by Pam Oken-Wright | Oct 9, 2017 | Teacher Research
Conversations with children about philosophy can be particularly rich. Big questions like “What is real?” or “What makes me me?” or “What happens after people die?”, big questions without obvious answers, are like playgrounds for...
by Pam Oken-Wright | Nov 29, 2016 | Teacher Research
“We don’t talk about that here” are limiting words. There’s a gift in difficult topics. I offer you the story of the dead fish. One morning we entered the classroom to find that the Betta fish that we’d had for about a month had died. The...
by Pam Oken-Wright | Jan 14, 2014 | Teacher Research
“Martin Luther King’s real birthday is in two days,” one child recalled. Then someone asked, “Did the man that shot him die, too?” I told her that the man who shot Dr. King went to jail. Before I could tell the children that James Earl...
by Pam Oken-Wright | Jan 9, 2014 | Teacher Research
In this series of conversations, four- and five-year-olds consider the nature and source of ice. At the beginning of our first conversation, some children posed the theory that ice is frozen water, but others seemed to doubt. It appeared that, to them, to believe...
by Pam Oken-Wright | Jan 2, 2014 | Uncategorized
Over the next several days the children continued to think about where the puddle goes when it evaporates. G articulated her theory in drawing. She explained: The puddles don’t go up in the air. They vibrate, and then they go back to the cloud, and then it rains....
