Mobile Classroom: Preliminary Considerations when Planning for the Projects

With our inspirations and past experiences with planning and executing a project, there were many questions and considerations as we began planning for the first one. These were a few we started with:

• Which age group did we want to focus on?
• How many children were we going to have in a group?
• What is the duration of each session?
• How many sessions would we want to allocate to complete a project?

After much discussion, we came to a few decisions which we decided that we would like a group of  six children with ages varying from three to six years of age. This is because we wanted to provide an environment where the children were able to learn and support each other during the sessions. 

It was also important for us to provide support to the children as we engage in conversations and interact with one another, we decided that there should be two adult mentors during each session with a 1:3 adult to child ratio. At our starting point, we were unsure if children had been exposed to project work before as not all the children were enrolled in formal school. Thus, we wanted to start each project season to six sessions with each session about one and half hour long. This is to accommodate for time to engage with each other and explore with materials provided.
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​With a frame in mind that children are capable of affecting change and creating an impact, we are choosing to believe that the child’s world is full of possibilities, not limitations. Project approach allows learners to interact with others and the world around to conduct in-depth investigations into questions about the topic of choice. This process builds an accumulation of knowledge, skills and dispositions, enabling self-motivated learners who are empowered to be decision makers. Those involved in a project would be able to construct meaning together, allowing them to integrate their discoveries with their perceptions of the world. It would also allow the children to apply their skills and learn new ones like asking questions, finding out the answers (research) then converging towards the same point (conclusion). 

As we embark on our Mobile classroom journey, we hope to continuously explore framing projects to create various experiences based on the topic of interest, roles that adult facilitators play, children's responses and documenting them and other observations and reflections in each project season we have. Because we do not have all the answers, it is the continuous learning processes through these projects that we are looking to immerse ourselves in. In the next blog post, we will be sharing about our first project with the children and how we planned the project with the three phases cited by Judy Helm and Lilian Katz (2011) to guide our learning process.

Reference: Helm, J. H. & Katz, L. G. (2011). Young investigators: The project approach in the early years (2nd ed). New York: Teachers College Press; Washington, D. C.: National Association for the Education of Young Children.