Developing Project Skills through Everyday Investigations 

Following a deeply engaging project on garbage trucks, a young friend came to school one day and asked me, “Mrs. Burd, can we be investigators again?”  What a tribute to the value of project work! When young children are invested in a topic and utilizing their developing skills in purposeful ways, they are naturally more engaged and involved in their learning.   

As preschool teachers, one way we kept that inquiry fire going for our classes in between projects was to incorporate some of the “tools” of Project Approach work into our daily routines and smaller thematic or seasonal studies. These activities helped build investigation skills for Project Approach work and would also hit curriculum standards and objectives and give opportunities to work on Individual Education Program (IEP) goals. 

The following “tools” were used in everyday planned activities as we prepared the children to become investigators. 

Data collection was one of the most common investigative activities in our classrooms. We regularly practiced observation skills and noticing or labeling what children see around them. The children loved to observe things around the school and document their findings on clipboards. Activities like shape or letter hunts in the classroom, surveys of peers and teachers, and home surveys made perfect practice of this kind of data collection. Children also engaged in tallying and graphing activities to show “how many” for things like voting tasks, story recall, and “question of the day” synthesis. Simple surveys became a powerful learning tool for all of our students during Project Approach work.  

Another tool we practiced regularly was representation. From drawing self-portraits to painting or modeling a still-life or topical artifact, children engaged in many opportunities to represent their ideas and learning. For example, after a visit from the fire truck during Fire Safety Month, the children were challenged to draw what they remembered about the truck. Their pictures and words told us what they observed and recalled and what vocabulary they knew. We also observed their interest level and wondered if the children would try to recreate a fire truck during their play. Could it be a project topic? Representation activities always felt like serious work to the children and gave us great pieces of documentation for portfolio collection. 

Graphic organizers, including webs, were another tool used regularly to collect and document children’s current and emerging knowledge about a topic. During a simple, seasonal investigation about Fall, one class created a web about pumpkins. We asked the children to tell us what they knew about pumpkins and wrote their words, drawing images to support written language. Children were so familiar with contributing to “spider webs” as they called them, that they occasionally suggested that we make one and some even tried creating them independently.  

Language skills like presenting information to peers were important project tools that were woven into our daily plans and practiced in simple ways between projects. For example, children shared out during group time about their art or construction work. They practiced speaking skills during show and tell and other group sharing opportunities after events like weekends or school breaks.  

Another language skill that was routinely supported was verbal inquiry.  In our classrooms, children were encouraged to wonder and ask questions about the world around them. Children asked questions of each other in routine show and tell activities such as “how does it work?” or “where did it come from?”. They also practiced interviewing people like classroom visitors to find out information to share with others.   

Weaving these simple strategies into our classroom practice fueled our own teacher enthusiasm and confidence and also supported the children’s development of critical inquiry skills. It also allowed for appropriate and practical application of their academic and developmental skills. However, we found the greatest outcome of teaching in this way was the engagement and joy it brought to the children’s learning! “Yes, friend, we can be investigators again today!” 

IEL Resources

• Resource List: The Project Approach: Resources for Teachers