Pattern, Relationship, and Spacial/Kinesthetic Learners

Last week, I found a good price on a set of Cuisenaire Rods, a popular math manipulative that allow children to play with and wonder at the beauty of pattern and relationships based on numbers and parts of the whole.This may not be an intuitive choice for a religious education classroom, but I think it has a very defensible place there. I, myself, was filled with an overwhelming sense of wonder the first time I saw microscopic images of snowflakes with its regular symmetry, cutaway images of a nautilus shell (that conforms to the Fibonacci sequence), and the perfect tesselation of hexagons that is honeycomb. Pattern and relationship abound beautifully in our natural world, and claiming this as a source of awe and inspiration is our children's birthright.

At the same place that I bought the Rods, I picked up a small set of wooden pattern blocks, and for many of the same reasons. But additionally, pattern blocks can be used to create mandalas, which have a long, multicultural tradition of being used as meditation tools and expressions of peace and harmony. Additionally, the Cuisenaire Rods and the pattern blocks both offer something special for the spacial learners, one of Gardner's 8 intelligences that is often more challenging to engage.

Something to keep in mind about spatial/kinesthetic learners and manipulatives is...well, they manipulate! And that manipulation might not look like you anticipated. See the last picture above? That is the hand of a child who made the soccer ball and the "drops of blood" in the first picture, and here he has made up a challenge game where one tries to flick a shape through a narrow passage to knock down another shape.  He was engaged. He was doing his own thing without interfering with anybody else's work. He picked up the pieces that fell on the floor. He made a new friend when another child came over to see what he was doing.

This was not the exquisitely laid symmetrical mandala of thoughtfulness, or an abstract theme derived from the morning's story. But it was a kid in a good mood having a good time within the boundaries of the room and making a sweet connection. With that kind of Sunday experience, he'll leave happy and ask to come back, and we have all the time we need to offer him new and different ways of expressing the Spirit within.