In partnership with Story Time with Mr. Limata, we’ve been testing out different tinkering activities with his 2nd grade class. Based on a great idea that Casey Federico suggested and inspired by Bea Rey's take on balance explorations shown below, we tried pairing building balancing sculptures with both imaginative drawing (drawing pictures of ideas and plans) and observational drawing (drawing to better understand what we’re looking at).
"Dibujar implica una segunda mirada sobre las propias creaciones, que da luz al que lo hace y al que lo recibe. Personalmente me ayuda a entender y ver, lo que realmente está ocurriendo delante mío." — Bea Rey
For background: we'd already established the difference between stacking objects on top of each other (left) and, to use the words of one student, "dangerous" balancing (right): building more precarious balancing sculptures on a point or seesaws with objects of very different weights.
This time, we showed the class 4 objects and then asked them to draw at least 2 different ways that they could either stack or "dangerously" balance them:
Then, we took a look at everyone's drawings. We asked about how they decided to arrange objects, listening to their reasoning and whether they thought their drawings were possible or impossible in the real world. We tried to create some of their drawings in the physical world to test them out:
The class then continued drawing imagined arrangements of objects, planning their future balancing sculptures with items from around their homes, or building and then documenting their own stacks and "dangerous" balance builds!