The insects appeared again during our third visit. Isaac declared that they were“ Slingy Dags.” During a whole-group gathering that followed this visit, the Green Dragonflies embraced the name. Children started telling tales of Slingy Dags( Hugo told about a swarm that formed the letter H before disappearing). Our music teacher, Alastair Moock, included Slingy Dags in a song called“ Newtowne Wonders” that he wrote and sang to all the children, which is how Blue Otter Josh heard the name.
Giving children the opportunity to name the Slingy Dags in this playful way was fun. It was democratic. It fostered the children’ s interest in and connections to this tiny critter.
And one more story: In June, the Purple Fish classroom saw other noteworthy critters. First thing in the morning, 3-year-old Aaraj would make a beeline to the window with the birdfeeder. If there was an avian feeding, he would excitedly— and correctly— call out,“ Blue jay!”;“ Robin!”;“ Cardinal!”;“ Mourning dove!”
Aaraj was not alone in his enthusiasm. Often, Nathan, Iris, Silas, and Phillip would join him along with one of the teachers. Together, they would watch the birds alight, grab a seed, fly to a nearby tree to eat it, and return to the feeder for more food. Smiling, they would talk about their sightings. It seemed they could watch the birds all day.
What I find most noteworthy about these critter sightings is not that 3-year-olds were correctly identifying different species, though this is cool. At the start of the year, many of these children spoke little or no English. Bengali, Danish, English, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, and Tigrinya were the children’ s home languages. The strides they made in language, along with their abilities to classify, are impressive. birds were something cool to talk about. These conversations allowed children to see one another more deeply, opening up pathways to friendship. What we talk about grows, and when we talk, community can blossom.
A version of this article first appeared in 2024 in The Remake, an online newsletter that explores pedagogy through practice.
About the Author
Ben Mardell, PhD, is the atelierista and pedagogista at Newtowne School and a research affiliate at LifeLong Kindergarten at MIT’ s Media Lab. He is also coeditor of The Remake, a newsletter featuring practitioner research about playful learning in our era of rapid climate change. benmar89 @ mit. edu
References
Beaver, B. C., & L. A. Borgerding. 2023.“ Climate Change Education in Early Childhood Classrooms: A Nature-Based Approach.” International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education 11( 1): 3 – 19. files. eric. ed. gov / fulltext / EJ1410621. pdf.
Brown, a. m. 2019. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. AK Press.
Edwards, C., L. Gandini, & G. Foreman, eds. 2011. The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation. 3rd ed. Ablex.
Mardell, B., J. Ryan, M. Krechevsky, M. Baker, T. S. Schulz, & Y. Liu-Constant. 2023. A Pedagogy of Play: Supporting Playful Learning in Classrooms and Schools. Project Zero. Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Resnick, M. 2017. Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity Through Projects, Passion, Peers and Play. MIT Press.
Nor is the prolonged attention span the children displayed most noteworthy. Rather, it was the relationships that developed through their common interest in seeing the birds. The Purple Fish teachers, Sam Liptak, Jenna Rounds, and Sarah Milofsky, created an emergent curriculum around birds that captured the children’ s attention. Through this attention, a web of caring connections developed between humans and other animals and between the humans themselves. In the Purple Fish classroom,
Photographs: © courtesy of the author Copyright © 2025 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. See Permissions and Reprints online at NAEYC. org / resources / permissions.
56 Young Children
Winter 2025