Problem solving in the afternoon.

This afternoon outside some of the children were individually showing lots of different problem solving skills. Mitchell was very busy over in our whare with lots of logs and I was intreuged to see what he was doing. 

When I arrived over to the whare I asked Mitchell what he was doing he very clearly articulated "I'm building a log house" and I could see that he was hammering nails into one of our round logs,This is great he rawe tēnā! He then looked at me a little confused, I could see that he was trying to figure something out and I was interested to know what. 

He quickly starting thinking and listing different materials he could use to attach the logs to his log house, some of his ideas "paint" "glue stick" "cello tape" "oh maybe a glue gun" were some of the things he explored. 

Mitchell is showing us while problem solving how much his sense of belonging has grown here at kindergarten by knowing he can go and get lots of different materials to explore his ideas! 

Later in the afternoon I was excited to see Nathaniel also doing some problem solving he had discovered some of our pipes over near the sandpit. He had taken the pipes over to the stones and was trying to get it to stand vertically out of the stones.

Nathaniel tried stabbing the pipe firmly into the ground, he let it go and with anticipation watched to see if it would stand up, oops it fell to the ground.

I could see Nathaniel really thinking about how he could get his idea to work, again he steadied the pipe and slowly let go, again the pipe fell over. While Nathaniel was picking up the pipe he started pulling the stones towards the pipe and mounding them around the base,he pai koe ki te whakaaro Pena, that's good thinking! When Nathaniel had finished making a mound of stones around his pipe he stood up and slowly starting to let go of the pipe, this time the pipe held for a few seconds longer than his previous tries but again fell to the ground! 

It is fantastic to see our afternoon children showing their problem solving skills and we as teachers are very excited to see where this leads in the next few weeks.