The Built Environment: Hands-On Education Activities

Quick links: Intended Audience, Education Theory, Session Menu and Design, Acknowledgments

The The Built Environment has four goals:

• Enhance parent-child collaborative learning
• Increase understanding of a neighborhood or city as a built environment, including an understanding of how buildings stand up
• Inspire an interest in architecture and engineering
• Use the process of documentation to help both children and adults reflect on their own and each other’s learning

Intended Audience
Anyone working with families—children ages 5-8 and their caregivers or siblings—may wish to download sessions for use in their community. Examples of community group facilitators include (but are not be limited to) program coordinators at YMCAs or museums.

Some sessions of The Built Environment will require two facilitators but most can be conducted by one individual.

Each session includes a section titled “For the After-School or Classroom Teacher,” which offers tips for adaption by after-school and classroom teachers.

Educational Theory Behind The Built Environment¹
Children’s ability to learn in an informal setting is greatly influenced by their social lsupport system, especially their family. The idea that we need to think about children’s learning in a broader context comes from the work of Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1962, 1978). Children’s social interactions with peers, parents, teachers, and other adults are critical elements in their ability not just to learn, but to learn how to learn.

Vygotsky and others influenced by his work argue that learning occurs when children are supported to do something they would not be able to achieve on their own. He called this developmental stretch “the Zone of Proximal Development,” a window in which, with guidance and support from adults or peers, young children learn to master more complex concepts, skills, and activities than they could on their own. These supportive interactions, known as “scaffolding” (Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1976), include behaviors such as helping the child tap into prior knowledge; asking open-ended questions that focus the child on important elements and processes; and pointing out obstacles, errors, and strategies.

The Built Environment seeks to encourage interaction between children and parents (or caregivers or siblings) in order to increase scaffolding.

Another concept the curriculum seeks to incorporate is documentation (the capture, distillation, and reflection) of evidence of children’s learning. Widely known through the work of Italy’s Reggio Emilia preschools, documentation helps to make children’s learning visible by converting internal learning processes into artifacts that can be saved, shared, considered, revisited, and reapplied. For children, documentation offers opportunities to reflect on what they’ve learned, to exchange ideas with others. They can even begin to learn about learning itself (Edwards, Gandini & Foreman, 1998). For adults, documentation sheds light on the learning that occurs during children’s play, how to assess children’s progress, and perceive opportunities for effective intervention (Project Zero, 2001).

This program utilizes a sketchbook concept. Participants are encouraged to document their experiences, thoughts, and questions by writing and drawing in a notebook. Caregivers serve as coaches and scribes during sketchbook time, helping children write and draw. Participants leave their sketches with program facilitators at the end of each session and take them home as a keepsake at the end of the program.

If feasible, facilitators can also use cameras to document participants’ activities each week. This documentation can assist facilitators in reflecting on participants' growth, as well as how to adjust content or teaching strategies. Photographs can also be used in participants’ sketchbooks.

Session Menu and Design
The program consists of six separate sessions, each exploring one or more concepts through collaborative hands-on activities. Sessions build on one another, but they can also be used as stand-alone workshops.

Session	Duration
1. Orientation	50 Minutes
2. Push & Pull: Be a Building (Compression)	50 Minutes
3. Push & Pull: Make a Tent (Tension)	50 Minutes
4. Foundation & Structure	50 Minutes
5. Form & Function	50 Minutes
6. Conclusion: Build a Community	50 Minutes

Each session includes the following components:

• Summary: Brief overview of what children and caregivers will do
• Learning Goals: List of cognitive, affective, and behavioral goals
• Time Frame: Expected duration of session
• Materials: List of required objects or tools for session implementation
• Words You Might Use: Annotated list of terms introduced throughout the session (for facilitators)
• Procedure: Process steps for the session
• For After-School or Classroom Teacher: Tips for adaptation

Acknowledgments
The Built Environment was made possible thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Thanks are also due to:

• Chicago Metropolitan YMCA for their support and collaboration
• The staff and families of the North Lawndale and Rauner Family YMCAs (Chicago, IL) for their roles in developing this curriculum
• Curriculum consultant Elory Rozner
• Graphic designer and web programmer Jon Wilcox
• Video editor Carol Riffle

Back to TBE main page

---

¹ From National Science Foundation grant #0452550 (the Partnership of Playful Learners). Go to www.nsf.gov for detailed information.