Tools Preschool visit: Relying on reasoning

Krista Smith and Erica Taylor have been teaching together at Gold Beach Head Start in Oregon for eleven years. Last year, they became a Tools preschool classroom. Now in their second year of teaching with Tools, these two are blown away by the growth they’ve seen in their classroom. “We are working on goals we never thought we would!” the teaching duo marvels.

In their recent posts, Ms. Smith and Ms. Taylor give us an up-close look at children using their new and existing knowledge to learn and practice reasoning skills.

How can I help?

Deep in their Grocery theme, children pretend to be employees in the classroom’s make-believe Grocery Store Office, where they field customer inquiries. When a customer asks about an item that isn’t in the store's inventory, the manager thinks quickly on her feet. “We don’t sell that,” she lets the customer know, “You have to go to Costco.”

This preschooler comes up with a reasonable explanation for why her customer can’t find the item and then takes that reasoning one step further, making a ‘next-step’ recommendation to solve the customer’s problem. That’s customer service!

Not as simple as it seems

Children are thinking critically in other Tools activities, too. Today’s Mystery Question is: Are you wearing short sleeves? It seems straightforward, but one child realizes that he could actually answer the question two different ways. “It’s different when I take off my jacket,” he explains.

Drawing on experience

Ms. Smith and Ms. Taylor’s children bridge learning across activities, applying what they’ve learned to new contexts and problems. For example, during Science Eyes, children discuss what they see and create observational drawings of objects with a circular shape: bumpy mini-pumpkins. Later, at Mystery Shape, they have a decision to make: which two pieces make a circle? Ms. Smith and Ms. Taylor’s children use what they know about a shape they’ve just examined closely to evaluate the options and come to a reasoned conclusion.

Grocery taxonomy

One way children develop the skills needed to reason and analyze is by learning to recognize how objects are the same and different. By noticing the color, shape, and other attributes of an item, they can begin to group items by these characteristics. Here, Ms. Smith and Ms. Taylor’s children sort food by color in the Produce Department of their make-believe Grocery Store.  They “classify” each item, using tongs to separate the produce into collections.

Thank you, Ms. Smith and Ms. Taylor, for giving us a glimpse of your preschoolers practicing critical thinking by using information to draw conclusions, asking and interpreting questions in different ways, and recognizing patterns in the world around them.

To see more from this classroom and classrooms of other Tools PreK Teachers of the Month, check out the most recent posts.