Larvae, Ladies, and Learning: The Project Approach

For those of you seeking more information on the "project approach" as outlined by Lilian Katz, here is an article outlining one first grade class's project on butterflies: 

http://www.cayc.ca/lll2003.pdf

Some quotes from the article....

"Educators who have studied and written about teaching Science to young children identify a number of features of effective science programs.  These features include an emphasis on deeper understanding, opportunities for children to manipulate their environments, the use of children's current ideas and understandings as a starting point for teaching, an effort to answer children's genuine questions about the world, and a focus on developing important process skills such as observing, hypothesizing, planning, interpreting, and communicating.  (Harlen, 1996;  Johnson, 1996)"  

I think back to the end of our school year last year, when we finished off raising caterpillars  into butterflies and then releasing them at the end of the year as a representation of the children blooming from their own "cocoon" into the greater world of kindergarten and on.  What a wonderful moment it was when the children gathered around observing the miracle of nature as the caterpillars who spun themselves into cocoons weeks earlier suddenly fight to emerge as butterflies.   The learning throughout this process was amazing, from the representational drawings of the caterpillars, cocoons, and the  butterflies to the reference books dug through for pictures, to the  beautiful paintings that emerged as the children studied symmetry  on butterfly's wings in the art studio.   No one could have observed these children at work and declared them "just playing".   If such in depth studies work for learning science, why should other areas of "academics" be taught in isolation?