“It would go rrraa right into his mouth”

— A Grade 1 Boy Talking About Animals —

by Jeff Bloom


Adam (a pseudonym) was a first grader in a local elementary school in North America. He stood out as one of the more precocious and talkative children in the group we were interviewing. He was with me for about an hour or so talking about a variety of animal artifacts I had brought with me. On another day, he spent about the same amount of time talking with my research assistant, Jeannette Borstad, about a collection of live earthworms she brought into the interview. The interviews were done in the hallway outside of the classroom, which meant that there were occasional interruptions from other children walking by. But, these interruptions were interesting in themselves and often showed contrasts in the reactions to the earthworms and the artifacts by the interviewee child and the children passing by.

In reading the following excerpts, try to be open to the “gestalt” or the total feel and sense of Adam and his thinking as expressed by his talking and other verbalizations. At the same time, you may want to note how a variety of different sorts of contexts of meaning (SEE Introduction to this collection and a short list below). Some of the more notable contexts of meaning aspects include: (a) emotion, (b) values, (c) aesthetics, (c) contending with categories of things, (d) justifications for his ideas, (e) excitement, (f) curiosity, (g) stories, (h) humor, and (i) inferences. Also, notable were expressions of his pride and self-confidence, along with his variety of questions and wonderings. Another perspective you may want to keep in mind is how his thinking is not only transcontextual in terms of the cognitive contexts, but also transcontextual in his incorporation of other contexts in his scope of his experiences. I’ve highlighted some of these in red.

The Animal Artifacts

The artifacts included:

  • a dried sponge,
  • 4 samples of coral (branching, grooved, fossilized, & embedded in plastic in its living form),
  • shells (spiral univalve, scallop, fossilized univalve, & fossilized bivalve),
  • tube worm tubes,
  • dried trunkfish,
  • 2 starfish (dried & partially dissected and embedded in plastic),
  • snakes (one dried & one preserved and transparent),
  • frog (preserved and transparent),
  • echinoderms (all embedded in plastic: sand dollar, sea cucumber, brittle star, starfish, sea urchin),
  • other chordates (all embedded in plastic: spiny dogfish embryo, sea horse, petromyzon or amphioxus, & minnow),
  • crayfish (life stage series embedded in plastic).

The Sponge

Adam, “I think this one's amazing!” 
Jeff, “Do you know what that is?”
Adam, “Looks like it’s sponge, cause it looks just like one. This I know is sponge, ‘cause it looks like sponge, and it feels like it.”
Jeff, “What is a sponge?”
Adam, “A sponge is something that you’d use in the bath tub to scrub yourself; that you can wash the dishes with. And, and, they can be really nice when they are swaying in the water. They can be really beautiful. Do you know how I know that? ‘Cause my aunt and uncle are scuba divers.”
Jeff, “So, they’ve seen sponges?”
Adam, “So, they’ve seen these things wading along in the water.”
Jeff, “Are they alive?”
Adam,They are. When they are underwater, they are.”
Jeff, “Are they an plant or an animal, do you know?”
Adam,They are an animal.”

Much later in the interview while talking about coral:

Adam, “Coral is another sea creature, just like the sponge. And, it works kind of the same way. It sprays just the same way, and it looks just the same while it, while they’re underwater. But, this one is a lot holier.”
Dried piece of coral.

Listening to children talk, especially when you’re focusing on what they are saying as a teacher or researcher, is littered with potholes. As teachers or researchers, we look for whether they “understand” some dry, disconnected concept, and whether the children use the “correct” language to express their ideas. The potholes are that children, and people, in general, don’t think and talk naturally in ways that fit the more formal rules for expressing concepts. The potholes also include all sorts of divergences, emotions, aesthetics, values, personal experiences, and so forth. Just in reading through the first three or four sentences of Adam’s talk about sponges, you may be led to believe that he does not see them as having once been alive. He almost immediately jumps into how sponges are used by people. Only later on, does he talk about sponges as being animals that live in the ocean.

Children’s worlds of ideas are much more elaborate, dynamic,, and exciting than are our adult worlds of ideas… at least for the most part. There are, of course, exceptions. But, schooling tends to narrow and limit the talk of children, and adult students. Divergences are halted almost before they get started, stories are dismissed, and all but the school-type, fragmented bits of knowledge are ignored.

