You Can See a Lot Just by Observing

Yogi Berra's famous malapropism takes on new meaning in learning and teaching science. Science really does begin with observation. Some recent work with a pre-kindergarten class that had become fascinated with fungus illustrated this for me. Their classroom teacher and I were taking them on a walk through a wooded area near their classroom to look more closely at the woodrat nests we had seen on an earlier visit. Looking for woodrat nests is a bit like looking for green cars; at first you don't see any, but once you start thinking about them, you see them everywhere.

There is an even earlier step when you first learn to recognize an object, such as a woodrat nest or a fungus. This too is a learning process. Usually when viewing something new, such as the woods, people see an undifferentiated blur. Then when someone points something out to you, shows you how that this thing, this rock, this nest, this lichen, can be separated from the blurry mass, it springs into reality. You can now see it where before you could not.

As we walked, one of the children pointed out a lichen on a tree and asked, "What's this?" We all looked at it and told the children it was a lichen. We told them that lichen was pretty interesting as it is a double organism, a partnership between an alga, which makes food, and a fungus, which provides the protective structure or home for the partnership. Most of them has seen algae on a pond and almost everyone knew about mushrooms, a very familiar type of fungus. Now that lichen had an image, a name, and some information connected with it, they started spotting lichen everywhere on our walk and wherever they went in the following days.

This strand of our curriculum emerged as the children began to see other organisms that resembled the lichen they had first seen. Some of these are lichen, too, we told them, but of a different kind. The first one we had seen was a foliose lichen, like the one at the top left of this page. They were now looking at crustose lichen, which lie flat on a bare rock or tree trunk and look like the image on the top right. Once you start seeing two types of something, you have a deeper concept or what the organism is, as well as what it is not. This is also the start of classification and taxonomy.

The PK class was on fire and the study deepened and broadened as they started looking at mushrooms as well and learning about the different types of mushrooms. The classroom teacher found nature books about mushrooms, as well as stories about mushrooms. We found that a husband-and-wife team of naturalists in our community that specialized in mushrooms and we learned the terms mycology and mycologists. They walked with the class in the woods and took the class much deeper into the study of mushrooms: how they get food, how they propagate, how they fit into the larger ecosystem. They class then devled into learning the parts of mushrooms and how these parts work together, structure and function. We dissected mushrooms in class and looked at them closely. This led to another lesson in looking for me.

I have found that starteding with looking at something small with your eyes along first is very helpful in getting an overview. Then we moved to magnifiers to see smaller parts larger, to see on a different scale. Finally, moving to microscopes allows them to see at a deeper level, but you still need to help young children know what they are looking at. At first, they may say that they see nothing. You look and you see the specimen very clearly, say a section of a mushroom stem. You often need to make the step of pointing out just what it is and just where it is for the child to see anything at all. We all learn to see in stages.