thinking Map to document our prior knowledge about “time.” Our classroom transformed into a “time laboratory” for days afterwards. Strings and weights, popsicle sticks, and measuring tape composed all of our makeshift supplies for handmade pendulums. Empty water bottles, bags of sugar and salt, rubber bands, masking tape, and more were strewn about while teams of two buddied-up to construct their own hour-glass sand timers. Each partnership calibrated their own timer, thought up tasks they could perform, and then timed each other. “I can draw 34 stars in 62 seconds,” Anthony concluded! The kids were tireless with time! “How many pendulum swings does it take for us to get lined up for lunch?” Mady asked one day. “I think 80,” Phillip estimated.
Concurrently alongside these explorations, we challenged our recent discoveries about 2-dimensional relationships with 3-dimensional figures, and began thinking about the possibility of 4-dimensions: width, height, depth, and time… time travel to be exact! Bringing both classes together, we drafted drawings of what our very own time machines might look like. We watched clips from the 1960 H.G. Wells’-inspired film The Time Machine. Students used their skills from Readers Workshop to think about setting as time and place, as well as make predictions and inferences based on their knowledge of the main character and events. Many burgeoning scientists borrowed ideas for the engineering of their own time machine.
Our timeline, both the tangible one in our classrooms and our intellectual conceptualization in our minds, is indeed still “under construction.” It was just last Friday that the students were taking a walking trip along the timeline, and one student chimed in, “I think that Martin Luther King, Jr. could’ve been alive during the first Hanukkah.” Hmm… if he had a time machine, maybe…