Snails, Clams, Crayfish, and Starfish

Adam, “Look at this. I know what this is. A snail shell. Can’t you see? The snail's body is rrrrrit. [making a sound to express how the snail body goes from one end of the spiral to the opening.]  The snail really is really long. So long that it goes rrrrit and out…”
Jeff, “Out the other end.”
Adam, “Out there and then, and then it would stream along the back pushing it along, and the front pushing it along. Snail bodies are very very long. I know what these are. Crayfish. I caught a crayfish once.”
Jeff, “You did? Did he pinch you?”
Adam, “I caught one quite fast. He didn’t pinch me.”
Jeff, “What are these other things up here?”
Adam,Do you know how I caught it? You just take a paddle, and and you put it in front of you, and, and the crayfish gets very very scared and, [OC] and then, and then you put the net behind it. And, you know there's discs there's the paddle when he gets scared so he walks backwards.”
Jeff, “And, he walks into your net?”
Adam, “Yup, he walks right into the net. Let's look at this. I know about starfishes, too. Star fishes… Do you know what? Those things on the bottom are really legs. And, and, right in there is where they would swallow their food, too.”
Jeff, “In the middle… so where… show me the legs again. Which are the legs?”
Adam, “The legs are are those white things, and, and, if the food gets away, they just grab it in there, and it would go rrraa right into his mouth. And, do you know what? That's the mouth, and this one is one that’s, that is broken open right there, there, and there. You see it's different from that, and it looks like it’s going in. And, you can kind of see, well… I can see if it’s turning, but all of the food has sort formed into a gold pearl see? It is. it turned from food into a gold pearl. Can you believe it?

Earthworms and Snail Shell in the Dirt

Adam, I can find worms, because I actually catch them.”
Jeannette, “Do you have to catch them? For what?”
Adam, “to catch the worms… ooh, there’s one.”
….
Adam, “Look at this. I know what this is. A snail shell. Can’t you see? The snail's body is rrrrrit. [making a sound to express how the snail body goes from one end of the spiral to the opening.] The snail really is really long. So long that it goes rrrrit and out…”
Jeannette, “Out the other end.”
Adam, “Out there and then, and then it would stream along the back pushing it along, and the front pushing it along. Snail bodies are very very long. I know what these are. Crayfish. I caught a crayfish once.
Jeannette, “You did? Did he pinch you?”
Adam, “I caught one quite fast. He didn’t pinch me.”
Jeannette, “What are these other things up here?”
Adam,Do you know how I caught it? You just take a paddle, and and you put it in front of you, and, and the crayfish gets very very scared and, [OC] and then, and then you put the net behind it. And, you know there's discs there's the paddle when he gets scared so he walks backwards.”
Jeannette, “And, he walks into your net?”
Adam, “Yup, he walks right into the net. Let's look at this. I know about starfishes, too. Star fishes… Do you know what? Those things on the bottom are really legs. And, and, right in there is where they would swallow their food, too.”
Jeannette, “In the middle… so where… show me the legs again. Which are the legs?”
Adam, “The legs are are those white things, and, and, if the food gets away, they just grab it in there, and it would go rrraa right into his mouth. And, do you know what? That's the mouth, and this one is one that’s, that is broken open right there, there, and there. You see it's different from that, and it looks like it’s going in. And, you can kind of see, well… I can see if it’s turning, but all of the food has sort formed into a gold pearl see? It is. it turned from food into a gold pearl. Can you believe it?”
….
Adam, Whoop! Look at them all! I’m going to take away one of the pieces of mud, and just see them. On the inside, the stomach would be right there. And, another stomach would be right there. The heart would be in the middle. And, there’s no legs. There’s a tail you can see. Do you see where it drops in? That’s where the body stops in, you see? That other thing? That’s the tail. I’ve seen lots of worms. They are really neat. Let’s put them back in the ground. And, the little one, and the skinny ones, and the fatter ones are pretty. Did you know that this one was only two fat ones? Well, I found another fat one.”
Jeannette, “Now, We’v got more. Hey, that one’s really moving?”
Adam, “Yeah, some of them really go fast. Some even look like an ’s.’“
Jeannette, “Yeah, they do. It does look like an ’s.’ Wow, he’s doing a dance.”
Adam, “aah!…he's doing a dance for us…(laughs)…look…some worms look look just like a snake.”
Jeannette, “what's the difference between a snake and a worm?”
Adam, “The worm’s smaller than a snake. But, worms are just small snakes.”
Jeannette, “Oh, are they? Are they a lot like…”
Adam, “Well, snakes live in the ground, and do the same things. Worms can't hurt you. Worms are just smaller, but they're the same thing, but they just, they don't hurt you, and that kind of stuff. And, and, worms don't have ears.”
Jeannette, “And, what about snakes?
Adam, “But, they are so small that you can't see them. Snakes don't have ears.”
….
Adam, “Yep. Hey, we dropped all the worms where they were (laughs), and they are squirming around in the place that they were. Wonder how they did it? Hey, I just saw how they did right here. They sticked their noses into the dirt and tried to drill it around. Do you see how how their noses noses kind of…”
Jeannette, “So, you think his head is kind of like a drill?”
Adam, “Yeah, and also his tail looks like that it goes through a lot better and then his whole body can fit through the other part just goes juuuu." sounds like drill (laughs)
Jeannette, “What do they go around through or what do they drill around?”
Adam, “The dirt. That’s what they eat.”

