Perspectives - Animals Hiding Learning Group

Can We Hide Animals Under Clear Containers?

Week of September 29th

The children have become very good at hiding the animals under the cardboard recycled materials.  They make sure all the parts are hidden out of view.  This week we added clear containers to our explorations.  I wanted to see if they would notice that the animals are not really hiding under the clear containers…we can still see them!  Only a few of the children really noticed a difference between the containers…most of the children believed their animals were hiding under the clear containers even though we could see through the container.   A few of the children were able to notice a difference but were unable to describe the difference or fix the problem.  After a lot of careful thought, some children realized that they could place a recycled cardboard container on top of the clear containers to make them hide.  

We are going to explore this concept more next week.  I want to use different materials to hide our animals under so that all of the children can develop a better concept of hiding and what it means to hide something.  This is a difficult concept for toddlers to understand…this requires them to think about what others perspectives and points of view.  I am going to use just the clear containers, but paint some of them black.  I think if the materials they are using to hide the animals are exactly the same, except that some of them are darker, they will be able to see the difference better.