I’m not sure where this belongs so feel free mods to move it as you see fit.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, my sister is on the last placement of her teaching degree.
For tomorrow’s class (Age 5) the teacher she has been assisting has asked her to discuss with the children tomorrow, old and new materials. From what I gather they have been looking at old and new as old being the days of knights and castles and new is today.
We are stuck to think of new materials that the 5 year olds will be familiar with.
For old, we have: wood, wool, clay and stone. For new, we have plastic and nylon.
Can you help us think of 2 other new materials.
How about aluminum? According to Wikipedia, Greeks and Romans used aluminum salts (like alum), but the base metal form wasn’t extracted until the 19th century.
Leaving aside for the moment which materials were invented when, while it’s a lovely little exercise and could indicate some teaching ability, the concept of long ago, and hundreds of years, and large scale time is beyond the ken of most five year olds, so the event will have limited intellectual value to the children. Furthermore, my guess is that only a limited handful of children will have the foggiest notion of man-made materials and natural materials. At that age, they don’t really understand the concept of characteristic properties of materials. Certainly, they’ll be confused by different sizes, colors and shapes of the same material. Hasn’t anyone in that school read Piaget? Good luck to your sister, but more good luck to the children.
How about polyester vs. wool or cotton?
Teflon cookware coatings vs. adding oil to a pan?
Artificial flavorings and scents vs. natural?
Artificial colors made from chemicals vs. mashing up bark or berries?
Depending on how far back you want to go, when did buildings start being made with steel as opposed to wood and brick?
The biggest new material, though, you already have: plastic.
Nitpick : nylon is a plastic
new; plastics and rubbers are the only two completely new classes (to the western world) of materials that come to hand that would be readily understandable by a 5 year old. While aluminium is new, metals aren’t
nitpick no 2
the ancients of course made heaps of crude buckyballs and tubes whenever they made a fire. Slightly more seriously - have you ever seen a gram of buckball or nanotubes? - looks like black dust. Not really a “material” by itself (though may be incorporated as part of a useful material)
Teaching nanotubes to fivers? Egad, that would be a great teacher.
My .02:
Pass around pieces of paper (or parchment) for old, then a few pieces of Tyvek for new. And don’t forget the bubblewrap!
ETA: oh… and sundials and digital watches – so the young’ns can see that their post is by now irrelevant to the OP. Hope it went well!!
Sorry to beat this apparently pre terminal equine, but 5 year olds are JUST NOW beginning to get a clue of what this life is about. Things that we all take for granted are just now coming into hazy focus. The notion that someone could make some sort of comparison between life now and life many years ago is ludicrous. Many years ago??? What is the concept of a year to a child? What is long ago? What is now? What is a material? This is one of the problems with letting legislators determine what people should teach in the schools - they have no clue of what children know, or need to know at various ages, particularly the youngest of them. I’ve seen curricula that purport to teach things like the solar system to 2nd graders. As if a child that age can truly comprehend that she’s sitting on an enormous globe moving in space, around the sun. Galileo’s ideas weren’t only heretical to the church - most people were not cognitively prepared to think about the universe that way - NOT UNLIKE A CHILD.
Sure, show the kids Tyvek and parchment and aluminum and steel and analog and digital watches and plastic and whatever, and try to convince yourself that what you’re saying is what the child is learning. They’re just barely past the point at which they put everything into their mouths to try to understand their worlds. The past. hah.
How about pottery? The earthenware of old compared with the porcelain of today. Speak to a local pottery company and you could probably get loads of seconds that the children can have fun smashing.
Or, as they’re into knights and things, how about comparing the ancient knight with the modern fighter or helicopter pilot?
I’d like to respectfully disagree. While it might be unwise to attempt to teach certain concepts too early, I can’t for the life of me see the harm of introducing the concept of old and history and materials to a group even if most will not understand it (which is a claim I find dubious to begin with). Some might, and even if one child gains something from it then it’s a success.
I was well aware of the concepts of the solar system, speed of light, and differences in time scale when I was 5 or 6. I understood that some people lived until they were 100, trees could be as old as 1000 and mountains grew up over millions. I understood that in context that I was 5 years old. In fact, I would imagine anybody who knows their age, knows that age changes and can count past their age can understand the concept of time before they were born.
The earliest recollection I have of being aware of my age as a number of years was when I was “four and a half”. I could very well answer the question of “how old are you going to be in half a year” with “five” because I remember being asked that very question. I had no trouble grasping the concept of materials as stuff that’s stuff is made of. I also had no trouble grasping the concept of known and unknown materials, and that somebody at some point discovered a new material. I might have beem a little hazy on the details, but if anything, discovery of something new is something any child who can a) understand language and has a b) working theory of mind can easily relate to. That’s all children do all day.
