Guppies and Parades: PBL in A Two-Year-Old Classroom
Kids By The Sea (KBTS) is a preschool serving children 2-5 years of age, with a focus on project based learning and play based experiences that include utilizing an outdoor classroom. Each year, one of our projects asks the question “How Can We Build Community?”. To create our projects, we look to the children for inspiration. One of the teacher’s roles at KBTS during play is that of observer. During this time, we watch to see what questions the children are asking and what experiences they are engaging in. As teachers in the Guppy Room (2 year olds), we were excited to observe our children’s curiosity about music, instruments, dancing, and costumes. We watched children dance outside as they played. They often requested we play movement songs that they could move along to. Each week, they waited with delight for our music and movement teachers to come. They loved incorporating movement into their dramatic play, like when they pretended to be butterflies with colorful scarves. We decided to create a small interest center with musical instruments to help us gain a deeper understanding of what they were drawn to and the questions they were asking.
At this point, we had a teacher planning meeting to come up with a project topic. During this meeting, we shared our observations of what we had noticed about the children’s interests. We then reflected on these interests - trying to make meaning of what the children wanted to learn and do. Through this process, it became apparent to us that the children were curious about the process of music-making, the community aspects of music, and how we could bring more music to our school.
Once we had decided we wanted music to be a focus of our project, we continued observing the children and how they used the music interest center we had created. One day we observed the children naturally following each other in a line, around the tables, while carrying their instruments. This prompted us to introduce the Donald Crews book, Parade, during our Readers Workshop time. The children LOVED the book and had endless questions and curiosities about parades - what was sold, what costumes were worn, what instruments were played and carried, and what a marching band was!
This took us into rich periods of learning - periods that engaged all of the children’s interest in parades. It also organically fit into our music investigation. In our Circle Times, we often bring questions to the children. We asked them if they wanted to have a parade. This filled them with joy and they enthusiastically answered, “yes.” Over the following weeks, we discussed with them different aspects of the parade: what colors they wanted, what costumes they wanted to wear, what instrument they wanted to play, and where they wanted the parade to be held, among other topics. These conversations were especially rich when we used the book as a guide.
Since the older children at KBTS love on our Guppies each and every day (helping to find lost stuffed animals, putting their shoes back on, filling water bottles, and closing lunch boxes,) when the teachers asked the question “Who do you want to host a parade for to bring them joy?” the children unanimously expressed that they wanted to share the gift of their parade with the older children at their school!
At last we reached the grand finale of our Community & Giving Project - Sharing The Joy Of Music With Ourselves and KBTS Community. Excitedly, the Guppies waited patiently on the side of our school, behind the banner they had made, wearing their costumes and holding their instruments. Each Guppy had a special job that they specifically chose. Two Guppies delivered the popcorn and candy to our spectators before the parade began. Next we turned on our marching music. The first two banner holders walked proudly out. The rest of the Guppies followed, marching around the parade course, waving their handmade flags, blowing their trumpets, beating their drums, rattling their wristbands, and waving to the crowd. Our 2024 Guppies Parade was the culmination of months of research and investigations into music genres, instruments, marching bands and parades! It was such an amazing gift of love and appreciation to share with the older children who help to guide, play with, and love on the little Guppies. As one five-year-old commented,“Those Guppies did pretty good!” We couldn’t agree more!
Several times a year, we culminate our projects with a schoolwide exhibition to celebrate the children’s learning. As a piece of our exhibitions, we create documentation to share with the families so they can experience the journey of our project and take a peek into the children’s world of learning. We hope you will click through the slides below to see more photos and learn more.
Closing Reflections
Projects are always such an incredible lens into seeing what competent learners children are. Even two year olds are capable of learning through, and participating in, project work. Projects are a great example of the scaffolding that can occur between teachers and children in early childhood. Scaffolding can provide opportunities for toddlers to develop strong foundations of knowledge that they can continuously build upon and deepen. For example, before the project, our children were really interested in music and would sometimes express preferences for their favorite songs. However, their knowledge about genres of music and how instruments fit into these different categories was limited. Through the experiences of the project, such as our guest musicians, discovering instruments within the genres of classical, jazz, and pop, and extending this understanding through creating art, playing instruments, and making their own instruments, the Guppies vastly deepened their understanding of music and music appreciation.
Toddlers need projects that include repetition to reinforce what they are learning. When learning about different instruments that were used in each genre, we accomplished this by using a simple felt board story and song. The basis of the felt story and song stayed the same each day, but weekly we added different instruments or parts to the story to include the new information we were learning. These were incorporated into our Morning Circle and Readers Workshop, which provided multiple opportunities each day for the project information to be revisited.
Toddlers are passionate about their interests and motivated to learn when things are fun and involve their senses. Since music was already an interest of theirs, we used music to tie in skill and knowledge acquisition in other areas. For example, in our dramatic play area, we added song lists with lyrics, concert tickets, and posters of the instruments with the instruments names underneath. All of this supported children’s language and literacy development. In a different example, since the beginning of the year, our two year olds have loved creating art with recycled materials. We took the opportunity to incorporate this interest into our project by repurposing old materials into musical instruments and our parade banner. The children LOVED it because their voices were being heard, and the teachers loved it because it created rich opportunities of learning and conversation.
Overall, the parade project was an amazing experience that ignited joy and passion for the entire school, while helping to strengthen our community roots - teachers in other classrooms helped to prep the parade route, older children sat patiently and waited for their little friends to get organized (not an easy feat for 2 year olds), and by the love that our little Guppies poured over our entire learning community through their musical parade! It was a project that will live in all of our hearts for a very long time.
Jennifer DiMiceli is an early childhood teacher at Kids By The Sea Preschool. In her 15 years of experience in education Jennifer has developed a love and passion for supporting and learning about children’s brain development, creating a play based learning environment, and creating outdoor classrooms for children to spend large amounts of time in nature. She loves PBL because it is based on the children’s interests, is relative to their lives, and deep dives into the world around them.
Elizabeth Santiago is an early childhood teacher at Kids By The Sea Preschool. In her 5 years of experience in education, Elizabeth has developed a love and passion for building relationships with the children in her care, helping them to grow, and supporting hands-on educational experiences. She loves PBL because she believes strongly in supporting learning that follows the children’s interests.