Staff Workshop Teacher Handout: The Project Approach

Enhance your curriculum by engaging children in active investigations of topics that have personal meaning for them. Projects are ways to help children answer their own questions and learn more about the world.

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A PROJECT IS an in-depth investigation of a topic worth learning more about. The study is undertaken by a small group of children within a class, by a whole class, or occasionally by an individual child. The key feature of a project is that it is a research effort focused on finding answers to questions about a topic posed by children, the teacher, or both. Rather than simply seeking right answers, the goal of a project is to learn more about a topic.

The Place of Project Work

The project approach should be seen as complementary to the more informal parts of the early childhood curriculum. Project work is not a separate subject; it provides contexts for applying specific skills learned in other parts of the curriculum. Nor is project work an "add on" to the basics; it is integral to all the other work included in the curriculum.

Project work encourages children to take initiative, assume responsibility, make decisions and choices, and pursue their own interests.

Themes, Units, and Projects

Both themes and units have an important place in the early childhood curriculum. However, they are not substitutes for projects, in which children ask questions that guide the investigation and make decisions about the work that will be undertaken.

Unlike themes and units, the topic of a project is a real phenomenon that children can investigate directly rather than mainly through books. Project topics draw children's attention to questions: How do things work? What do people do? What tools do people use? What goes on behind the scenes?

Project Work Activities

Depending on the ages and skills of the children, the activities they engage in during a project include drawing, writing, reading, recording observations, and interviewing experts. The information gathered is summarized and represented in the form of graphs, charts, diagrams, paintings, drawings, murals, models and other constructions, and reports to peers and parents. With young children, an important component of a project is dramatic play, in which children express their new knowledge and use their new vocabulary.

Project work in the early childhood curriculum provides children with a context for applying the skills they learn in the more formal parts of the curriculum. It also supports children's natural impulse to investigate the world around them.

A Project's Phases

In Phase 1 of a project, Getting Started, children and the teacher devote several discussions to selecting and refining the topic to be investigated. Several criteria can be considered in selecting topics.

First, the topic should be closely related to children's everyday experience. At least a few of the children should have enough familiarity with the topic to be able to raise relevant questions about it.

Second, the topic should allow the integration of a range of subject areas, such as science, social studies, and language arts, as well as basic literacy and numeracy skills.

Third, the topic should be rich enough to be explored for at least a week.

Fourth, the topic should be one that is more suitable for examination in school than at home - for example, an investigation of local insects, rather than a study of local festivals.

Once the topic has been selected, teachers usually begin by making a web, or concept map, based on group discussions. Then the teacher and children propose the questions they will seek to answer. During this phase, children also recall and share their own experiences related to the topic.

Phase 2, Fieldwork, includes trips to explore sites, objects, or events. In this phase, which is the heart of project work, children are collecting data, investigating, making observations, constructing models, recording findings, making predictions, and discussing and dramatizing their new knowledge.

Phase 3, Culminating and Debriefing Events, includes preparing and presenting reports of results in the form of displays, discussions, dramatic presentations, or guided tours of children's constructions.

Projects on Everyday Objects

One example of an investigation of an everyday object is a project called "All About Balls." A kindergarten teacher asked the children to collect as many old balls as they could from home, friends, relatives, and others. She developed a web by asking what the children might like to know about the balls.

Children collected 31 different kinds of balls, including a gumball, a cotton ball, a globe of the earth, and a football. Comparing the balls led to a discussion of the concepts of sphere, hemisphere, and cone. Then the children formed small groups to examine specific questions. One group studied the surface texture of each ball and made rubbings to represent their findings; another measured the circumference of each ball with a piece of string; and a third tried to determine what each ball was made of.

After each group displayed and reported its findings, the class made and tested predictions about the balls. The children asked which balls would be the heaviest and which the lightest, how the weight of the balls was related to their circumference, which balls would roll the farthest on grass and gravel, and which balls would bounce the highest. As children tested their predictions, the teacher helped them explore concepts such as weight, circumference, and resistance.

Following this hands-on investigation, children engaged in a discussion about ball games. They discussed which balls were struck by bats, clubs, mallets, hands, feet, racquets, and so forth.

Rich Opportunities for Learning

A project on a topic of real interest to children, such as "All About Balls," involves them in a wide variety of tasks: drawing, measuring, writing, reading, listening, and discussing. From engaging in a project, children learn a rich new vocabulary as their knowledge of a familiar object deepens and expands.

Systematic Instruction and Project Work

Both have an important place in the early childhood curriculum.

Systematic instruction:

• helps children acquire new skills.
• addresses deficiencies in children's knowledge and skills.
• relies on extrinsic motivation.
• allows teachers to direct children's work and specify the task that children perform to help them achieve mastery.

Project work:

• provides children with opportunities to apply new skills.
• addresses  children's proficiencies.
• relies on intrinsic motivation.
• encourages children to determine what to work on and accept them as experts on their own needs.

Lilian G. Katz, Ph.D., is professor emerita of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Campaign) where she is also Director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary & Early Childhood Education (http://www.ericeece.org/). She is a past president the National Association for Education of Young Children and editor of the first online, peer-reviewed early childhood journal Early Childhood Research & Practice, and a member of Scholastic's National Early Childhood Advisory Board.

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