A recent birthday and growing bodies have brought up a topic near and dear to the hearts of 4 years olds. "I'm bigger than you!" one says to the other. "Nah-ah! See!" and so the comparisons begin... who is taller, older, faster, jumps higher. And so for Project Day, I asked the question, "What did you like to do when you were little?"
​I asked the children to start by drawing in their journals. Each kiddos carefully thought about this question and readily set to work.

So for a while, my assistant teacher and I have been working with our class of 3 and 4 year olds to find ways to solve problems, and to be kind to each other. As is very typical for three and four year olds, however, many children have been experimenting with inclusion and exclusion and what it means to be friends. It seemed like we had been handling the incidents on a case by case basis, often stepping in as adults to resolve the problem. As the teachers thought about this, and how it was affecting the mood of the classroom, we decided to take a new and different approach. We decided to bring the problem to the children, and see if we could investigate the problem. We are calling it: The Meanness Problem. Like many of our projects, this undertaking is not one that we have done before, so we do not have a concrete map of where we are going. Rather we have guiding research questions that we have presented to the children:
What is meanness? How do you know if something is mean? Where is all the meanness coming from? ​