We've all been there - we want children to discuss a rich concept or idea, but going straight into the main question feels like diving in at the deep end.
Starting in the world of the child means to float the theme of what you'll end up talking about in a context they're familiar with. Here are three simple ways you can do it:
The Greyest Example
This means to take the key idea you're going to be looking at, and come up with borderline examples of it.
This worked really well in Tom's sessions at Sutton Veny Primary last week. In one, the key question was going to be "If you put yourself through a copying machine, would you make a good friend to yourself?". A wonderful question that not only explore qualities of a friend, but also the need for similarities and differences between friends. To get everyone talking about these ideas, we played "The Greyest Example". Here's a rough transcript of the explanation and modelling:
"First, can anyone think of something that's really important in friendship?"
"How about reliability?"
"Okay, how about something that's not important?"
"How someone looks."
"Thanks. Now here's the interesting bit - can we think of things that we're not sure whether they're important or not. Things which sit in the grey area between important and unimportant?"
We did a similar exercise when approaching the question "What is anger good for?" - by looking for examples of times when it's justified to be angry ("no presents on your birthday"), times when it's not too justified ("when your little brother nicks a chip from your plate") and then the grey examples in between.
We made a fun worksheet on this a few years ago -Â download it here.
The Auction
This is a simple "Serve and Return" game that asks one child in the pair to begin with a very small/minor example of something, and taking it in turns to "increase the bid" but never making such a huge jump that it leaves the other person with nowhere to go. The last person to speak loses. When Tom was at Loyola Prep, our eventual question was about lying, so we did an auction of lies:
"Telling your Mum you definitely brushed your teeth for the whole two minutes."
"Telling your Dad his wedding suit still fits."
"Telling your friends you're related to Ed Sheeran."
"Telling a tourist you're a major celebrity in your country."
This leads to trying to ou tdo each other with bigger lies - "I don't exist!" > The universe doesn't exist!"
"Think of a time when..."
This warm-up activity simply asks them to recall a time when the idea or concept featured in their lives. So a session on what makes a good excuse can be approached with "think of a time when you had a really good excuse for something" or "think of a time when someone gave you a lame excuse." Once everyone has shared something, they've all got a range of examples to draw upon in the ensuing discussion.
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