More than a year ago I watched the dvd école buissonière that depicts a school between two world wars at the tipping point for letting children express themselves in the classroom. Today the expression of children in the classroom differs when schools increase working with standard materials and try to much to fix life on measures, leaving not enough room for the particular beauty of the momentary occurence not yet catched in words.
A new schoolyear started with mindmapping and numbers. This time I left the books of numbertheory and mindmapping at home and gave my lesson à l'improviste to about thirty children. We divided in groups with different numbers. "Natural numbers" a child remembered from last year. Free association showed me that most associations with the numbers are in images, some are actually related to the number. Children learned how their brain remembers well concepts with which they associated freely. Hopefully this will help them learn. I don't know yet where to go from here. I have a week to decide what to do with the harvest, a pile of paper with free associations in children handwriting. I want to show a possible direction.
In my thoughts sounds 'logical reasonning', 'categories', 'nature', 'music', 'ethics'... but the child associates to four: cows.
