Our Planet

Text : Asako Sugano

A radish in miso soup, the pattern on someone ’s socks, the shape of a cloud in the sky. Every time children find a triangle, they shout ”Look! A triangle!” with smiles on their faces.  Just as some children are fascinated by cranes among working vehicles or elephants among animals, the children of the Kogomi class seem to have a special attraction to triangles and the sound of the English word ”triangle” among various shapes.
From spring in 2021, children started to pay attention to triangles, and it did not end up being a passing fad, but even now, months later, someone is discovering triangles every day. What are children discovering through the shape?

It all started with one book.
In March 2021, a picture book called ”Color Zoo”became a favorite of some of the class. The book has pages with overlapping shapes in the following order: circle, square, triangle, rectangle, oval, heart, diamond, octagon, and hexagon. The names of the shapes and animals are written in English, for example, the first page has a picture of a tiger, and when you turn the page, the face of the tiger is shaped like a circle. As I read the book many times, some of the children began shouting ”Triangle!” when the page comes. From that time on, they seemed to enjoy describing triangles as ”Triangle” instead of ”Sankaku(triangle in Japanese)”.

The world becomes more high resolution
Triangle has come from the world of a picture book to daily our lives. The first step was to notice the existing triangles before them, as if they were wearing ”triangle discovery glasses”. For example, onigiri (rice balls), broken corners of lunch mats, and scraps of dismantled playground equipment. Then, after noticing the triangles, they gradually started to look for triangles on their own. It became popular to look for triangle stones among the stones lying in the yard, which had been seen as ”rice” or ”gravel” in playing house or construction games. The children’s ability to find triangles in any environment is becoming more and more acute every day. One day, a child put a tiny half-split grain of corn on her finger and said, ”I found a triangle!” I was amazed at how she saw the tiny triangle while eating corn, which tells the level of resolution of her world is rising.
It was also common to see the children making triangles almost in parallel. The pictures are just a few examples; some were making triangles with their fingers, some were making them by moving objects, etc. Seeing children as young as 2 or 3 years old moving their own bodies to get to the essence of triangles was an intuitive reminder that humans are born with the ability to explore.

 

Interest and development of various shapes
With triangles as the center, their interest in other shapes has been growing. One day children stopped in front of the water faucet, where they were always looking for frogs and rubber bugs, and said, ”Oh, a triangle! There is a circle too! And a very very small circle! ” Here, too, I saw children making new discoveries in a familiar landscape. As this episode implies that they had imagined a triangle from the shape of the faucet, they gradually began to think, ”Connecting triangles makes a diamond!” and ”If I cut a rectangle, it becomes a square!” Recently, I was impressed by a child who looked at a dried sweet potato and said, ”Hey, this is not a triangle. It ’s not a triangle, because it doesn ’t have this, I don ’t know, something like a horn”. To him, the trapezoidal shape of the dried potato looked like an incomplete triangle. I was astonished to witness the process of a child who had enjoyed finding triangles yesterday, picking up something that was not a triangle today, and thinking hard to explain why it was not a triangle as he imagined.

 

Triangles as a communication tool
The exploration of shapes by 2 and 3 year olds influenced their younger classmates. The 1-year-olds would ask questions about shapes they found around them, and some liked the other page in the book where the monkey turns into an oval and would spend all day saying, ”Oval! monkey!” In their daily lives, when someone in the class notices ”Oh, there ’s another triangle here”, people nearby often react with laughter. One to 3 year olds all participate and can even enjoy quiz-like conversations such as ”What ’s this?”, ”Hmm…a triangle!” too. It is interesting to see how the common topic of triangles can bridge communications across age groups.

Enjoying the sound of different languages
I feel that the sound of the word ”triangle” has a lot to do with the children ’s fascination with the shape triangle. When I first encountered ”Color Zoo”at the library, I borrowed it because I thought the shapes and colors were interesting. I thought that the fact that it was an English book was merely one of the elements, so I was surprised to see how the children understood the meaning of the English words and started using them with familiarity. In retrospect, the first few times I read the book, the children were silent with blank faces when they heard the names of the shapes. As I read the book several times, they began to make connections between the shapes and the names, and they also began to sense the difference in the sound of the words between Japanese and English languages. I remember that some people started by jokingly saying, ”Chu-ya-i-ango(triangle in child-like Japanese accent)!” Adults think of languages in terms of Japanese and English, but for 1 to 3 year olds, it doesn ’t matter. I feel that their pure feeling that ”triangle is fun” is what keeps their curiosity tickled. The way they accept and enjoy different cultures without any prejudice reminds me of how precious it is to learn from them. I am looking forward to their explorations yet to come.