Signatures of Working Styles

One of the delights of doing this kind of work regularly with children is that, in addition to allowing for a huge range of creativity and freedom, it also allows for their own working style to come through. By about week five in both the PreK and third grade classes, we started to notice recognizable styles or themes of working. Some students kept coming back to structures they had been working on in previous classes (refining their work each time), while for others their signature could be discerned in the way they worked (some worked very quickly at the beginning of class and then slowed down; some were more deliberate the whole way through). Either way, we noticed how these developing styles allowed us to recognize children’s work even without their faces or names on their Zoom squares. Take a look at some examples below:

This third grader worked with a wide sturdy cardboard tube from week to week, discovering new ways to prop up items he put in the middle of the tube.

Another student focused on balancing, particularly with columns (while describing his work he said, “I like to balance. It’s just something I do - like I like to balance on a soccer ball.”)

This third grader reconstructed an ever more complex ramp structure that developed into a kind of Rube Goldberg design. 

In PreK, a child spent a number of weeks coming back to connecting cardboard tubes, including white paper for an interesting pattern.

Another PreK student loved to place different materials in a line so that they would fall like dominoes when he pushed one of the materials on the end (when we remarked on this, his mom said, “sometimes even I’m a domino!”)