I was exposed to too much knowledge too fast, I’ll agree. I went to a private elementary school with a fairly eccentric child psychologist as the founder. We were introduced to the Bohr model in second or third grade at the age of 7 or 8, and had no trouble grasping it. When I came home full of questions if the Bohr model of the atom has anything to do with the solar system and is there a solar system in each atom made up of smaller atoms ad infinitum, my father the physicist felt compelled to tell the truth as he knew it. Let me tell you, Heisenberg uncertainty principle blew my mind and warped me forever, but I had no trouble understanding it. It took me a long time to develop truly fluid abstract thinking, but most amazing stuff I learned as a kid did not require it – I certainly did not need it to do algebra, for example. All you need for algebra is motivation and a basic ability to manipulate symbols.
Jean Piaget’s work is not a good cite for claiming teaching children about history and materials while they are in the “pre-operational stage” is pointless. I’m not claiming he’s right or wrong, but a statement that attempting to teach ____ to ____ is pointless is almost offensive. Even if it’s teaching your terrier the Laplace transform, it might not result in a terrier that can solve differential equations, but it certainly has a point. Believe it or not even if some concepts elude some children, they can still find the experience captivating, interesting, entertaining and might even learn something. Keep it interesting and you will do fine.
Agreed. The fact that few to no five-year-olds will fully comprehend the concept of “hundreds of years ago” does not mean that this sort of thing should be off limits. Since the concept is important to many humans, just knowing it’s out there is useful, as is the notion that it’s okay not to instantly and fully grasp everything you hear about.
For a case in point, I have a 4-year-old nephew who is seriously into dinosaurs: he knows the names and details of many - a lot more than I do. His understanding of where they fit in time is certainly limited, but I think he definitely grasps that these were real animals that lived a long time ago and none are alive now. The fact that he isn’t capable of full understanding would not IMO be a sound argument against exposing him to dinosaurs.
I feel compelled to note that not only did I understand the solar system in 2nd grade, I was a total space junky who once attempted to explain the different “grades” of stars to an autistic classmate over recess one day. (Of course I can’t confirm this, but it’s worth sharing.)
A minor nitpick with something ChrisBooth12 said: Soap is not a new substance. People have been making soap by mixing ashes and animal fat for thousands of years. The earliest known recipie for soap dates back to around 2200 BC from Babylon. Detergents, on the other hand, are a new substance–but the differences between them are chemical in nature, and not the sort of thing it’d be easy to explain to five-year-olds.
My recommendation: How about comparing candles to lightbulbs? And if you only want a “new” material, I’d go with aluminum, as has already been suggested.
My sister’s class went well, thanks for the ideas she used. Here is a wee review of what happened.
She sat with the kids and they talked about how things have changed from the days of castles and knights. Then they looked at some pictures of how we have changed and saw and talked about the materials mentioned. Then she had two boards, one for old materials one for new, the kids then sorted the different materials by name or picture onto the boards. This went well, not too many kids got mixed up. Then she had some pictures of things made from these materials and this went better.
Then they talked about other old and new things. She told me she got some funny views here. One young lad was convinced people should be new because his brother is a person and only 1 year old.
Feh! The Babylonians knew how to make transparent aluminum 3000 years ago! The formula was given them by a fat guy in a red suit, kinda like Santa except with just a moustache. It was taken back by a couple of Judaeans, though one claimed to be from Iowa and the other from a completely different planet, because they said it violated some “prime directive” of their god.
Sure, a 7-yo probably can’t really comprehend exactly how big the solar system is or the extent of the galaxy, but that doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy space. Both my kids are space junkies. My 4-yo loves to point out the planets and name them all, at 3 she was pointing to Mars and Venus in the sky and yelling out their names, and her favorite star is Betelgeuse. My 6-yo likes nothing better than an evening at the planetarium and can name several constellations–we are both looking forward to studying astronomy in 2nd grade. I see nothing wrong with teaching them things they like to know, even if they can’t think like an adult astronomer.
My 6-yo is also pretty good on time; while I’m sure she doesn’t realize just how long ago the Romans were, we have a timeline which we stock with little drawings (by her) of major events, which she loves. In a way, the study of ancient history is great for her because she doesn’t get how long ago it was; she can imagine herself right into ancient Egypt or Athens as easily as she can imagine herself into pioneer days. They aren’t foreign to her they way they are to adults; they’re just friends with interesting lives and stories. And as she fills her timeline with more and more little drawings, she gets an idea of how events happened one after another, with cause and effect, and of how filled with stories and events history is.