“What Do You See?”
An investigation from a 3-year-old class
“It makes me feel like myself.”
“I just see me.”
“I looked at it and I saw more.”
Some children took the prompt as an invitation for self-portraiture.
At the very beginning of the year, the children were presented with a mirror and a simple question: What do you see?
“I look like Mama.”
“I just see Orange.”
“Water.”
“Shiny.”
“There it is.”
“It’s cold!”
“It’s me!”
Others chose to describe their vision in imaginative fantasies.
“Squeak, Squeak. An owl.”
“Paint right there [on the mirror].”
“Gray.”
“Sparkly.”
“Mickey Mouse and Baby Risto.”
“I saw bunny here.”
As we continued to paint what we saw, a few children looked at the mirror and saw something intriguing — not themselves, not the classroom behind them, but the mirror itself.
This sparked a wild curiosity in us… what is a mirror?
We explored mirrors from many angles, and quickly began to notice some features of mirrors.
Mirrors are:
“Pointy.”
An Invitation to Look
We put the project on hold for a few weeks, and explored the art of looking in many other forms.
We looked at space through telescopes and with magnifying glasses, explored and observed our city on neighborhood walks, turned our friends and our classrooms funny colors with acrylic paddles, and experimented with manipulating light and shadow on our projectors.
This idea of looking and seeing became a powerful through line for the Room 6 investigations; a touchstone that we came back to over and over in every aspect of our lives in the classroom.
We stacked materials on top of mirrors flat on the table, and looked from above to see the reflections stretching below them…
And laid out first mylar “mirror paper” and eventually many other shiny materials to explore and manipulate.
Shiny Things
When we came back to the idea of reflection, the children had built a lot of familiarity with observation and the many different ways we can see in our daily lives.
We jumped right back in to our exploration of mirrors, and when students observed that mirrors are “shiny,” the investigation grew to be a study of shiny things in all forms, from mirrors to sequins and shiny glass beads.
We developed language to describe different kinds of shiny materials (sparkly! glittery! bright!), and observed that many of these materials looked different depending on how we held them in the light and what else we saw nearby.
As we searched for more reflective materials to explore, the children began to deepen their understanding.
“It looks...kind of shiny...kind of squishy.”
Then the children began branching out from using the shiny materials to simply look at, and expanded their understanding of the materials.
Children began to notice how these materials appeared to change color under a bright light, how they each had a distinctive feel and texture, how they sounded when the children shook them, and if they could be bent or cut or crinkled or glued.
We discovered that reflective materials have unique properties.
Some of them look different from different perspectives
Some of them feel different from other materials
Some of them make strange noises when you shake or move them
Some of them change when you cut, bend, or fold them.
“This is not working. I can’t see myself.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s all squishy.”
A whole new world of exploration opened up.
Final Reflections
When we began this investigation, the choice of our guiding question “what do you see [in the mirror]?” was very intentional. We wanted to capture the children’s interest, but not overtake their creativity with adult expectations; to provide them with opportunities to show us who they were and what was important to them; and to move away from a reliance on physical appearances into a broader understanding of how the children saw the world around them.
This investigation is still ongoing, but it feels we are now at a turning point — moving from looking and seeing to feeling, hearing, and manipulating materials.