Adam was very engaged with the objects and earthworms we made available for him to examine and play with. He was not at all shy and talked without any prompting. He had a great deal of knowledge about different animals, which appeared to come from his range experiences. These experiences included everything from backyard, fishing, and camping explorations, museum visits, and nature TV shows, which his parents said they watched regularly.

What is particularly interesting about these conversations with Adam was the variety of both cognitive and everyday contexts which contributed to his understandings and the meanings that are associated with these understandings. Drawing upon this range of contexts is a common characteristic of children’s thinking, but is much more evident with Adam, who talked with ease and who loved to share his ideas with others. Much of this sort of conversational style is not usually supported and encouraged in school classrooms. In fact, teachers often stop tangents and ignore emotional, asethetic, valuative, humorous, and metaphoric sorts of ideas. Yet, it is this array of ideas that bring topics to life and make them meaningful and relevant to children.

For most of us, as adults, we’ve been subject to the suppression of what educational institutions consider tangential, irrelevant, and “not on topic.” Although the same thinking processes are at play with us, we have learned to be careful how think and how we can play the school game of thinking. I suspect that much of what we see in our society today, in terms of attractions to conspiracy theories and being so heavily influenced by the emotional talk of others, is a rebellious sort of reaction to having our emotions and values suppressed throughout all of our schooling and beyond. It is like being given a license to think in ways we haven’t been allowed to think. Had we approached this complex dynamic of thinking and meaning-making throughout our schooling, we may have come out with a better understanding of how the different dimensions of our thinking works together. We may have entered adulthood with a better balance of rationality, creativity, imagination, valuing, beliefs, and all the rest.

We, as teachers and parents, need to play off children’s ideas and thinking in ways that encourage and support children’s thinking and promote further inquiry, creativity, and questioning. We also need to allow and encourage children to communicate their ideas in various ways, so that we can promote a sense of children as knowledge producers and creative communicators. In order to do this, we need to pay attention to their ideas and questions, reflect on the possibilities presented by their ideas, and offer children a range of possible directions that they can explore further.

For instance, one common idea that came up in children explorations and conversation was the idea of earthworms having tails. One girl even said, “Look! He’s wagging his tail.” If teachers are knowledgeable about earthworms, they may, again, suppress and criticize children for such a statement by saying something like, “well, earthworms don’t really have tails.” That ends all further inquiry right there. Instead, teachers or parents might ask questions about tails, and maybe bring in lots of examples of tails and things that look like tails, but aren’t tails. How do different animals use tails? What makes a tail a tail? What are things that look like tails, but aren’t tails used for? What does a wagging tail mean to different animals? Kids can draw or paint real or fictional animals with tails, take photos of tails, do videos of tails in action, etc. They can write stories about animals and tails or a tale of tails. They can dissect an earthworm and another animal with a tail. The possibilities are endless. And, all of the possibilities allow children to continue thinking transcontextually and in ways that bring alive science, art, music, history, language, and much more.


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