The Power of a Snap Cube

A beautiful thing happened last week in my kindergarten class! During a round of afternoon centers, I noticed two little boys very carefully lining up snap cubes on either side of a table.

I asked them what they were doing, they replied, “We’re playing our new game.” I asked them to explain to me how to play their game. They told me the rules and told me they created it together. It’s a game they call Snap Cube War. They pick a color and line it up on either side of the table. They take turns placing their color cubes in the middle. The goal is to cross your opponent’s color line but you can only move when you “jump” over your opponent’s color cube.

After watching a round of Snap Cube War, I asked the boys some questions and listened to them negotiate rules to play the game. They boys decided they wanted to play this game again and again, and maybe some of their classmates would like to play it too, so they started writing a “How To” narrative together. Their first draft was quite impressive, we’re going to edit it together next week and put it in a format that other students can read and use.

Their game could have been inspired by another game they’ve played or observed, but their negotiations and rationalizations of rules and procedures were inspiring. I had to step back and remind myself, these little boys are 6 years old because their play was so advanced. They took something as ordinary as a snap cube, independently engaged in communication and creation to facilitate their own rich play experience. I hope this evidence encourages other teachers to let their children play, there are no limits to what their students can uncover and create.

Mastery of a Tough Objective Through Play

Where I teach, it’s all about mastery! We have to show our students’ mastery through percentages, one-on-one assessments every quarter entered into beastly spreadsheets that average, compute, slice and spit out numbers to give an overall performance scores for teachers and students. And yes, this happens in kindergarten so the pressure starts early. Our prioritized, assessed learning goals are pre-determined by administrators and they sometimes seem very out of touch with what matters most to the growth of my kinders but at our school, that’s just how it is. There is so much emphasis placed on results and percentages, I try as hard as I can to observe and show mastery through creative ways that are fun and make sense to my students.

Last week, one of my pre-determined, prioritized learning goals seemed so difficult for me to teach much less assess. The objective was: students will be able to create and describe a visualization from text. For more seasoned kindergarten teachers, perhaps this doesn’t sound so challenging, but I had a very tough time figuring out just how I was going to teach and facilitate mastery of this objective. Visualization is important to comprehension, but it seems like such an intangible thing to teach, much less produce quantifiable evidence of progress or mastery.

I started with an amazing text, Voices in the Park by: Anthony Browne, about events in a park one afternoon told by four different characters. I thought if this whole attempt at teaching visualization flopped, at least my students would get exposure to quality literature. This book usually generates thoughtful conversation among children and makes students think about perspective. The different “voices” describing their individual encounters begs the question, how can two people see the exact same event in different ways? Additionally, this book has great visuals, all of the characters have human bodies but monkey or gorilla faces. There are random things in the background of the pages and every time we read the book, students point out new things I hadn’t noticed before. The author’s choice of visuals alone is a great conversation starter.

The first day we read and discussed the book. In the story, the older male character seems hopeless about finding a job, one of my students made the brilliant conclusion that he’d be depressed too, it’s probably extremely difficult to find a job when you’re a gorilla!

By the second day, most students were starting to put together the multiple perspective concept. My students became incredibly curious about uncovering explanations for why Charles’ mother was so grumpy, they just couldn’t figure out why if her son was sad because he was alone in the house and then met a funny little girl to play with, why wouldn’t the mom be happy for her son? Afterall, the little girl wasn’t a big, mean stranger! I’m getting off topic, this will have to be another discussion and post for another day!

By the end of the week and much discussion, the students wanted to dramatize the story. Students got to choose the characters they wanted to be and we went through the events that happened in the story. Even if a character wasn’t on the page or telling their version, the student playing that character was still doing something. For example, I showed students this page and asked them to dramatize it for me. The only characters seen on this page of the book are the mother and Charles.

You don’t see the other two characters, Smudge and her father, but the students that were playing those characters didn’t just sit down and wait for the parts of the book that their character was the active voice, they did what they thought those characters would be doing even if they couldn’t see be seen on the page and even added in their own dialogue. Smudge’s father is reading his newspaper, looking for a job and Smudge is off by herself playing happily, in this picture on top of a table which this student explained as hanging from invisible monkey bars. The dialogue the actors engaged in was completely genuine and not found anywhere in the text—the little boy playing the father would say things like “I wish more kids would come to this park, Smudge needs a playmate and I’m too old. I wish I could just find a circus to join!” and the little girl playing Smudge said, “Why isn’t there anyone to play with at this park! I don’t want to bother Daddy, he’s reading!”

My students were visualizing and not only describing those visualizations, they were acting them out, for everyone to see. They took an objective I was not confident I could effectively teach or assess and made it into something really awesome! Just another example of how important good literature and the opportunity to dramatize are in the kindergarten classroom. Students need that time to put themselves into the stories, manipulate what they see and hear to deepen their understanding of texts. They never cease to amaze me!